Alternative balanced scorecards built from paradigm models in strategic HRM and employment/industrial relations and used to measure the state of employment relations and HR system performance across U.S. workplaces

This paper constructs alternative balanced scorecards based on high‐performance work system (HPWS) and employment relations system (ERS) models. The models are depicted and compared in diagrams and used as framework skeletons for building separate HPWS and ERS scorecards, intended to provide a detailed data picture of the operational health and performance of an organization's employment/HR system and its operations, processes, and inputs/outputs. The scorecards are filled in with nationally representative data from 2,000+ U.S. workplaces using more than 50 employment/HR indicators, as reported by separate panels of managers and employees. The indicators for each workplace are aggregated into an overall HR/employment system score, ranked from low‐to‐high, and graphed as frequency distributions. These distributions provide a unique snapshot picture of the mean and dispersion of the state of employment relations and HR system performance for companies across the United State. They also reveal that “models matter” since the HPWS and ERS scorecards provide distinctly different evaluation assessments.     

Protection for maturing industries: Evidence from Canadian trade patterns and trade policy, 1870–1913

As industries mature, experience is accumulated, productivity increases, trade performance improves on domestic and international markets and learning potential dissipates. Using theory‐consistent empirical specifications, I find a strong, robust negative relationship linking tariff rates to trade performance for manufactured products that matured during the first decade after Canada prioritized protectionist policy objectives in 1879. This relationship also holds at a more aggregate industry level, where I can use other measures of maturity, control for import penetration, use historically contemporaneous trade elasticity estimates, link trade performance to trade restrictiveness and effective rates of protection and where I can instrument for import penetration and trade performance using a two‐stage IV–GMM estimation approach. The results suggest that after 1890 the Canadian government carefully cut tariffs on products produced by maturing Canadian producers and this retreat from protectionism significantly lowered the static deadweight losses resulting from Canadian trade policy during the post‐1890 period.     

Development and the Environment in Asia

Economic growth and environmental damage are associated, but the relationship is neither linear nor even monotonic. This is clearly seen in the diverse experiences of tropical Asian economies over recent decades. The nature of the growth–environment link depends on the changing composition of production and on growth-related changes in techniques and environmental policies; the enforcement of property rights over natural resources and over air and water quality is another important element. Moreover, environmental and economic policies interact: in effect, every economic policy that affects resource allocation is a de facto environmental measure. One important implication is that the environmental consequences of major policy shifts, such as the 'globalisation' of many tropical Asian economies since about 1980, have been profound. The analytical literature on growth and the environment in Asia tends to agree that environmental damage is costly to regional economies, and has begun to identify and quantify some of the many causal linkages now recognised between economic development and the valuation and use of environmental and natural resource assets.     

A theoretical analysis of institutional investors' trading costs in auction and dealer markets

This paper compares trading costs for institutional investors subject to liquidity shocks, in auction and dealer markets. The batch auction restricts the institutions' ability to exploit informational advantages because of competition between institutions when they simultaneously submit orders. This competition lowers aggregate trading costs. In the dealership market, competition between traders is absent but private information is revealed by observing the flow of successive orders and so reduces aggregate trading costs. We analyse the relative effects on trading costs of competition and information revelation in the two systems and derive a parameter inequality which determines which system has lower costs.     

The Law and Economics of Marriage Contracts

Growth in property ownership has raised the stakes in the distribution of financial assets on divorce. Given high risks of marital failure, this has stimulated the demand for private ordering through enforceable marriage contracts. This paper surveys the existing law and economics literature and legal practice to consider the state of knowledge on the economic theory, scope and limits of written nuptial agreements.     

Replacement Investment: Optimal Economic Life Under Uncertainty

Replacement investment is essentially a regenerative optimal stopping problem; that is, the key decision concerns when to terminate the life of existing plant – and hence when to start over again. This paper examines this optimisation problem within a continuous time framework and studies the qualitative and quantitative impact of uncertainty on the timing of new investment (and the criteria that should be used for terminating the life of existing plant).     

The False Promise of Organizational Culture Change: A Case Study of Middle Managers in Grocery Retailing*

ABSTRACT The strategic importance of managing organizational culture has been a central theme in organizational literature over the past two decades. But relatively little attention has been given to the impact of culture change initiatives on managers. This paper reports on the impact of a programme of culture change on managers at one of Britain's leading grocery retail chains. Based on a series of detailed interviews with managers together with examination of company documents and an understanding of trends in grocery retailing, we explain the purpose and content of change, and document and analyse the reactions of those managers who are expected to change their own cultural orientations as well as persuade their subordinates to change. We conclude that in this case at least changes in managerial behaviour, as with previously documented changes in the behaviour of shopfloor workers, are related more to surveillance, direct control and the threat of sanction than any transformation of managerial values. Indeed, the situation and experiences of managers – one of reduced autonomy, close monitoring and control, and perceived career insecurity – are explained less in relation to ‘organizational culture’, more in relation to organizational (re‐)structuring intended to create a more centralized form of organizational control.     

ENTERPRISE WITHOUT UNIONS: THE MANAGEMENT OF EMPLOYEE RELATIONS IN NON-UNION FIRMS

Employee relations in non-union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers. This article examines the management of employee relations in establishments in high technology industries in the Southeast of England - a sector and locality frequently identified with high levels of non-unionism. Moreover, high technology firms are frequently seen as exemplars of new human resource management techniques designed to substitute for unions. Our data from postal and interview surveys of 115 establishments suggests that HRM is only one, and by no means the dominant, approach to managing employee relations in high technology establishments.