Purpose
– The purpose of this study is to present the state-of-the-art in empirical research on conflicts in innovation inorganizations and to outline strategic implications both for research and ...practical application with the specific focus on intervention studies.
Design/methodology/approach
– Literature search in the Web-of-Science identified 32 empirical publications from 1990 to July 2012. Characteristics of the studies, methodological approaches and empirical findings are summarized and discussed. Strategic implications are derived.
Findings
– The literature review reveals studies of the relationship between conflict and innovation on different organizational levels. Most of the studies address different aspects of conflict as antecedents of innovation, while some address conflict as an outcome of innovative behavior or structures. Almost all authors come up with theoretical and practical implications. But intervention studies which could close the gap between theory and practice, here termed the “last mile” of conflict management, are yet to be addressed.
Research limitations/implications
– While several implications are derived that aim at consolidating and deepening the understanding of the conflict – innovation dynamics, the major implication is to develop a knowledge-oriented research approach and to expand the scope of research to intervention studies. Constructive controversy is described as an example of this new research avenue.
Practical implications
– From intervention studies, researchers could gain more direct, practical insights into actual work processes. Managers could profit by incorporating first-hand knowledge augmented by researchers’ expertise.
Originality/value
– This article provides a systematic review of the relationship between conflict and innovation in the business context and practical implications thereof.
This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 self-employed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of ...employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their ‘congealed service’. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Methodologically this article demonstrates the importance of comparative employment relations analysis (CERA) for exposing the relationship between employment structures and labour process experiences.
Welfare Reform and Lone Parents in the UK Gregg, Paul; Harkness, Susan; Smith, Sarah
The Economic journal (London),
February 2009, Volume:
119, Issue:
535
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
A series of reforms to help low income families with children were introduced in the UK in 1999, including in-work tax credits and welfare-to-work programmes. Lone parents were a key target for these ...reforms - they comprised 22% of all families by 1998 but 55% of families with children in poverty. Previous studies have shown that the reforms raised employment among lone parents. This article extends the analysis of the effect of the reforms to consider employment dynamics, including hours adjustments, and a broader range of outcomes including partnership and indicators of well-being among lone mothers and their children.
The purpose of the study was to address several of the limitations of work‐non‐work research by adopting a qualitative diary methodology which explored insiders' accounts of both the positive and ...negative aspects of work‐non‐work relationships and examined the role of context in shaping such relationships. Daily diary data on work‐non‐work events and post‐diary interview data were collected from participants in two contrasting organizational contexts: Flexorg (N=20), a progressive local government organization and The Factory (N=18), a traditional manufacturing organization. Work‐non‐work relationships were found to be simultaneously enriching and depleting in both organizations. For Flexorg workers, work‐non‐work relationships were characterized by facilitation and time‐based conflicts. At The Factory, high spillover from work to non‐work and vice versa challenged the assumption that blue‐collar work is typified by segmentation (Nippert‐Eng, 1995). The experience of work‐non‐work events was shaped by the nature of the work, the work‐non‐work culture and working patterns in both organizations. The study also identified negative spillover as a qualitatively more important problem than work‐non‐work conflict in this study, and identified a social dimension of work‐non‐work conflict which was found across organizational contexts.
This article discusses crisis-related developments in collective bargaining in the private sector across the EU since the onset of the crisis during 2008. It analyses developments in the incidence, ...procedures and content of collective bargaining during the crisis and is cross-nationally and cross-sectorally comparative. It also examines how economic developments, industrial relations institutions and public policy might explain these developments. The article shows that collective bargaining responses to the crisis have been much more frequent in multi-employer bargaining systems than in single-employer bargaining systems, both at sectoral and company level. Major differences also exist between manufacturing and services, with bargaining being more prevalent in the former. In procedural terms, with some exceptions, the crisis has accelerated the longer-term trend towards organized decentralization. Substantively, restoring competitiveness and maintaining employment are central to the agenda of crisis-response agreements. The trade-offs are more integrative under multi-employer bargaining systems and where public policy offers support in negotiating short-time working schemes, and more distributive under single-employer bargaining.
Cet article examine, s’agissant de la négociation collective du secteur privé, les développements liés à la crise, et cela dans l’ensemble de l’Union européenne, depuis le début de la crise au cours de l’année 2008. Il analyse les développements en termes d’incidence, de procédure et du contenu de la négociation collective, dans une perspective comparative transnationale et intersectorielle. Il examine aussi comment les évolutions économiques, les institutions des relations professionnelles et les politiques publiques peuvent expliquer de tels développements. L’article montre que les réponses de la négociation collective à la crise ont été bien plus fréquentes dans les systèmes de négociation à employeurs multiples que dans les systèmes négociation à employeur unique, tant au niveau sectoriel qu’au niveau de l’entreprise. Des différences majeures existent également entre l’industrie et les services, où la négociation collective est moins présente. En termes procéduraux, et malgré quelques exceptions, la crise a accéléré la tendance à plus long terme vers une décentralisation organisée. Sur le plan du contenu, la restauration de la compétitivité et le maintien de l’emploi sont les principaux éléments des accords de réponse à la crise. Les arbitrages présentent un aspect plus intégratif dans les systèmes de négociation à employeurs multiples et lorsque les politiques publiques offrent un soutien dans la négociation de formules de chômage partiel; ils sont plus distributifs dans le cas de négociation à employeur unique.
Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit krisenbedingten Entwicklungen der Kollektivverhandlungen in der Privatwirtschaft in der EU seit Ausbruch der Krise im Jahr 2008. Die Entwicklungen der Häufigkeit, der Verfahren und des Inhalts von Kollektivverhandlungen während der Krise werden analysiert und einem sowohl länder- als auch branchenübergreifenden Vergleich unterzogen. Es wird auch untersucht, inwieweit diese Entwicklungen sich durch die wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungen, die Institutionen der Arbeitsbeziehungen und die öffentliche Politik erklären lassen. Aus dem Artikel geht hervor, dass in Verhandlungssystemen mit mehreren Arbeitgebern wesentlich häufiger in Kollektivverhandlungen Antworten auf die Krise gefunden wurden, als in Verhandlungen mit nur einem Arbeitgeber, und zwar sowohl auf Branchen- als auch auf Unternehmensebene. Auch bestehen große Unterschiede zwischen dem produzierenden Gewerbe und dem Dienstleistungssektor, wobei in ersterem häufiger verhandelt wird. Im Hinblick auf die Verfahren hat die Krise, bis auf wenige Ausnahmen, den längerfristigen Trend der organisierten Dezentralisierung beschleunigt. Inhaltlich stehen die Wiederherstellung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und die Sicherung der Beschäftigung ganz oben auf der Tagesordnung der Vereinbarungen in Reaktion auf die Krise. In Verhandlungen mit mehreren Arbeitgebern und dort, wo es staatliche Unterstützung für Kurzarbeitsmodelle gibt, werden mehr integrative Kompromisse geschlossen, Verhandlungen mit einem einzelnen Arbeitgeber weisen mehr distributive Elemente auf.
This paper examines narratives about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to reveal people's interpretations of changes to agrarian relations in Andhra Pradesh. ...Through narratives, we are able to reveal more than just the material relations of production, unveiling internalised modes of control, how these have come under threat in recent times, and discursive strategies to restore them – albeit in modified form. It argues that the MGNREGA has become a site of ideological contestation, in which the scheme means either an entitlement to government support, or alternatively a threat to existing modes of control that can only be reinstated through the scheme itself.
Using two new data sets from France, the authors present the first study of the comparative productivity of labor-managed and conventional firms involving large representative samples of firms in a ...range of industries including services. Their study offers new stylized facts on labor-managed firms, and disentangles incentive effects from those of differences in input demand behavior on factor elasticities. Contrary to received wisdom, labor-managed firms are not smaller than conventional firms; they grow as fast or faster in all industries. The two groups of firms organize production differently. Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms' industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales.
This paper approaches globalisation as a contradictory and dialectical phenomenon, one in which the tools of exploitation are being subverted into instruments of labour resistance. Through a study of ...the Garment and Textile Workers' Union (GATWU) the paper observes how feminised workplaces are bringing to the fore issues of gender oppression, flexible conditions are expanding union organisational capacity and the universality of capital has led to transnational links between workers. While the global neo-liberal regime weakens traditional paths to unionisation, it has concurrently facilitated alternative strategies of worker organisation and resistance. GATWU members both battle immediate economic issues while transforming worker organisation from an atomised factory workstation, to assembly line, to outside the factory gates, and finally into social movement and transnational spaces. The research takes note of how GATWU's organising strategy both compliments and conflicts with struggles of gender and class, the local and global.
This article addresses the question of whether the first job functions as a 'stepping stone' or as a 'trap'. It does so by using individual longitudinal data to estimate the consequences on future ...occupational attainment of entry into the labour market via (a) 'under-qualified' jobs or (b) via temporary contracts. A cross-national comparison of West Germany, Great Britain and Italy allows assessment of the impact of different labour market structures on this allocation process. With regard to 'under-qualified' positions, the findings are not consistent with the stepping-stone hypothesis but provide some support for the entrapment hypothesis. Despite the greater mobility chances of over-qualified workers, the initial disadvantage associated with status-inadequate jobs is not fully overcome during their future careers. The article shows, however, that the negative effects are not due to the mismatch as such but rather to the relatively lower level positions. These effects are mediated by the national labour market structure, with the British flexible model providing the best chances of making up for initial disadvantages, and the more tightly regulated and segmented markets in Germany and Italy leading to stronger entrapment in lower status positions. No negative effects of the type of contract are found for later occupational positions in any of the countries.
We use the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data from 2001 to 2006 to analyse the source of the gender wage gap across public‐ and private‐sector wage distributions in Australia. We ...are particularly interested in the role of gender segregation within sector‐specific occupations in explaining relative wages. We find that, irrespective of labour market sector, the gender wage gap among low‐paid, Australian workers is more than explained by differences in wage‐related characteristics. The gender wage gap among high‐wage workers, however, is largely unexplained in both sectors suggesting that glass ceilings (rather than sticky floors) may be prevalent. Gender differences in employment across occupations advantage (rather than disadvantage) all women except those in high‐paid jobs, whereas disparity in labour market experience plays a much more important role in explaining relative private‐sector wages. Finally, disparity in educational qualifications and demographic characteristics are generally unimportant in explaining the gender wage gap.
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