This study uses personally collected data from 41 steel production lines to assess the effects of Japanese and U.S. human resource management (HRM) practices on worker productivity. The Japanese ...production lines employ a common system of HRM practices including: problem-solving teams, extensive orientation, training throughout employees' careers, extensive information sharing, rotation across jobs, employment security, and profit sharing. A majority of U.S. plants now have one or two features of this system of HRM practices, but only a minority have a comprehensive system of innovative work practices that parallels the full system of practices found among the Japanese manufacturers.
We find that the Japanese lines are significantly more productive than the U.S. lines. However, U.S. manufacturers that have adopted a full system of innovative HRM practices patterned after the Japanese system achieve levels of productivity and quality equal to the performance of the Japanese manufacturers. This study's evidence helps reconcile conflicting views about the effectiveness of adopting Japanese-style worker involvement schemes in the United States. United States manufacturers that have adopted a definition of employee participation that extends only to problem-solving teams or information sharing do not see large improvements in productivity. However, U.S. manufacturers that adopt a broader definition of participation that mimics the full Japanese HRM system see substantial performance gains.
This book explains why moral beliefs can and likely do play an important role in the development and operation of market economies. It shows why the maximization of general prosperity requires that ...people genuinely trust others - even those whom they know don't particularly care about them. It then identifies characteristics that moral beliefs must have for people to trust others even when there is no chance of detection and no possibility of harming anyone. It shows that when moral beliefs with these characteristics are held by a sufficiently high proportion of the population, a high trust society emerges that supports maximum cooperation and creativity while permitting honest competition at the same time. The required characteristics are not tied to any specific religious narrative and have nothing to do with the moral earnestness of individuals or the set of moral values. What really matters is how moral beliefs affect the way people think about morality. The required characteristics are based on abstract ideas that must be learned so they are matters of culture, not genes, and are therefore potentially capable of explaining differences in material success across human societies. This work has many theoretical and empirical implications including but not limited to social capital theory and trust-based economic experiments. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780199781744/toc.html
An on-line reinforcement learning system that adapts to environmental changes using a mixture of Bayesian networks is described. Building intelligent systems able to adapt to dynamic environments is ...important for deploying real-world applications. Machine learning approaches, such as those using reinforcement learning methods and stochastic models, have been used to acquire behavior appropriate to environments characterized by uncertainty. However, efficient hybrid architectures based on these approaches have not yet been developed. The results of several experiments demonstrated that an agent using the proposed system can flexibly adapt to various kinds of environmental changes.
The success of the profound restructuring changes in the Polish economy depended mainly on the effectiveness of the reforms concerning the restructured properties in all sectors. This required a new ...approach to private property, determining the new role and place of employees in the process of changes and forming employee companies. Employee companies were formed as a result of direct privatization, so-called liquidation, when the equity of the enterprise is handed over for use with the right to the repurchase by the majority of employees of the established company (leasing). Prior to this privatization it was necessary to convince employees to purchase shares. One should keep in mind that this method turned out to be effective with respect to small and medium-sized enterprises, which didn't require the great financial outlays which were necessary for the privatization of larger companies. Initially it may be said that the conditions for implementing new solutions increasing the participation of employees in ownership, or their participation in other financial programs, are not very favourable. It is even possible to formulate the thesis that in Polish enterprises and amongst employees, peculiarly at the workshop level, there was an awareness barrier, which has made the process of further democratic changes rather difficult. Breaking this barrier can only take place after a certain time, when the employee as an owner begins to understand the economic significance of a dividend, picks up the habit of thinking in categories of an increase in goodwill, and realizes that this is transferred directly into an increase in the value of his or her assets.
This article investigates where financial participation is most likely to be encountered, and explores its compatibility with collective forms of employee voice. It is based on the findings of a ...major international survey of human resource management (HRM) practices. We found that financial participation was not affected by collective employee voice, but that national context and associated HRM strategies had significant effects on its nature and extent. As financial participation is likely to make for greater variation in wage rates, it tends to weaken industry-level bargaining. By re-casting the fundamental determinants of wages, it is also likely to facilitate greater wage dispersion within the firm. Hence, it was found that financial participation is more commonly encountered in liberal market contexts, and in firms practising calculative HRM, where countervailing employee power is weak, whether or not collective bargaining is formally present.
Models of public utility regulation are often framed, alternatively, as rateof-return or price-cap regulation. In practice, however, regulators have increasingly adopted a variety of hybrid ...regulatory constraints that embody elements of both these, and other, regulatory forms. In this paper, we draw upon elements of both the positive economic theory of regulation and standard efficiency-based economic analysis of regulation to develop a model that endogenously yields hybrid regulatory constraints as a regulatory optimum. In this context, the paper further demonstrates that a commonly observed side payment-profit sharing-enhances regulator welfare. The results provide a plausible basis for understanding the pattern of modern regulatory constraints.
It is known that workers' financial participation, primarily in the form of wider participation of employees in profits and ownership, has been used in enterprises from many years, but in practice ...the period of implementation of different forms of financial participation has taken place only in the last four decades. Workers' participation in decision-making has a longer tradition, so it is well described in the literature, and its impact on the results achieved by companies are known through the many research projects conducted by researchers around the world and through detailed reports. Financial participation has not been the focus of so many papers, so the knowledge and information from this area is incomplete. This is because of the lack of comprehensive studies on the various forms of participation, their irregularity, the lack of cooperation between states in the exchange of information concerning the number of implemented solutions, etc. Of course, it is not possible to include all of the companies in research and the results cannot be generalized due to the different conditions and selection criteria in particular countries. Also, the ambiguous interpretation of the term "financial participation" by different authors and different institutions does not allow for setting up and developing the output database necessary to conduct the research and carry out comparisons. In the literature, programs of financial participation are treated as an incentive system, without taking into account the wider context and the relationships between these programmes and the results achieved by the company. This contribution aims to give some theoretical and scientific examples, which, by virtue of their nature and severity can contribute to the possible diverse research solutions to the problems facing businesses, especially in today's dynamic, global economy. After forty years of empirical research on the benefits of the implementation of various programmes of financial participation, the information provided, in principle, only in the form of reports, is not sufficient to express opinions on the development of forms of participation. At the same time, it is concluded that the programmes of financial participation have had a positive effect on the results achieved by companies, especially in terms of social benefits. Arriving at the above opinion has been additionally impeded by the different attitudes of the social partners to the issue of participation and participatory approaches, the absence of explicit data showing the relationship between implemented financial schemes and financial results, changes in the competitive position of enterprises, etc. The outlined theory concerning how the workers' ownership affects economic performance achieved by a company unfortunately has not changed. This article is not to bring about fundamental changes, but to find new threads or directions of deliberation.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the shortcomings in the compliance of the full-fledged Islamic banks with the Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) disclosure guidelines related to the profit ...sharing investment accounts (PSIAs).Design methodology approach - This study uses interviews and a survey.Findings - It was found that only two out five full-fledged Islamic banks followed BNM guidelines which are based on the idea of self-regulation. The authors developed a checklist of disclosure items, and probed whether the sample banks would adopt these new disclosure items. As it transpired, some banks have been disclosing these items selectively, and or recording them for internal control and management purposes. The findings show these banks do not disclose: policies, procedures, product design and structure; profit allocation basis, methodology of calculating profit attributable to investment account holders (IAHs). Nevertheless, disclosure related to Shari'ah compliance was given to a reasonable extent. It is intriguing that full-fledged Islamic banks do not provide comprehensive disclosure related to PSIAs because such disclosure is not mandatory; while foreign full-fledged Islamic banks provided such disclosure voluntarily.Research limitations implications - The banking sector regulator is not sure of whether individual Islamic banks have actually complied with all of its guidelines. The shortcomings in the disclosure are due to lack of expertise, outdated information system structure, and shortage of support and highly trained staff. The authors propose that the Islamic jurists should use Istiqra - which is a comprehensive examination of contracting environment before a new definite ruling is made on the issue of accountability to the IAHs. This would involve exploratory study of how the securities regulator (not banking regulator) perceives the information risks faced by the IAHs and enforce new disclosure guidelines.Originality value - This paper proposes new disclosure guidelines which incorporate transparency, appropriateness, and timeliness to reduce information asymmetry and enhance governance disclosure.
Trends in Khmer Art Boisselier, Jean; Eilenberg, Natasha; Elliot, Melvin
05/2018
eBook
A translation of Professor Boisselier's original work. This monograph discusses twenty-four sculptures representative of Khmer art. Includes brief chapters on the history and religions of Cambodia as ...background for understanding the discussion of the statuary itself, as well as beautiful black-and-white reproductions and a glossary.
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