Older Lesbians and Work in the Australian Health and Aged Care Sector

While research has identified challenges lesbians face in the workplace, there is limited understanding of the particular experiences of older lesbians, especially those working in the health and aged care sector. This article draws on the stories of four women who participated in a narrative research project on lesbian and gay people's experiences of health and aged care. It highlights the need for future research to examine the complexity of identity expression and community affiliation, how people negotiate “coming out” in the workplace, the impact of discrimination, and the resources (such as friends) available to lesbians in the workplace.     

Workplace Flexibility Practices and Corporate Performance: Evidence from the British Private Sector

This paper investigates the relationship between workplace flexibility practices (WFPs) and corporate performance using data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. Disaggregating WFPs into numerical, functional and cost aspects enables the analysis of their relationships to an objective measure of corporate performance, namely workplace financial turnover. Furthermore separate analyses are presented for different types of workplace: differentiated by workforce size; ownership; age; wage level; and unionization. Results show that different types of workplaces need to pay attention to the mix of WFPs they adopt. We find that certain cost WFPs (profit‐related pay, merit pay and payment‐by‐results) have strong positive relationships with corporate performance. However, training delivers mixed corporate performance results, while the extent of job autonomy and the proportion of part‐time employees in a workplace have an inverse association with corporate performance. Given the limited existing research examining disaggregated measures of WFPs and objectively measured corporate performance, this paper offers useful insights for firms, policy makers and the overall economy.     

Researching Asia's Third Sector

Most Asian countries have a strong third sector and a rich tradition of philanthropy. The varied array of social, economic, political, and third sector variables across the many countries of the region make Asia an ideal site for testing and developing third sector theory. The research infrastructure needed to sustain such a venture is beginning to form. The five papers published in this issue of Voluntas indicate some of the product, and the variety, of this growing body of research.     

Estimating carbon storage in urban forests of New York City

Urban Ecosystems - Forests play an important role in mitigating many of the negative effects of climate change. One of the ways trees mitigate impacts of climate change is by absorbing carbon...