Ethnic Diversity Policy: Perceptions within the NHS

Ethnic diversity has become an important policy objective for the Labour government, particularly since the publication of the Macpherson Report (1999) . It is projected as a potential means of improving service provision in various policy areas from policing to the business sector. The contention of this article, based on research conducted in the NHS, is that much more thought needs to be given to the shape of ethnic diversity and its operationalization if services are to improve for society as a whole. The current shape of the concept, as perceived by the majority of the interview respondents who participated in the research (all of whom had responsibility for employment decisions within their organizations), promises at best disappointment, and at worst a further peripheralization of minority ethnic issues, for which communities themselves may be held responsible.     

Domain Effects and Financial Risk Attitudes

We investigated whether financial risk preferences are dependent on the financial domain (i.e., the context) in which the risky choice options are presented. Previous studies have demonstrated that risk attitudes change when gambles are framed as gains, losses, or as insurance. Our study explores this directly by offering choices between identical gambles, framed in terms of seven financial domains. Three factors were extracted, explaining 68.6% of the variance: Factor 1 (Positive)—opportunity to win, pension provision, and job salary change; Factor 2 (Positive‐Complex)—investments and mortgage buying; Factor 3 (Negative)—possibility of loss and insurance. Inspection of the solution revealed context effects on risk perceptions across the seven scenarios. We also found that the commonly accepted assumption that women are more risk averse cannot be confirmed with the context structure suggested in this research; however, it is acknowledged that in the students’ population the variance across genders might be considerably less. These results suggest that our financial risk attitude measures may be tapping into a stable aspect of “context dependence” of relevance to real‐world decision making.     

Utilizing job resources: Qualitative evidence of the roles of job control and social support in problem solving

Abstract

In resource-based models of job design, job resources, such as control and social support, are thought to help workers to solve problems. Few studies have examined this assumption. We analyzed 80 qualitative diary entries (N=29) and interviews (N=37) concerned with the in-role requirements of medical technology designers in the UK for problem solving. Four themes linked to using the resources of job control and social support for problem solving emerged. These were: (1) eliciting social support to solve problems; (2) exercising job control to solve problems; (3) co-dependence between eliciting social support and exercising job control to solve problems; and (4) using job resources to regulate affect. The results were largely supportive of the assumptions underpinning resource-based models of job design. They also indicated that the explanatory power of resource-based models of job design may be enhanced by considering interdependencies between various factors: how different job resources are used, workers' motivation to use resources, workers' knowledge of how to use resources and the use of resources from across organizational boundaries. The study provides qualitative support for the assumption that social support and job control are used to cope with demands.     

Management,Governance and Intellectual Property: Electronic Publishing in the UK

Intellectual property issues have been formulated mostly in termsof legal and regulatory aspects. In the case of electronicpublishing, as with a number of other technology-basedindustries, there has been concern on the part of government andinternational bodies to tighten intellectual property rights(IPRs). On the basis of a survey of smaller electronicpublishing firms in the UK, we find that such tightening of IPRshas little support from them. Instead, they voice concern thatintensified regulation, whatever it gains for them in revenues,could alter the whole structure of the industry in ways veryunfavourable to them. The survey reveals that their mainconcerns are, instead, directed at the kind of issues portrayedin the recent literature on ``dynamic capabilities'. In thisliterature, the extent of replicability is central to theprovision of IPRs. We find that policy-makers see electronicpublishing as an instance of `easy replicability', thuswarranting tougher IPRs, whereas the industry itself seesreplicability as considerably harder, because of dependence oninternal capabilities generated within firms. Changes ingovernance need to relate more closely to managementcapabilities.