Patterns of Strategic Change in the Development of Human Resource Management

In addition to being characterized by the consistency of employment decisions one with another and their alignment with business strategy, human resource management (HRM) has also been deeply involved in the reshaping of organization structures in the 1980s, under conditions of increased external and internal complexity, and in managing other aspects of strategic change. These have contributed to the distinctive character of HRM and the shift away from a style of personnel management focused on administration and industrial relations. This evolution is explored through the concept of life-cycle change in a sample of ten firms that underwent major transformation during the 1980s.     

Are Religious People Nice People? Religiosity,Race, Interview Dynamics,and Perceived Cooperativeness

Prior research has shown consistently that religiosity, as indexed by self-reported frequency of prayer, is associated positively with "niceness," measured by interviewers'ratings of respondents'cooperativeness. We used data pooled from the 1983, 1988, and 1993 General Social Surveys to further examine the association between religiosity and niceness, and to raise questions about the adequacy of this currently preferred operationalization of niceness. We used three different measures of religiosity and directly examined racial differences in perceived cooperativeness. Our results indicate that each self-reported indicator of religiosity was associated positively with perceived cooperativeness (in separate models), while race was associated negatively. We found no evidence of mediating or moderating relationships. Overall, our results provide additional evidence that persons who are more religious are perceived by others to be more cooperative and that this effect operates net of more readily observable characteristics that might influence interview dynamics and interviewers'evaluations of respondents'cooperativeness. However, our results also suggest that new, more specific measures of niceness are needed to improve our ability to fully measure this sociologically important concept and to refine our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and niceness.     

Australian evidence on corporate governance attributes and their association with forward-looking information in the annual report

We investigate the role played by a firm’s corporate governance framework in the decision to voluntarily disclose forward-looking information in the published financial reports of Australian companies in 2000 and 2002. With respect to the year 2000, the corporate governance category, audit quality, consisting of the presence and independence of the audit committee, its meeting frequency, the use of a big 6 auditor and the auditor’s independence, is positively associated with the disclosure of forward-looking information. The corporate governance category, board committees, consisting of the appointment and independence of a compensation committee and the creation of a nomination committee, and the overall efficacy of the corporate governance system are also positively associated with the disclosure of forward-looking information. However, corporate disclosure does not seem to be driven by the same factors in 2002 since in that year none of the governance categories is significantly associated with the firm’s decision to publish forward-looking information in financial reports.

From'Normal Appearances'to 'Simulation'in Interaction

Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new. and I think it not improbable that modern ideas may, through the media of newspapers and conversation, have seeped down into the social stratum which exists below stairs. My souls (or characters) are agglomerations of past and present cultures, scraps from books and newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once-fine clothing that has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched together. (Strindberg [1888] 1964: 102-3)