ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AS CONTESTED GROUND IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION: WORKER PERCEPTIONS AND SATISFACTION IN THE USPS

Many prior efforts have examined the personal characteristics of workers or the structural features of an organization that impact job satisfaction. By contrast, we examine organizational culture in the context of "high-performance work systems." We analyze the organizational culture of the United States Postal System, as it is presented in key organizational documents and perceived by workers. It is argued that a viable theory of job satisfaction in the modern workplace must treat worker perceptions, which spring from an organizational culture that is both prescribed and lived.     

Estimation of the finite population distribution function using a global penalized calibration method

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - Auxiliary information $${\varvec{x}}$$ is commonly used in survey sampling at the estimation stage. We propose an estimator of the finite population...     

American union law: Sources of conflict

Japanese union-management relations are reputed to be cooperative, while American union-management relations are perceived to be adversarial. This study examines three sources of the adversarial union-management relations in the United States: union history, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, and the Wagner Act, as amended. Union history is a tale of conflict between workers who wished to cartelize and other workers who wished to be independent. It is not, primarily, a tale of conflict between capital and labor. The Norris-LaGuardia Act institutionalized conflict, and the Wagner Act enshrined it. To improve American unionmanagement relations significantly, so that American firms can be more effective international competitors, it is necessary, though not sufficient, to repeal both pieces of legislation.     

Operational Research changes: tales from a parallel universe

Operational research and statistics share many common features. A review of the historical development and of some current dilemmas in operational research is given, in the belief that the narrative will fulfil a wider purpose by causing statisticians to reflect on related aspects of the evolution of their own subject in a rapidly changing environment.     

Occupational mobility and trust: Reconsidering mobility effects

This paper hypothesizes that a hierarchy of types of mobility and immobility may be used as an interaction term to determine whether there is evidence of mobility effects beyond those contributed by origin and destination. The dependent variable is a trust scale constructed from responses to three questions that have repeatedly appeared on the General Social Survey. The analysis of data from the GSS, 1972–1994, reveals that some categories of the mobility dummy variable are significant for the 1970s and 1980s, but not for the 1990s. Although the dummy variables for occupational mobility contribute to a model constructed to explain the respondents’ trust of others, father's occupation and respondent's current occupation generally do not. The discussion considers the limitations of a reliance on census occupational categories to study the effects of occupational mobility, and suggests the potential benefits of examining occupational mobility within industries.     

EMPLOYEE AWARENESS OF FAMILY LEAVE BENEFITS: The Effects of Family, Work, and Gender

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was intended to help employees meet short-term family demands, such as caring for children and elderly parents, without losing their jobs. However, recent evidence suggests that few women and even fewer men employees avail themselves of family leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. This paper examines the organizational, worker status, and salience/need factors associated with knowledge of family leave benefits. We study employees covered by the FMLA using the 1996 panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to ascertain what work and family factors influence knowledge of leave benefits. Overall, 91 percent of employed FMLA-eligible women report they have access to unpaid family leave, compared to 72 percent of men. Logistic regression analyses demonstrate that work situations more than family situations affect knowledge of family leave benefits and that gender shapes the impact of some work and family factors on awareness. Furthermore, work and family situations do not explain away the considerable gender difference in knowledge of family leave.