Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour,Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

This paper presents in‐depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner‐managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms’ working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner‐managers as a tool at their disposal. However, while early studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises support such a functionalist view, our findings indicate its significant limitations. We argue that humour obscures but does not resolve disjunctive interests and it remains stubbornly ambiguous and resistant to attempts to functionalize it. Our findings contribute to studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises by challenging its utility as a means of managerial control or employee resistance. They also contribute to studies of employment relationships by exploring humour's potentially disruptive influence within the formality–informality span, especially as small and medium‐sized enterprises seek greater degrees of formalization, with implications for how those relationships are conducted and (re)negotiated on an ongoing basis.     

Nonparametric regression estimation at design poles and zeros

ABSTRACT In most treatments of nonparametric regression, it is assumed that the marginal density of the explanatory variables is strictly bounded away from zero and infinity. This note investigates the pointwise asymptotics for nonparametric regression when this assumption fails, that is, the marginal density of the explanatory variable has either an isolated zero or a pole at the point of interest.     

Cognitive therapy and behavioural coping in the management of work-related stress: An intervention study

Transactional models of stress emphasize the importance of cognitive appraisal of potential stressors in the determination of the stress response. This appraisal can be modified by the use of techniques normally associated with cognitive therapy. The contribution of a specifically cognitive component when intervening in work-related stress has not been well evaluated to date. This research seeks to determine the effectiveness of stress management training in the treatment of the work-related effects of stress by comparing the role of modifying dysfunctional cognitions with the teaching of appropriate behavioural coping strategies. Participants were allocated to one of two intervention conditions or to a waiting list control group. Those in the intervention conditions received group stress management either with the focus on delivering cognitive therapy techniques or with the focus on behavioural coping skills. Measures of general health were taken at the beginning and end of intervention and at 3-month follow-up. Participants in the cognitive therapy groups who were reporting symptoms of general ill-health at the start of the intervention showed a significant improvement at follow-up. Cognitive therapy appears to have been an effective intervention in work-related stress. Those in the behavioural group showed a smaller but still clinically effective improvement. Results are discussed in terms of methodological issues and implications for future research. It is suggested that changes in cognitive appraisal may need to be developed.     

Bayesian Forecasting With Stable Seasonal Patterns

A multiplicative seasonal forecasting model for cumulative events in which, conditional on end- of-season totals being given and seasonal shape being known, it is shown that events occurring within the season are multinomially distributed is presented. The model uses the information contained in the arrival of new events to obtain a posterior distribution for end-of-season totals. Bayesian forecasts are obtained recursively in two stages: first, by predicting the expected number and variance of event counts in future intervals within the remaining season, and then by predicting revised means and variances for end-of-season totals based on the most recent forecast error.     

Planning personnel retraining: column generation heuristics

Retraining of staff is a compulsory managerial function in many organisations and often requires planning for a large number of employees. The large scale of this problem and various restrictions on the resultant assignment to classes make this planning challenging. The paper presents a complexity analysis of this problem together with linear and nonlinear mathematical programming formulations. Three different column generation based optimisation procedures and a large neighbourhood search procedure, incorporating column generation, are compared by means of computational experiments. The experiments used data typical to large electricity distributors.     

The Death Penalty and Historical Change in Spain

This article studies the long duration of the death penalty in Spain until its abolition in the Constitution of 1978. After analysing the plurality of theoretical approaches and possibilities offered by archival sources and specialised historiography (particularly those produced by specialists in the history of law and social history), I synthesise the Spanish answers to the major questions posed in the international historiographical debate on this issue. I then review the formality and the religious and juridical content of these “ceremonies of torment” in order to understand the scope of the practice of the death penalty in processes of social change: what did political power transmit from the scaffolds and what type of social impact was generated by public executions? How did the institutions that exercised the death penalty evolve? Why, during the transition from the Old Regime to the liberal state, was the death penalty used more regularly than before? How many prisoners were in fact executed, for what crimes, and using what procedures and techniques? Finally, after confirming that in the decades straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the death penalty was on the decline, being counteracted by abolitionist discourse in the field of penal sentencing, I examine the functions played by political executions in the repressive dynamics of the Civil War and Francoism.     

Electricity consumption changes following solar adoption: Testing for a solar rebound

We use household-level data to explore residential electricity use patterns following installation of solar panels. Solar adoption leads to an increase in total electricity consumption relative to a matched non-adopting control group. Our point estimate translates to a rebound effect of 28.5%, suggesting that nearly a third of the electricity produced by a customer's solar panels is used for increased energy services, rather than reduced grid electricity consumption. We explore several potential drivers of an increase in electricity consumption. These results have important implications for electricity planning and policy, suggesting that rooftop solar stimulates additional demand for electricity.