Why Are Some Subsidiaries of Multinationals the Source of Novel Practices while Others Are Not? National,Corporate and Functional Influences

It has frequently been argued that multinational companies are moving towards network forms whereby subsidiaries share different practices with the rest of the company. This paper presents large‐scale empirical evidence concerning the extent to which subsidiaries input novel practices into the rest of the multinational. We investigate this in the field of human resources through analysis of a unique international data set in four host countries – Canada, Ireland, Spain and the UK – and address the question of how we can explain variation between subsidiaries in terms of whether they initiate the diffusion of practices to other subsidiaries. The data support the argument that multiple, rather than single, factor explanations are required to more effectively understand the factors promoting or retarding the diffusion of human resource practices within multinational companies. It emerges that national, corporate and functional contexts all matter. More specifically, actors at subsidiary level who seek to initiate diffusion appear to be differentially placed according to their national context, their place within corporate structures and the extent to which the human resource function is internationally networked.     

In bondage when cold was king: the frigid terrain of slavery in antebellum Maryland

Cold weather remains one of the least explored environmental phenomena in the historiography of American slavery. By detailing the heightened vulnerabilities of the enslaved during the colder portions of the year and then describing the means by which enslaved people leveraged frigid weather against slaveholders, this paper highlights how slave and slaveholder differently mobilized the cold against one another in contests over power. It argues that in the lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Maryland, cold weather was both an afflicting as well as empowering force.     

Employment regulation,game theory and weak employee voice in liberal economies

This article analyses the impact of information and consultation regulations – specifically the European Information and Consultation Directive – on worker participation or “employee voice” in liberal market economies (LMEs), providing both empirical and theoretical insights to complement existing research on the Directive. Using game theory and the prisoner's dilemma framework, and empirical data from 16 case studies, the authors explain why national legislation implementing the Directive is largely ineffective in diffusing mutual‐gains cooperation in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Three theoretical explanatory propositions advance understanding of the policy impact of information and consultation regulations in LMEs.     

A note on Cochran test for homogeneity in one-way ANOVA and meta-analysis

In this paper we provide a formal yet simple and straightforward proof of the asymptotic χ² distribution for Cochran test statistic. Then, we show that the general form of this type of test statistics is invariant for the choice of weights. This fact is important since in practice many such test statistics are constructed with more complicated forms which usually require calculating generalized inverse matrices. Based on our results, we can simplify the construction of the test statistics. More importantly, properties such as anti-conservativeness of this type of test statistics can be drawn from Cochran test statistic. Furthermore, one can improve the performance of the tests by using some modified statistics with correction for small sample size situations.     

Does the internet change how we die and mourn? Overview and analysis

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.     

Citizenship: locating people with learning disabilities

This article first identifies citizenship as an ambiguous con-cept with changing and contested meanings. Next it discusses the methodological commitment of a study conducted in 2001 exploring the conceptions of citizenship permeating learning disability services. The third section identifies four themes linked to the citizenship of disabled people: work, participa-tion, community and consumption. Lastly, the article looks to locate the citizenship of people with learning disability within the framework of governmentality. The analysis of interview material from the 2001 study suggested that there was no coherent idea of citizenship operating through the services. However, the analysis of governmentality provides a richer picture. The different discourses of citizenship, while produc-ing contradictory positions for individuals with learning disability, do nevertheless provide positions to be had when less than half a century ago no such positions existed. In this sense these discourses are productive.     

How minimum wages affect schooling-employment outcomes in Canada, 1993–1999

Based on longitudinal data from the Master File of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for Canada for 1993-1999, we provide multinomial logit estimates of the effect of minimum wages on the probability of being in one of four schooling-employment states as well as transitions across the states. We find that minimum wage increases led to large and statistically significant reductions in the employment of teenagers but had no net effect on their school enrollment or on the individual transition probabilities. We also find no substantial substitution of students for nonstudents or students leaving school to queue for the higher minimum wage jobs.     

Is there a liquidity effect? An investigation using the Kalman filter

We test for a liquidity effect by utilizing a Kalman filter and find that monetary innovations lowered interest rates in 51 out of the 120 quarters in our sample. This implies that the recent empirical consensus of no liquidity effect has resulted from the implicit assumption that monetary innovations always impact interest rates in the same direction, rather than from an absence of a liquidity effect in the data (JEL E4).