The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains.     

When informal is normal… On the role of credentials and contacts for the job entry in Serbia

The paper focuses on the roles of human capital and social resources in structuring young people's entries into either the formal or the informal labour market in the Serbian transformation society. Results show that informal labour market in Serbia follows the structure of the secondary labour market and signals vulnerability on part of youths employed there. Education dropouts are largely channelled to the informal sector, whereas favourably educated Serbian graduates are less attracted to it. Job search via social networks facilitates entry to unregistered employment, but slows down entry to registered employment for job seekers. Whereas stratification of labour market entry by education largely follows patterns of primary and secondary labour market attainment in any industrialized society, the effects of contacts might exhibit traces of inefficiencies peculiar to the transformation countries. Analyses are conducted on the basis of the Serbian school-leaver survey (2006) applying event history modelling and binomial regression analysis.     

Interactive effect of individual factors on nurses' health and sleep

Abstract

There is a tendency in studies concerning individual diferences in shiftwork tolerance to analyse the moderating effect of individual factors separately as if they acted independently. The aim of this study was to examine the interactive effect of individual factors (i.e. morningness, flexibility, languidity, neuroticism, extroversion) on nurses' health and sleep. A hundred female nurses (mean age 25.9 years, SD = 3.7 years) working a 2 × 12-h shift system were chosen from a larger study conducted among Intensive Care Unit staff. All subjects completed the Standard Shiftwork Index. Multiple regression analyses show that interactions of neuroticism and other factors (languidity, morningness) predict the majority of health and sleep complaints rather than neuroticism itself. Correlation analyses revealed that the interaction of neuroticism and languidity correlates higher with some indices of impaired health and sleep disturbances than when these factors are taken separately. The contribution of flexibility together with extroversion in interactions with neuroticism, and with neuroticism and languidity weaken the relations of languidity and neuroticism with health and sleep indices. The results show that some individual features tend to strengthen or counteract one another in relation to symptoms of shiftwork intolerance.     

Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust? Assessing Measurement Equivalence in Diverse Regime Types

Do standard “trust in government” survey questions deliver measures which are reliable and equivalent in meaning across diverse regime types? I test for the measurement equivalence of political trust in a sample of 35 former Soviet and European countries using the 2010 Life in Transition Survey II conducted by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Employing multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, I find that trust perceptions in central political institutions differ from (1) trust in regional and local political institutions, (2) trust in protective institutions like the armed forces and police and (3) trust in order institutions like the courts and police. Four measurement models achieve partial metric invariance and two reach partial scalar invariance in most countries, allowing for comparisons of correlates using latent factors from each model. I also found some clustering of measurement error and variation in the dimensionality of political trust between democratic and autocratic portions of the sample. On some measurement parameters, therefore, respondents in diverse cultures and regime types do not have equivalent understandings of political trust. The findings offer both optimism and a note of caution for researchers using political trust measures in cross-regime contexts.     

Potenziale nutzen!

In light of the continuing discussions about the recruitment of a highly-qualified labour force in Germany, this article explores the determinants of immigrants?? investments in official recognition of their education, and the labour market effects of this recognition. We examine both research questions with the help of the dataset extending to immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Results of the propensity score matching analysis show that level of education, occupational status in the country of origin, employment in professions that in Germany require specialized authorization, and language proficiency all positively affect immigrants?? investments in education recognition. Conversely, age at migration exerts a negative effect. Recognition of education certainly pays off in the German labour market, particularly when concerning high-status employment entry. Penalties associated with a partial recognition of education seem to be of minor importance. The biggest losers appear to be immigrants who attempted to get their education recognized but failed altogether. Not attempting to get one??s education recognized, on the other hand, seems to be a rational strategy largely on the part of less educated migrants who are more interested in investing into a quick labour market entry without much concern about the status of their employment.     

Managing Culture at British Airways: Hype, Hope and Reality

Nearly twenty years after the publication of the (in)famous In Search of Excellence, the notion of ‘cultural change’ within organisations continues to excite attention. This is readily understandable, since cultural interventions offer practitioners the hope of a universal panacea to organisational ills and academics an explanatory framework that enjoys the virtues of being both partially true and gloriously simple. Such a combination is apparent in the way that many attempts to shape organisational culture are presented to the public: as simple stories with happy endings.¹ This article attempts to rescue a fairy-tale. The story of British Airways is one of the most widely used inspirational accounts of changing culture. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was used to demonstrate the necessary compatibility of pleasure and profits² in celebratory accounts where culture change is presented as the only explanation for the transformation that occurred. This corrective makes no attempt to deny the very substantial changes that took place in BA. Rather, it sets these in context noting the organisation’s environment at the time of the transformation, the structural changes that took place and observes the impact that such changes had over the long term. ^{[3], [4] and [5]}Today, nearly twenty years after the publication of the (in)famous In Search of Excellence, the notion of ‘cultural change’ within organisations continues to excite attention. This continuing attraction is readily understood, since cultural interventions offer practitioners the hope of a universal panacea to organisational ills and academics an explanatory framework that enjoys the virtues of being both partially true and gloriously simple. Such a combination is apparent in the way that many attempts to shape organisational culture are presented to the public: as simple stories with happy endings.To a certain extent, of course, any form of narration encourages a story, an ending, and, as a result, a simplification—and stories may be used to shed light on attitudes and understandings not otherwise easily available to the researcher. But there is a very significant difference between listening to the accounts that individuals tell in order to make sense of their lives and allowing the study of the workplace to become ‘fictionalised’. The former involves engaging with the ‘subjects’ of the research, attempting to understand their world view and allowing them a voice in the process they are participating in. The latter can mean a selective reading of the data with examples chosen because they illustrate pre-set conclusions.In management particularly the capacity of writers to turn case studies into celebratory fictions is worrying. As Marchington argues, too many texts focus on “fairy tales and magic wands”.⁶ Such an emphasis encourages the belief that what is important in the workplace is not context, structure, power, economics or industrial relations but whatever new initiative management have chosen to introduce (the “magic wands”). The form that this magic takes varies from intervention to intervention but the impact claimed for each is curiously similar, with unproductive workplaces turned around and reluctant employees transformed into enthusiasts. Any changes that take place are seen to be a direct result of the magic and most are exaggerated. As a result, research into management becomes research into a series of fads and fashions with Total Quality Management or Business Process Re-engineering or empowerment or culture vying for attention. Every intervention is presented as new, so academic understanding of the workplace starts afresh each time a guru develops a new magic wand. Lessons cannot be carried forward since BPR is not employee involvement and company culture is not TQM. Elements of the workplace that might have provided a crucial element of continuity are ignored or dismissed as unimportant since only change is magical. As a result, by relying on these accounts, we understand less and less about why organisations function in the way that they do and practitioners are encouraged to believe that each initiative starts with a blank sheet, entirely unconstrained by what has gone before.Accordingly, in this article we attempt to rescue a fairy-tale. The story of British Airways is one of the most widely used inspirational accounts of changing culture. Throughout the 80s and 90s it was used to demonstrate the necessary compatibility of pleasure and profits. In such celebratory accounts, culture change is presented as the only explanation for the transformation that occurred. This corrective makes no attempt to deny the very substantial changes that took place in BA. Rather, it sets these in context noting the organisation’s environment at the time of the transformation, the structural changes that took place and observing the impact that such changes had over the long term.⁷