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Since the early 2000s there has been increased attention on the professionalisation of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workforce in many OECD countries. This study focuses on what Australian early childhood educators holding the lowest level of qualification – Certificate III are experiencing in relation to their professional capital in a sector that is experiencing wide-spread and ongoing reform. The study identifies the human capital, social capital and decisional capital of these educators, then explores the interconnections.

This paper was funded by the Australian Research Council. The qualitative data consider the capabilities of certificate-qualified educators and how these are enabled or constrained within the workplace. The corpus of data for this study consists of 14 interviews with Certificate III-qualified educators from three locations across Victoria, Australia. Hargreaves and Fullan’s (2012) forms of professional capital (human, social and decisional) act as organisers for the themes identified through a thematic analysis.

Themes identified in the data speak to inequity in access to professional learning, the valuing of life experiences, clear divisions of labour that impact what knowledge is valued, and differences in educator agency in the decision-making process. Many certificate-qualified educators experience a workplace culture that lacks trust in an individual’s professional competence and does not appreciate collegial knowledge and skill building as a collective enterprise.

The conceptual framing of this study provides a unique way to explore the experiences of certificate-trained educators. The study introduces the idea of using exploratory categories and the identification of levels of human, social and decisional capital. This type of study involving this cohort of educators is unique.

To determine how different voluntary leaves of absence (parental vs. community service) affect individuals’ preferences for working with either male or female supervisors. Drawing on role congruity theory, the authors examined whether individuals would least prefer supervisors who took voluntary leave that violated role expectations.

In Study 1, participants (n = 372) evaluated supervisors who took different forms of leave (none vs. parental vs. community service). In Study 2 (n = 202), the authors tested an intervention to reduce negative bias toward males taking community service leave. In both studies the authors examined the sex of the supervisor (male vs. female) on perceptions of typicality and supervisor preference.

Males who took community service leave were perceived as most atypical and were least preferred as supervisors. However, providing relevant research-based information about typicality reduced this bias.

The results show that people respond negatively toward males who take community service leave. Managers can help reduce this bias by providing relevant research-based information regarding community service leave.

This work is among the first to explore the consequences of community service leave and how it interacts with supervisor sex. The authors also identify a simple way to reduce bias against males who take community service leave.

Conducting research that is both practice- and theory-relevant is important for the service research community. Action research can be a fruitful approach for service researchers studying the transformative role of service research and wanting to make contributions to both the research community and to practical development. By exploring the current use of action research in service research, this study aims to make suggestions for enhancing the contribution to theory and practice development and to propose criteria for research quality for action research in service research.

This study builds on a systematic literature review of the use of action research approaches in service research.

The study makes three main contributions. First, it posits that any action research project needs to consider the four elements of problem identification, theorization, creating guiding concepts and intervention. Second, based on these elements mirrored in service action research, it outlines and analyzes three approaches to action research (i.e. theory-enhancing, concept developing and practice-enhancing). Third, it suggests a move from instrumental to a more conceptual relevance of the research and elaborates on the criteria for research quality.

This study contributes to the understanding of how action research may be applied for conducting high-quality collaborative research in services and proposes measures to enhance research quality in action research projects focusing services.

This paper reviews the socioeconomic reform policies employed by the China’s party-state between the early 1980s and mid-2000s. Unlike conventional frameworks viewing the reform as an economic development project designed for “national interests” or “ruling elites” personal interests’, this paper interprets the reform as a political attempt of the state made in response to the crisis of dominance over the working class. In the face of the crisis of class dominance expressed as economic and political unrests related to low growth of labor productivity, the state managers of the post-Mao era embarked on the reform as a way of restoring the state’s ability to impose work upon the workers. As is well known, the reform was “market-oriented” with the state relinquishing some of the control over economic managements, and this paper sees it as the state’s strategy of reducing political risks arising from a highly politicized form of class confrontation. By making pressures upon producers look like a purely economic matter arising from private relations, that is, by depoliticizing exploitative social relations of production, the market-oriented reform helped the party-state effectively repress workers without a serious damage to political legitimacy. From this perspective, this paper examines the reform policies in management of labor, firms, and money, and how those policies contributed to the state’s ability to discipline class relations of production in China. This paper, however, does not conclude that the reform as a depoliticization strategy of class dominance was successful and nonproblematic. It is argued that beneath the success of the reform was a growing necessity of crisis; faced with re-burgeoning workers’ struggles, growing problems of overproduction/overaccumulation, and the resultant looming banking system crisis, the party-state came to find it more and more necessary to bring the economic managements back into political ambit with the related political risks also growing.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the eighteenth to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1991. A few are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

An important aspect of the impact of the economic crisis is how pay in the public sector responds – in the face not only of the evolution of pay in the private sector but also extreme pressure on public spending (of which pay is a very large proportion) as fiscal deficits soar. What are the effects on the income distribution of cutting public sector pay rates or alternative strategies to reduce the public sector pay bill? This chapter investigates these issues using data and a tax–benefit simulation model for Ireland, a country which faces a particularly severe fiscal crisis and where innovative measures have already been implemented to claw back pay from public sector workers in the guise of a ‘pension levy’, followed by a significant cut in nominal pay rates. The SWITCH (Simulating Welfare and Income Tax Changes) tax–benefit model first allows the distributional effects of these measures, which achieved a substantial reduction in the net public sector pay bill, to be teased out. The overall impact on the income distribution is assessed. This provides empirical evidence relevant to policy choices in relation to a key aspect of household income over which governments have direct influence, while at the same time illustrating methodologically how a tax–benefit model can serve as the base for such investigation.

This article aims to analyze individual-, organizational- and country-level factors that determine the use of home-based telework across Europe according to the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the technology–organization–environment model.

To examine the impact of individual-, organizational- and country-level factors on telework, multilevel models are estimated to prevent problems derived from biased standard errors when micro- and macro-level data are combined.

The main findings show that, according to the usefulness side of the TAM, employees with family responsibilities, those that live away from their work and highly qualified workers use more home-based telework. Additionally, and according to the ease of use side of the TAM, empowerment in firms facilitates home-based telework. At the country level, lower power distance, individualism and femininity, better telework regulations and technology developments are also facilitators of home-based telework.

The study is limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data. This prevents the estimation of causal effects. Additional research would benefit from the use of panel data and from a more detailed analysis of the effects of country dimensions.

From an applied perspective, politics related to cultural dimensions are suggested to stimulate home-based telework.

The research contributes to previous literature by: (1) considering a large sample to conduct an empirical analysis of the use of home-based telework across Europe, (2) including micro and macro factors, (3) providing a theoretical framework to explain home-based telework, (4) applying a rigorous definition of home-based telework and (5) focusing on employees who are able to adopt home-based telework.

Macroeconomic shocks such as the recent global economic crisis can have far-reaching effects on the levels and the distribution of resources at the individual and the household levels. A recession associated with a labor market downturn and turbulent property and financial markets gives rise to significant and widespread losses for workers and households. Identifying the likely pattern of losses is, however, not straightforward. This is especially the case at the outset of a severe recession, when up-to-date information about current household circumstances is patchy, and economic conditions are subject to rapid change.