Search results

BUSINESS SCHOOL GRAFFITI is a highly personal and revealing account of the first ten years (1965–1975) at Britain’s University Business Schools. The progress achieved is documented in a whimsical fashion that makes it highly readable. Gordon Wills has been on the inside throughout the decade and has played a leading role in two of the major Schools. Rather than presuming to present anything as pompous as a complete history of what has happened, he recalls his reactions to problems, issues and events as they confronted him and his colleagues. Lord Franks lit a fuse which set a score of Universities and even more Polytechnics alight. There was to be a bold attempt to produce the management talent that the pundits of the mid‐sixties so clearly felt was needed. Buildings, books, teachers who could teach it all, and students to listen and learn were all required for the boom to happen. The decade saw great progress, but also a rapid decline in the relevancy ethic. It saw a rapid withering of interest by many businessmen more accustomed to and certainly desirous of quick results. University Vice Chancellors, theologians and engineers all had to learn to live with the new and often wealthier if less scholarly faculty members who arrived on campus. The Research Councils had to decide how much cake to allow the Business Schools to eat. Most importantly, the author describes the process of search he went through as an individual in evolving a definition of his own subject and how it can best be forwarded in a University environment. It was a process that carried him from Technical College student in Slough to a position as one of the authorities on his subject today.

Many individuals start a new firm each year, mainly intending to become independent or improve their financial situation. For most of them, the first years of operations mean a substantial investment of time, effort and money with highly insecure outcomes. This study aims to explore how entrepreneurs running new firms perform financially compared with the established ones and how this situation influences their well-being.

A questionnaire survey was completed in 2021 and 2022 by a representative sample of N = 1136 solo self-employed and microentrepreneurs in the Czech Republic, with dependent self-employed excluded. This study used multiple regressions for data analysis.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are less satisfied with their financial situation, have lower disposable income and report more significant financial problems than their established counterparts. The situation is even worse for the subsample of startups. However, this study also finds they do not have lower well-being than established entrepreneurs. While a worse financial situation is generally negatively related to well-being, being a startup founder moderates this link. Startup founders can maintain a good level of well-being even in financial struggles.

The results suggest that policies should focus on reducing the costs related to start-up activities. Further, policy support should not be restricted to new technological firms. Startups from all fields should be eligible to receive support, provided that they meet the milestones of their development. For entrepreneurship education, this study‘s results support action-oriented approaches that help build entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy while making them aware of cognitive biases common in entrepreneurship. This study also underscores that effectuation or lean startup approaches help entrepreneurs develop their startups efficiently and not deprive themselves of resources because of their unjustified overconfidence.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the financial situation and well-being of founders of new firms and, specifically, startups. The personal financial situation of startup founders has been a largely underexplored issue. Compared with other entrepreneurs, this study finds that startup founders are, as individuals, in the worst financial situation. Their well-being remains, however, on a comparable level with that of other entrepreneurs.

“Corporate planning” is the term which, perhaps more than any other, epitomises the adoption of business management techniques by the public sector. In Britain, with massive local government reorganisation in 1974, many librarians were forced to come to terms with such techniques whether they liked it or not. Of course, in its purest sense corporate planning applies to the combined operation of an entire organisation be it local authority, university, government department or industrial firm. However, in this paper I do not intend discussing “the grand design” whereby the library is merely a component part of a greater body. Rather, it is my intention to view the library as the corporate body. It is a perfectly possible and very useful exercise to apply the principles of corporate planning, and the management techniques involved, to the running of a library or group of libraries. Indeed, many librarians have already done this either independently or as their part in the corporate plan of their parent organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to compare quality of life scores in a long-term recovery population group (post five years) with a general population group and to explore how any differences might be explained by recovering individuals themselves in a small number of follow up qualitative interviews.

A sequential explanatory mixed method design combining quantitative quality of life measure (WHOQOL-BREF, 1996) and six subsequent semi-structured individual interviews. The quality of life measure compared long-term recovery scores (post five years) with the general population group. The subsequent qualitative semi-structured interviews explored what the participants themselves said about their recovery.

The quantitative data provide evidence of a significant difference in quality of life (WHOQoL-BREF) in two domains. The long-term recovery group (five or more years into recovery) scored higher in both the environment and psychological domains than the general population group. Of the long-term recovery group, 17 people who still accessed mutual aid scored higher in all four domains than those 23 people who did not. The interviews provide evidence of the this difference as result of growth in psychological elements of recovery, such as developing perspective, improvement in self-esteem, spirituality, as well as contributing as part of wider social involvement.

This study provides support for the quality of life measure as useful in recovery research. The empirical data support the concept of recovery involving improvements in many areas of life and potentially beyond the norm, termed “better than well” (Best and Lubman, 2012; Valentine, 2011; Hibbert and Best, 2011). Limitations: snowballing method of recruitment, and undertaken by public health practitioner. Some suggestions of women and those who attend mutual aid having higher quality of life but sample too small.

Use QoL measure more in recovery research. Public health practitioners and policy makers need to work with partners and agencies to ensure that there is much more work, not just treatment focused, addressing the wider social and environmental context to support individuals recovering from alcohol and drugs over the longer term.

One of small number of studies using with participants who have experienced long-term (post five years) recovery, also use of quality of life measure (WHOQOL-BREF, 1996) with this population.

Household food insecurity and poor well-being have increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and resulting lockdown measures. Home food growing has been associated with improved food access and well-being, but it is unknown what role it plays during food supply crises and lockdown. It is also unclear how home food growing and social restrictions may affect opinions about growing food in urban areas (i.e. urban agriculture; UA).

A cross-sectional online survey was conducted during the UK national lockdown in March-April 2020 to measure home food growing, perceived food insecurity, well-being, and opinions of UA. The participants were 477 UK-based adults (369 female, mean age 39.57 years ± 13.36); 152 participants were engaged in home food growing prior to the pandemic. Responses were compared to data collected from a separate sample of participants before the pandemic (N=583) to explore potential shifts in opinions about UA.

Participants who engaged in home food growing had lower levels of food insecurity (U_­=19894.50, z=−3.649, p<0.001, r=−0.167) and higher well-being (U=19566.50, z=−3.666, p<0.001, r=−0.168) than those not engaged in home food growing. Perceived food insecurity partially mediated the relationship between home food growing and well-being; home food growing was associated with less food insecurity, which in turn was associated with better well-being. There were no differences in opinions of UA compared to the sample of participants from before the pandemic.

Home food growing may have had a protective effect over perceived food security and well-being in the early stages the pandemic. Opinions of UA were positive and unchanged compared to data collected pre-pandemic. Policies that support home food growing and access to suitable growing spaces and resources may be beneficial for food system resilience and well-being.

Variable pay, defined as pay that is tied to some measure of a firm’s output, has become more important for executives of the typical American firm. Variable pay is usually touted as a way to provide incentives to managers whose interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of owners. The incentive justification for variable pay has well-known theoretical problems and also appears to be inconsistent with much of the data. Alternative explanations are considered. One that has not received much attention, but is consistent with many of the facts, is selection. Managers and industry specialists may have information about a firm’s prospects that is unavailable to outside investors. In order to induce managers to be truthful about prospects, owners may require managers to “put their money where their mouths are,” forcing them to extract some of their compensation in the form of variable pay. The selection or sorting explanation is consistent with the low elasticities of pay to output that are commonly observed, with the fact that the elasticity is higher in small and new firms, with the fact that variable pay is more prevalent in industries with very technical production technologies, and with the fact that stock and stock options are a larger proportion of total compensation for higher level employees. The explanation fits small firms and start-ups better than larger, well-established firms.

This paper aims to focus on participation in the workplace and examines the relative importance of different dimensions of job control in relation to subjective well-being and organizational commitment. These dimensions are job autonomy (within a given job), functional support (from supervisor and colleagues) and organizational level decision latitude (shop-floor consultancy on process improvements, division of labor, workmates, targets, etc.). Interaction with work intensity is looked at as well.

Measurements and data were taken from the European Working Conditions Survey, 2010. The paper focusses on salaried employees only. The sample was further limited to employees in workplaces consisting of at least 50 workers. There are 2,048 employees in the final sample, from Denmark, Ireland, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and the UK. In this paper, the focus is not on differences between countries, and adding more countries would have introduced too many country characteristics as intermediate variables.

In the regression analyses, functional support and organizational level decision latitude showed stronger relations with the outcome variables than job autonomy. There was no relation between work intensity and the outcome variables. Two-way interactions were found for job autonomy and organizational level decision latitude on subjective well-being and for functional support and organizational level decision latitude on organizational commitment. A three-way interaction, of all job control variables combined, was found on organizational commitment, with the presence of all types of job control showing the highest organizational commitment level. No such three-way interaction was found for subjective well-being. There was an indication for a two-way interaction of work intensity and functional support, as well as an indication for a two-way interaction of work intensity and organizational level decision latitude on subjective well-being: high work intensity and low functional support or low organizational level decision latitude seemed to associate with low well-being. No interaction was found for any dimension of job control being high and high work intensity.

Although this study has all the limitations of a cross-sectional survey, the results are more or less in accordance with existing theories. This indicates that organizational level decision latitude matters. Differentiation of job control dimensions in research models is recommended, and so is workplace innovation for healthy and productive jobs.

Most theoretical models for empirical research are limited to control at task level (e.g. the Job Demand-Control-Support model of Karasek and Theorell. The paper aims at nuancing and extending current job control models by distinguishing three dimensions/levels of job control, referring to sociotechnical systems design theory (De Sitter) and action regulation theory (Hacker) and reciprocity (Akerlof). The policy relevance regards the consequences for work and organization design.

The impact of globalization on individual well-being through the interplay of self and standard forms of lifestyle aspirations, has generally received less attention than the merits of globalization at the macro-level. This chapter addresses this question by testing the hypothesis that poor rural-dwelling Botswana men suffer diminished well-being compared to their relatively well-off urban-dwelling counterparts as a result of unfulfilled lifestyle aspirations. The study combines ethnographic, psychological, and psychosomatic data to compare well-being among rural and urban adult Botswana men. Results indicate that failed urban migration associates with low cortisol and high depressive affect, and rural residence is also independently associated with high depressive affect. This psychosomatic syndrome may be similar to that observed in posttraumatic stress disorder, suggesting that the experience of failed urban migration is considerably more stressful than the demands of employed urban life in contemporary Botswana.

HEAR what Mr. Les Huckfield has to say. Why? Because he is the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Department of Industry. “Britain's potential for becoming a very great industrial nation exists; we have the ideas, the men and women to put them into practice; all we need is the will to succeed.”

The purpose of this paper is to find an answer the question of whether an educational institution of a fair socio-economic mix of pupils, and an institution favoured with powerful political connections, made any difference to access, equity, and exclusivity in relation to the transition into secondary education. It undertakes this purpose as a historical investigation of Junction Park State School in the early twentieth century combined with statistical analysis of family backgrounds of scholarship holders and their cohorts from 1915 to 1932.

The socio-economic study uses a published list of scholarship holders from Junction Park State School for the years 1924-1932. The study compares the scholarship groupings with their different school cohorts for the same years using the data on parental occupations, extracted from the Junction Park State School Admission Records 1915-1931. After refinement the study examines a cohort data set of 4,531 pupils which includes 287 scholarship holders. Parental occupations are categorised into socio-economic groupings with high and low occupational ends. There were 237 parental occupations described among the cohort, 1915-1931, from the admission records.

The statistical chance of obtaining scholarship is increased for a pupil from “commercial low” and “industrial low” background when the school starts with a cohort that has a large representation from such backgrounds. Pupils who were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale at Junction Park State School did much better in scholarship outcomes than for the state. However, pupils whose family background was at the high end of the professions did marginally better than the state result. For the school between 1915 and 1932, in most socio-economic groupings, the boys outperform the girls in the like-to-like comparisons.

The numeric value is excessively low for the primary producers (high) category and numbers in cohort groupings vary. This study deliberately applied like-to-like comparisons: the number of scholarship holders compared to their own gender for the same socio-economic cohort. Percentile in relation to the study’s total was not used due to numeric variations between cohort sizes. The study is a historical investigation of a formative period before Junction Park State School developed its reputation as a scholarship school in the 1940s, and historical factors relating to the post-Second World War era would have different results for a similar statistical analysis.

The paper presents a case study of particular historical significance; however, a generic principle that institutional status can change access and equity opportunities can be tested within the historical setting. The paper claims that historical investigation provides the groundwork to establish the distinctive actuality. Historical investigation picks up on unusual patterns over time, not necessarily to disprove the sociological model, but more to test the model against actual events.

The Queensland social history is connected to the study’s statistical analysis. The data are considered from a perspective that, first, Junction Park had a diverse population of pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds. Second, the school had a solid reputation as a leading school, partly from the political standing of the school leadership, and partly from the strength of its scholarship teachers. Together these factors suggest that pupils at Junction Park State School from the socio-economic backgrounds less inclined to foster educational values were given greater support to achieve better scholarship outcomes.

Statistical analysis is rarely brought to academic history work. There are greater risks in misinterpreting the data. There is also a difficult enterprise of extracting the required information. Nevertheless, the reward from this paper is an insightful view of a large and an innovating Queensland primary school, picking up the details in the life experience of pupils. In that historical process there is a greater degree of accuracy and better interpretive value which can be applied to the sociological model.