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Identifying and measuring personality traits assists to understanding professional career choices, however, what impact personality traits have on nursing student rural career choice remains absent. The purpose of this paper is to identify personality traits among nursing students that may be predictive of pursuing a rural career.

A cross-sectional design was used to examine the importance Bachelor of Nursing students place on undertaking rural careers. All nursing students (n=1,982) studying a three-year bachelor’s degree were invited to complete a questionnaire examining personality traits and rural practice intentions.

Students who saw themselves working rurally after graduation had higher levels of conscientiousness than those who wanted metropolitan careers. Students with higher levels of agreeableness or open-mindedness were more likely to consider rural practice when individual community factors were carefully considered. Finally, students with higher levels of neuroticism were less likely to consider rural practice as a future career pathway.

The cohort had high numbers of student from rural and regional settings, which may limit the ability to generalise the findings. In addition, student respondents of the survey may not be representative of the whole student cohort given the low response rate.

Key personality traits are identifying factors that contribute to nursing student decision making regarding rural practice. Students who displayed higher levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness and open-mindedness have traits that are most likely to impact the consideration of rural practice across their nursing career, which gives additional insight into targeted recruitment strategies.

This chapter examines the labor-empowerment potential of emerging taxi driver cooperative-union partnerships. Cooperative-union partnerships can adopt differing stances toward the virtue of waging broad-based, class-conscious conflict against economic elites to win economic change, as opposed to the virtue of small-scale and practical steps to improve the immediate conditions of individual “job-conscious” workers. This case study utilizes a “class consciousness” versus “job consciousness” framework to examine a recent immigrant taxi driver union-cooperative partnership.

Case study of taxi driver organizing in Denver (CO), utilizing narrative inquiry, and survey and interviews with 69 drivers.

The US tradition of accommodational job consciousness continues to influence union and cooperative leaders. Among Denver’s taxi cooperatives, an emphasis on accommodational job consciousness, bereft of class perspectives, has undermined a narrative promoting worker solidarity or encouraging workers to engage in social justice campaigns for immigrant workers. The consequence has been to weaken the transformational potential of taxi driver activism.

Findings based on a single case study need to be confirmed through additional research.

Cooperative-union partnerships that adopt a class-conscious political approach, including leadership development opportunities, a “labor empowerment curriculum, and partnerships with broader social movements, are a promising alternative to narrowly tailored “job conscious” organizing strategies.

Immigrants are increasingly forming worker cooperatives, and the recent Denver taxi driver union-cooperative is one of the largest taxi cooperatives in the country. Current research on the labor empowerment consequences of these emerging immigrant cooperatives is sparse.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

Using a sample of 214 US metropolitan areas, we examine the connection between the Great Recession and bad jobs, taking into consideration the macro-level determinants of the troubled economy. Our measure of bad jobs is derived from Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson’s (2000) conceptualization as those that have low pay, lack health insurance, and lack pension plans. We find that the Great Recession increased the prevalence of bad jobs, consistently for men and selectively for women. Among the macro-level processes, the decline of the manufacturing base, union membership, and public sector employment are sources of increasing bad jobs, especially for men. Those macro-level processes which are growing in influence such as casualization, globalization and financialization show no signs of reversing the negative trends in bad jobs. Human capital variables in the labor market such as educational and age variability consistently suggest more adverse effects on bad jobs for men than women. Our findings contribute to the further understanding of the nature of precarious work in a troubled economy.

This study examines the performance consequences of pay dispersion in publicly listed firms in Turkey for the period 2009–2013. Our study focuses on vertical pay dispersion, which reflects intra-firm and vertical differences between pay at two important hierarchical levels: top executive level and lower hierarchical level. The author intends to present arguments based on equity theory and tournament theory and will propose two contradictory hypotheses to test them within the context of an emerging market. Results provided in the present study confirm that pay dispersion between executives and employees has a positive impact on a firm’s profitability in Turkey. Our study contributes current empirical evidence by examining vertical pay dispersion in an emerging country context, which may have a different cultural orientation and societal-wide assumptions concerning fairness, power, and disparities, relative to its developed country counterparts.

Using two nationally representative data sets, we examine the wages, benefits, and social insurance of contingent workers compared with standard employees in South Korea. In addition, we measure employers’ investments in their contingent workforce. Our results indicate that contingent workers have become the dominant form of labor in South Korea after the 1998 Asian financial crisis and are faced with working conditions that are discriminative compared with those of standard employees. We also find that employers’ investments in contingent workers as human resources, as well as the upward mobility of contingent workers, are limited in the Korean labor market. Overall, our findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the working poor, including the social exclusion of contingent workers in an advanced developing economy.

The transformations in the existing forms of governmentality and power regimes are deeply rooted within the political economy of advanced neoliberalism, having profound implications in the governance matrix. The new rationalities and instrumentalities of governance involve ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes, 1996) following the delegitimisation and deconstruction of the Keynesian Welfare State and the gradual enactment of what Jessop (2002) calls the Schumpeterian Competition State. This chapter throws open the play field for competing standpoints on governing the mega corporates. Various theorists consider that there is emptiness within the existing global regulatory armoury concerning the operational activities of TNCs. The convolution of ‘steering’ in this poly-centred, globalised societies with its innate uncertainty makes it tricky to keep an eye on the fix of ‘who actually steers whom’ and ‘with what means’. There also appears to be huge disinclination to spot systemic technical description of the evolving modern institutional structure of economic regulation in a composite and practical manner. Thus, the complexity of international issues, their overlapping nature and the turmoil within the arena in which they surface defy tidy theorizing about effective supervision.

This brings in the wider questions dealt with in the chapter – Is globalisation then a product of material conditions of fundamental technical and economic change or is it collective construct of an artifact of the means we have preferred to arrange political and economic activity? The new reflexive, self-regulatory and horizontal spaces of governance are getting modelled following the logic of competitive market relations whereby multiple formally equal actors (acting or aspiring to act as sources of authority) consult, trade and compete over the deployment of various instruments of authority both intrinsically and in their relations with each other (Shamir, 2008). The chapter also looks into these messy and fluid intersections to situate the key actors at the heart of processes of ‘rearticulation’ and ‘recalibration’ of different modes of governance which operates through a somewhat fuzzy amalgamation of the terrain by corporates, state hierarchy and networks all calibrating and competing to pull off the finest probable’s in metagovernance landscape. Unambiguously, this chapter seeks to elaborate on an institutional-discursive conceptualization of governance while stitching in and out of the complex terrain a weave of governances for modern leviathan – the global corporates.