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This paper aims to discuss the importance of flexible working time arrangements in the United States (U.S.). Section I creates a framework to analyse the various dimensions of working time and their impacts. It examines the availability of flexitime and its potential costs and benefits to workers and employers. Section II describes the current distribution and differential access to flexitime by workers' demographic characteristics and by industry and occupational sector. Section III analyses these data to estimate the probability that workers with a given demographic or work characteristic have access to flexitime daily schedules. The fourth and final section discusses the implications of the findings. The empirical findings reveal that many workers are gaining flexibility in the timing of their daily work schedules, but access to flexible schedules remains uneven by characteristics of workers such as gender or race and by their jobs such as skill‐level, job status and hours status. Having flexible scheduling comes at the expense of working long average hours per week, or re‐locating to part‐time or self‐employment status or “unsocial” evening shifts. One implication of this is that a public policy aimed at flexible work hours for workers benefit must seek first to spread such flexibility to those who are currently not sharing it because of their occupation, industry or other personal or labour market characteristics.

The article aims to provide a discussion of societal norms concerning “attractiveness,” the existence of appearance discrimination in employment, the presence of “preferring the pretty”, and then the authors examine important civil rights laws that relate to such forms of discrimination. Finally, the authors apply ethical theories to determine whether such discrimination can be seen as moral or immoral.

It is a legal paper which covers all the laws related to discrimination based on look. Court cases and Americans laws related to this concept are reviewed and critically discussed.

The paper finds that appearance‐based discrimination is not illegal in the USA so long as it does not violate civil rights laws.

This research is limited to Federal and State laws in the USA and may not be relevant in other countries as the local laws might vary.

Managers and employees can protect themselves in the workplace from illegal discriminatory practices.

Employees know their rights and enhance their understanding of laws related to appearance, attractiveness, and why companies look to hire those who are considered “handsome”, “pretty” and “beautiful”.

This is an original and comprehensive paper by the authors.

A small firm, like Key Pharmaceuticals, pioneers niche businesses by developing novel ways of delivering medicine to a patient's bloodstream—for example, nitroglycerine absorbed through adhesive pads on cardiac patients' chests. Key Pharmaceuticals is viewed as an ally by the large pharmaceutical firms as long as it stays out of their drug discovery businesses. • A small company refuses to abandon loyal customers when other firms stop producing products that face declining demand. For example, Beaunit makes cupramonium‐process rayon, which is needed by the small casket‐velvets market; enterprising electronic component distributors buy out inventories of obsolete vacuum tubes to supply a few good customers who don't want to retire their equipment before it wears out. Neither firm is challenged in its market niche because competitors don't consider the rewards worth the effort. • The “new company on the block” demonstrates its credibility by investing aggressively in a pioneering idea—as Archer‐Daniels‐Midland did with high fructose corn syrup in the maturing corn wet milling industry. The gamble succeeds because its larger rivals ignore its activities—perhaps because they don't consider the pioneer a threat; or because they believe that they can easily copy the pioneer's successes; or they're busy with more important battles in other markets.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of employees’ different disability types on lodging guests’ perceptions of service quality delivery and stereotyping. The study also explores the influence of consumer characteristics (i.e. gender, education, religiosity, generational identity and relationship to a person with a disability) on service delivery quality perceptions and stereotyping.

Using different types of disabilities, the study uses a controlled experiment, followed by a survey, to evaluate consumers’ perception of service quality delivery of a hotel front office staff member.

The results suggest that there are no significant differences in the perceptions of service quality delivery and stereotyping for service employees with disabilities with the exception of employees with a visual impairment. The study found that participants, who had a close friend or family member with a disability, expressed less stereotyping than those who did not have a close friend or family member with a disability.

Real service encounters can be used where participants might be more involved in the service process than in a controlled experiment setting.

The findings provide support to human resource management in strategically placing people with disabilities into front-line positions because they satisfactorily represent the image of the company and guests consider their service professional and reliable.

The study’s findings support that employers should tap into the under-utilized workforce of people with disabilities and avoid pre-existing stereotyping.

A major concern of hospitality companies making employment decisions about hiring people with disabilities is guests’ attitude. This is the first study in hospitality that examines service quality delivery of employees with different types of disability serve guests.

The concept of company culture is now playing an ever‐increasing role in the continuing endeavour to work towards ever better company management, particularly in the industrial field. This monograph reviews the history and development of both national and company cultures, and then goes on to demonstrate the significance of a culture to proper company management. Well‐managed companies will have both a “quality culture” and a “safety culture” as well as a cultural history. However, it has to be recognised that the company culture is subject to change, and effecting this can be very difficult. Of the many national cultures, that of Japan is considered to be the most effective, as is demonstrated by the present dominance of Japan on the industrial scene. Many industrialised nations now seek to emulate the Japanese style of management, but it is not possible to copy or acquire Japan′s cultural heritage. The text is illustrated by a large number of practical examples from real life, illustrating the way in which the company culture works and can be used by management to improve company performance.

The purpose of this paper is to draw the perspective of dynamic adjustment costs, the author developed hypotheses regarding the relationships between the internationalization of business groups and first, key leaders of business groups who helped found the groups (i.e. founder-key leaders); second, business groups’ group-level decision teams where the majority of positions are held by members of the founding family (i.e. family-dominated decision teams); and third, business groups’ group-level decision teams where strong ties exist among these teams (i.e. strong-tie decision teams) because group-level top managers are simultaneously top managers of group affiliates.

This study used generalized least squares fixed-effects models to test its arguments about longitudinal data pertaining to 173 Taiwanese business groups’ foreign direct investments over a period of five years (2004-2008).

The results show that the presence of a founder-key leader and strong-tie group-level decision teams in a business group can positively affect the internationalization of business groups. However, family-dominated group-level decision teams in a business group can adversely affect the internationalization of business groups.

Using a dynamic managerial-capacities perspective, this study provides alternative explanations regarding the degree of business groups’ internationalization to demonstrate the links among business groups’ key leaders, group-level decision teams, and internationalization.

When deciding whether to expand abroad, managers at a given business group should carefully consider the characteristics of the group's management team because business groups engaging in such expansion are likely to incur dynamic adjustment costs. In this case, the dynamic managerial capacities of a business group play an important role in enabling the group to decrease dynamic adjustment costs. The differences among a group-level key leader's traits, a family-dominated group-level decision team's traits, and a strong-tie group-level decision team's traits will lead to distinct levels of dynamic managerial capacities within the group.

Given the increasing number of business groups entering international markets, this paper rests on the perspective of dynamic managerial capabilities and uses group-level evidence to clarify how the characteristics of key leaders and the characteristics of group-level decision teams in business groups affect the groups’ international expansion.

The purpose of this paper is to study the allocation of time to paid work, unpaid work and non-work by women in Britain in 1998-1999. To infer the labor supply from the other time-use expressions.

The paper uses weekly diary data to estimate the unpaid work and non-work functions. It infers the (residual) paid work expression. As the latter is recovered from uncensored regressions, it makes direct use of the complete set of observations. Hence, it contains more information than the conventional labor supply functions that are estimated from the data obtained from paid work participants via the Tobit and Heckit or selection-bias correction (SBC) techniques.

The women surveyed generally allocated 69 percent of their time toward non-work, 18 percent to unpaid work, and 13 percent to paid work. The non-work function is dominated by the autonomous component, and all three functions depend on subjects’ age, wage, non-labor income, household composition, the unpaid work contributions of adult relatives and region of residence. The unpaid work and non-work functions are more consistent with the SBC rather than the Tobit version of the labor supply. Moreover, the Tobit predicts unrealistic paid work allocations for women engaging in very little non-work.

The unpaid work and non-work functions are regressed separately, as often the case in the literature. Their consideration within a seemingly unrelated regression framework necessitates a reduction in the number of observations to match those considered in the Tobit and SBC versions of the labor supply. Nuances may arise when the time reported in the diaries does not add up to 24 daily hours for all respondents. Knowledge of the recovered regional, age, household member and other effects on women time allocation might had come handy to economic development authorities who sought to attract women out of the household into market production, and from part-time to full-time employment in the context of the 2000-2010 Lisbon Strategy. Similar lessons may be valid today.

The data set derives from a survey that has not been used before. It relies on week-long diaries in order to avoid the occurrence of many zeros in a good number of activities (which is the norm in short diaries), and to ensure the study of a censored time-use function through its uncensored complements. The findings are compared to those of a weekly diary survey conducted in 1987 that solicited similar information. Hence, the study fills a gap in time-use analysis. Identifying the factors which influence the number of hours that women engage in work (both paid and unpaid) and non-work is useful for economic policy purposes. The study exposes a limitation in the conventional estimation of the labor supply which, in turn, casts doubt on the reliability of empirical results for policy making.

It is just over fifty years since the British government instigated the scheme that was to lead to the setting up of Government Training Centres (GTCs) shortly afterwards.

Synthesizes the contributions of a number of scholars on competitive strategies. Discusses several imperfections in the literature. Submits three propositions for empirical testing in a fragmented industry ‐ the adhesives and sealants industry. The results of the investigation suggest that business units which compete with the low cost strategy and differentiation strategy have higher ROIs than enterprises which compete with low costs only or differentiation only. As a group, however, the high profit firms are not significantly larger in size than the groups of low profit companies studied. Thus, what is elaborated is that competing with both strategies may involve benefits that are not based on advantages of larger market shares and scale economies.

This paper contains a meta-analysis of the psychological contract literature published in the last two decades. The aim of this paper was to investigate the moderating role of national culture in the individual-level relationships between psychological contract breach (PCB) and two important work outcomes, namely job performance (in-role and organizational citizenship behaviors) and turnover (actual and intended).

After an extensive literature search, 134 studies were found which matched the authors’ aim. The authors then incorporated national cultural scores based on the GLOBE study to include country-level scores to identify how the PCB relationships with these four outcomes vary across cultures.

The findings indicate that national cultural practices moderated the associations between PCB and the four outcomes, yet, no significant moderations for uncertainty avoidance practices.

While existing research has examined the impact of the breach on work outcomes such as job performance and turnover, there are few empirical studies that examine how national cultural practices influence the relationships between psychological contract breach and job performance and turnover. The authors address this need by investigating and creating a deeper insight into how cultural practices such as institutional collectivism, performance-orientation, power-distance, future orientation and gender egalitarianism moderate the relationships between PCB and job performance and turnover.