Search results

“When James Boswell returned from a tour of Corsica in 1765 he wrote: ‘It is indeed amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known.’ The same might be said today of Puerto Rico.” Thus began Millard Hansen and Henry Wells in the foreword to their 1953 look at Puerto Rico's democratic development. Four decades later, the same could again be said about the island.

The purpose of this paper is to compare conditions in informal day-labor markets in South Africa and the USA to better understand the nature of worker vulnerabilities in this market, as well as the economic conditions that have contributed to the growth of day labor. The conclusion considers interventions that are underway in the two countries to improve conditions in day-labor markets.

The paper is based on national surveys of day laborers in South Africa and the USA. A random sample of day laborers seeking work at informal hiring sites was undertaken in each country. The paper presents key findings, compares conditions in South Africa and the USA, and analyzes the relationship between economic change, labor-market dynamics, and worker vulnerability.

Day-labor work is characterized by low pay, hazardous conditions on the job, and tremendous income insecurity. The day-labor markets in South Africa and the USA perform somewhat different functions within regional economies. Within South Africa, day labor can be regarded as a survival strategy. The growth of day labor in South Africa over the past decade is a manifestation of a formal labor market that is incapable of absorbing the structurally unemployed. Here, day labor is the employment of last resort, allowing workers to subsist on the fringes of the mainstream economy, but offering few pathways into the formal sector. In the USA, the day labor workforce is a largely undocumented-immigrant workforce. Workers seek work at informal hiring sites, maintaining a tenuous hold on jobs in the construction industry. There is evidence of some mobility into more stable and better paying employment.

This paper documents the need for policies and programs to increase employment opportunities for day laborers and to better enforce labor standards in the informal economy.

This paper summarizes findings from the only two national surveys of day laborers that have been conducted, and it compares for the first time the dynamic within growing day-labor markets in a developed- and emerging-market context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of day labor worker centers in improving wages and working conditions of migrant casual workers in the USA.

The paper reports the results of a survey of worker center executive directors and senior staff, with particular attention to the ways in which centers maintain wage rates, allocate jobs, and redress grievances.

Day labor worker centers are now an important presence in construction industry casual labor markets, performing HRM functions that benefit employers and workers.

The research was undertaken during a time when the US construction industry was enjoying an expansion. It is unclear what a macroeconomic downturn might mean for the effectiveness of worker centers to maintain labor standards.

Conditions of instability and the violation of basic labor standards that occur in casual labor markets in the USA exist in other countries as well. Day labor worker centers might be a model intervention that could apply in other contexts.

The paper presents results from the first national survey of day labor worker centers. It highlights the key activities of these emerging labor market institutions.

This study aims to identify the effect of demographic factors on the relationship between academic contribution and university–industry knowledge exchange in Sri Lanka.

This study is of quantitative and explanatory type , which applied the deductive research method, and is conducted with minimum interference of researcher taking individual academics as the unit of analysis. The study collected data from 178 academics randomly through a structured questionnaire designed to analyze through statistical package for the social sciences and analysis of a moment structure statistical software. A structural equation model is applied to collected data to explore the moderating impact of the demographic factor on the university–industry knowledge exchange.

Overall involvement of academic staff in joint research, contract research, human resource mobility and the training with industry were was low in Sri Lanka. However, all four independent variables significantly associated with the knowledge exchange process from which only joint research and training had a statistically significant effect on university–industry knowledge exchange . Concerning demographic factors, only the quality of academic research significantly moderated the relationship between academic contribution and university–industry knowledge exchange process in Sri Lanka.

This study considered only the university side of the university–industry knowledge exchange process.

This paper implies that gender, age and area of specialization did not have significant power to moderate the relationship between academic contribution and university–industry knowledge exchange process.

There is a lack of research literature discussing the moderating effect of demographic factors on the university–industry knowledge exchange process. In Sri Lanka, money and commercial benefits that received through industry partnerships had not been valued by academics. The majority considered the connection with industry and exchange knowledge as a responsibility that they should perform in return to free education received from grade one to graduation.

This introduction provides the history and rationale for this volume on gender and practice. The editors’ broad conception of practice, especially gender practice, and the relationships among education, training, and practice, three sections into which the volume’s chapters are grouped, are outlined. Connections between gender practice and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals are drawn. Each chapter is then summarized and relationships among them are highlighted.

Characteristics of leaders whose behaviour is visceral include taking action based on instinct rather than intellect and exhibiting coarse, base and often negative emotions. Despite the challenge of precisely defining the nature of visceral behaviour, the purpose of this paper is to provide insight into this less attractive side of boardroom life.

Following a literature review of the research into the negative behaviour leaders exhibit, the paper highlights four forms of visceral behaviour based on focused and intimate qualitative case studies involving the experiences of those on the receiving end of that behaviour within a boardroom context.

Based on interviews with an international sample of five chief executive officers (CEOs), plus three subordinates with substantial profit and loss responsibility, the study reveals a distinctly human experience from which no one is exempt. The idiosyncratic nature of the visceral behaviour experienced resulted in each study participant's unique experience. The authors conclude that leaders need to adopt specific measures in order to control and reduce the darker human tendencies.

The experiences of study participants are presented in four case studies, providing insight into their experiences whilst also protecting their identity. The study participants were drawn from a sample of companies operating globally within a single sector of the manufacturing industry. The concepts the authors present require validating in other organisations with different demographic profiles.

The paper presents a model based on two dimensions – choice and level of mastery – that provides the reader with insight into the forms of visceral behaviour to which leaders succumb. Insight enables us to offer managers strategic suggestions to guard against visceral behaviour and assist them in mitigating its worst aspects, in both those with whom they work and themselves.

Smart campuses can be seen as the future of higher education efforts, especially for their contributions to sustainability and to encourage innovation. This paper aims to present the benefits of smart practices in a Higher Education Institutions and highlights its connections to the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The methodology is divided into three steps: first, an international search and assessment of smart practices at universities; second, the identification of smart practices in a university campus in southern Brazil; and third, the presentation of the benefits of smart practices and their relationship with the SDGs.

The results showed that globally, the area most covered by smart practices in universities is the environment and, specifically, focused on waste reduction. in the context of this case study, the benefits of implementing smart practices mainly reach SDGs 4 and SDG 9, especially due to aspects of teaching technologies for the new classroom models and the optimization of campus infrastructure management.

The study encourages other universities to implement smart practices in their campuses, to becoming smart campuses while they also collaborate in achieving the SDGs while raising the discussion on the importance of committed actions taken on a university campus with the UN SDGs, to leverage synergies on campus operations at universities.

This paper presents a set of smart practices that universities are applying both globally and locally (in southern Brazil). In addition, it contributes to sustainability research by showing how smart practices have the potential to promote SDGs in universities, especially through campus operations.