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Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers: They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates and less-educated technical school graduates.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of government regulation on economic value creation through the lens of Resource-Advantage Theory. This study intends to shed more light on how industry-government relationships affect the entrepreneurial activities that drive economic growth.

The authors use a test of joint significance (MacKinnon et al., 2002) in a generalized linear model to examine how competition mediates the relationship between government regulation and jobs and wages. The research context is the US brewing industry for the year 2012.

High excise taxes and certain sales restrictions negatively impact competition, which ultimately affects economic value creation. State regulators may effectively balance the need to bring in tax revenues on the one hand and promote healthy competition on the other by turning to small business tax credits and exemptions. The results of a post hoc analysis indicate excise taxes have the most pronounced effect at the manufacturing level of the supply chain as opposed to the wholesale and retail levels.

The predictive validity of this study suggests that Resource-Advantage Theory is a useful and appropriate framework for understanding how industry–government relations impact the competitive processes that lead to economic value creation. From a practical standpoint, the study also has several implications for public policy, which are detailed in the latter stages of the paper.

The worldwide expansion of higher education participation has destabilised the value of higher education as a currency of opportunity. An increasing number of graduates are experiencing the precarity of unemployment, under-employment and low salaries. This study aimed to investigate how university students in China understand and respond to the changing relationship between higher education and career opportunities.

The research team conducted 100 in-depth interviews with final-year undergraduates at one elite and one lower-tier university in a metropolitan city in Guangdong Province.

The students were acutely aware of fierce competition in the graduate labour market. When asked “what matters most” for post-graduation career prospects, they identified elite universities and high-status fields of study as “traditional” currencies of opportunity. Nonetheless, to stand out in a competitive environment, they perceived a growing need to supplement higher education credentials through university experiences (internships, student governance, study abroad programmes), party membership, personal connections and (overseas) postgraduate education. Moreover, in a “race to the top”, they discussed how qualitatively distinctive university experiences and elite postgraduate education are “new” currencies of opportunity for high-status professional employment.

The study demonstrates how intensified competition for graduate employment can result in an “opportunity trap”. The students were participating in an “arms race” to accumulate positional advantages for their post-graduation careers. The net impact of such efforts on a systemic level is to create an upward spiral in what students are expected to do in preparation for their post-graduation careers and further destabilise the value of higher education as a currency of opportunity.

The paper gives a brief description of the transformation on a global scale of the old international production concept of mass production towards the new global concept of lean production as an explanation for the increasing inequality in income distribution since the 1980s. The information is based on research of the electronics industry. The salient point is that mass production heavily depends on conveyor‐belt work, while lean production (batch size one) is increasingly relying on sub‐contracting (co‐makership, just‐in‐time delivery) which is part of the strategy of large suppliers to concentrate production on their core activities, on global sourcing and on coalition‐forming. The former left room for low qualified employment and “on the job training”, while the concentration on core activities etc. tends to redirect work to highly remunerated but decreasing employment in large enterprises, and to poorly rewarded work in an increasing number of smaller subcontractor and co‐maker firms. The risks involved for income distribution are self‐evident.

Public-sector construction clients in the UK and Australia have a clear objective to maximise potential and value for construction and infrastructure projects. Outcome-based performance predictive models, which link influencing factors to individual performance outcomes, were developed for the public-sector property management clients. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Combined qualitative-quantitative methods were used to examine the causal relationships between performance outcomes and input economic and job performance factors. Hypotheses on individual relationships generated by a literature review were refined using the findings from a qualitative multiple-case study of three universities, and then tested by a quantitative hierarchical regression analysis using data from 60 consultancies collected from a questionnaire survey sent to the estate management offices of the universities, which form a unique public sector. Each performance project outcome was regressed against influencing factors. Performance predictive models were established in the form of regression equations.

Five performance outcomes are identified: time, cost, quality, innovations and working relationship with the client. These can be significantly predicted by regression models, based on performance influencing factors of project staff, competence of firm, execution approach, size of firm, consultant framework and competition level.

The performance predictive models developed should be regarded as “conceptual”. Public-sector clients may have different organisation objectives and hence different requirements for performance outcomes, which may further vary according to specific project situations. The models should be adapted to suit individual needs. Adjustments can be made by using the combined qualitative-quantitative methods adopted in this research, thus creating customised models for property management and construction-related clients.

The client’s professional team should focus on the significant performance influencing factors and take advantage of the performance predictive models to select quality consultants. Construction consultants should address the factors in the tender proposals in order to add value to the project and benefit the client.

The existing input-based assessment approach applied at the tender stage cannot guarantee the strategic project objectives to be achieved. The performance predictive models are adaptable for property management and construction disciplines within the wider public sector, thus contributing to achievement of the government construction policy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of discriminatory job loss (DJL), which occurs when discrimination and job loss intersect. The paper aims to discuss the antecedents and consequences of DJL and calls for research on the topic.

Diversity and careers research from management, psychology, economics, and sociology literatures on discrimination, job loss, and unemployment are examined.

Discriminatory job loss involves discriminatory termination, discriminatory layoff, retaliatory termination, and constructive discharge and exacerbates negative outcomes of discrimination or job loss alone. Antecedents to DJL are the external and internal environments. DJL affects unemployment duration and reemployment quality and targets self‐esteem, self‐efficacy, and perceived control.

When large numbers of people experience DJL and long unemployment durations and lower re‐employment quality, this affects the individuals as well as society. In times of high employment, when jobs are scarce, individuals have fewer employment options and employers have more freedom to engage in discrimination. Having large groups of people know that their ability to maintain employment is negatively affected by their demographic group membership while others know that their demographic membership provides employment privileges can result in long‐term negative individual, organizational, and societal consequences.

This paper brings attention to, and calls for research on, DJL and its negative consequences.

Although proactive fault handling plans are widely spread, many unexpected data center outages still occurred. To rescue the jobs from faulty data centers, the authors propose a novel independent job rescheduling strategy for cloud resilience to reschedule the task from the faulty data center to other working-proper cloud data centers, by jointly considering job nature, timeline scenario and overall cloud performance.

A job parsing system and a priority assignment system are developed to identify the eligible time slots for the jobs and prioritize the jobs, respectively. A dynamic job rescheduling algorithm is proposed.

The simulation results show that our proposed approach has better cloud resiliency and load balancing performance than the HEFT series approaches.

This paper contributes to the cloud resilience by developing a novel job prioritizing, task rescheduling and timeline allocation method when facing faults.

The appearance of job security demands at the bargaining table is on the rise in the United States. Job security has increased relative to income security in the hierarchy of employee concerns. Management has, in several instances, responded to these concerns. This piece will outline the many reasons behind, and offer examples of, the increased emphasis on job security provisions. It will also detail some of the current roadblocks in this area.