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Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

In response to calls for conceptual frameworks and generic theory building toward the advancement of sustainability in supply chain resource utilization and management, the purpose of this paper is to advance a circular framework for supply chain resource sustainability (SCRS), and a decision-support methodology for assessing SCRS against the backdrop of five foundational premises (FPs) deduced from the literature on resource sustainability.

Taking a conceptual theory-building approach, the paper advances a set of SCRS decision-support criteria for each of the theoretical premises advanced, and applies the theory of constraints to illustrate the conceptual and practical applications of the framework in SCRS decision making.

This study uses recent conceptualizations of supply chains as “complex adaptive systems” to provide a robust and novel frame and a set of decision rules with which to assess the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, and social capital of supply chain resources from pre-production to post-production.

The paper contributes to theory building in sustainability research, and the SCRS decision framework developed could be applied in tandem with existing quantitative hybrid life-cycle and input-output approaches to facilitate targeted resource sustainability assessments, with implications for research and practice.

The novel SCRS framework proposed serves as a template for evaluating SCRS and provides a decision-support methodology for assessing SCRS against the five theorized FPs.

Social media (SM) platforms have become major sources for generating, sharing and gathering political and election news. Although there appears to be an assumption that reliance on SM for political news consumption will continue to gain in popularity, there are reasons to believe that many Americans are retreating from using SM for political news. The purpose of this study is to examine if Americans are reducing reliance on SM for political news and to analyze why retreat may be happening.

Using longitudinal panel data from Pew’s American Trends Panel study, the authors tracked 993 respondents from February of 2016 to November of 2019 to monitor their reliance on SM for political news leading up to the 2020 US presidential election.

The results of this study indicate that a sizeable percentage of people (about a third) are retreating from SM platforms for political news consumption and some are abandoning it altogether – people we refer to as new SM “nones.” The authors find that retreat from SM is associated with increased distrust of the information found on the platforms. Concerns about fake news, incivility on SM and information overload were unrelated to retreat from use of SM for political news consumption.

The findings of this study are novel and suggest that reliance on SM for political news by the public may have waxed, seen its zenith and may now be waning largely because of distrust in the information found on SM platforms.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the pressures from stakeholders located in company's country of origin and level of internationalization of the company influence the implementation of socially responsible supply chain management (SR-SCM) practices.

To assess this level of influence, an SR-SCM performance index is developed by building on existing theoretical frameworks and using secondary data from ThomsonReuters’ WorldScope and ASSET4 databases to capture responsible supply chain actions categorized in communication, compliance and supplier development strategies. The analysis is based on 1,252 international companies from diverse countries and sectors between 2007 and 2016.

The effectiveness of stakeholder pressures in facilitating the adoption of socially responsible practices varies greatly with regard to the strategic element of SR-SCM and the type stakeholders considered. Companies that are more internationalized tend to adopt a greater number of SR-SCM practices, whereas home country stakeholders are of diminishing relevance with the increasing internationalization of a company.

Governments in companies’ countries of origin should ensure that social issues in supply chains are adequately covered by regulations. Ideally, laws should not only cover firms’ domestic operations but also their global activities.

Citizens should be given the opportunities to raise their voice and publicly express their disagreement with business misconduct and non-compliance. Apart from that, the role of workers’ associations and investors in the social sustainability debate should be strengthened.

This study contributes to SR-SCM theory development by operationalizing existing conceptual frameworks, showing how domestic stakeholders shape SR-SCM performance and analyzing whether the influence of certain stakeholder groups diminishes or increases when a company is more globally-oriented in its operations.

Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.

Drawing on the systems theory and the natural resource-based view, the purpose of this paper is to advance an integrated resource efficiency view (IREV) and derive a composite “integrated resource efficiency index” (IRE-index) for assessing the environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies.

Using sub-national input-output data, the IRE-index builds on the human development index (HDI) and the OECD green growth indicators by including functions for environmental resource efficiency, energy, and material productivity. The study uses multiple regressions to examine and compare the IRE-index of 40 countries, including 34 OECD nations. The study further compares the IRE-index to similar composite indicators such as the human sustainable development index (HSDI) and the ecological footprint.

The IRE-index reveals a discrepancy between social development and resource efficiency in many of the world’s wealthiest production economies. Findings also show that material productivity has been the key driver for observed improvements in IRE over time. The index is a robust macro-level methodology for assessing resource efficiency and sustainability, with implications for production operations in global supply chains.

The IREV and IRE-index both contribute towards advancing green supply chain management and sustainability, and country-level resource efficiency accounting and reporting. The IRE-index is a useful composite for capturing aggregate environmental, economic, and social resource efficiencies of production economies. The paper clearly outlines the managerial, academic, and policy implications of the IREV and resulting index.

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.