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Examining the process of job mobility and its effect on earnings, the authors find that this particular labour market is characterised by a high incidence of specific training, that upward mobility is largely experienced within the same organisation and is mainly of the osmotic type. It is felt that a technique must be devised to measure osmotic mobility accurately.

This chapter critically examines the dynamics that exists between employee well-being, line management leadership and governance as experienced and perceived by employees in the public sector context. This chapter is based on research into employee well-being and line management leadership with a British Local Authority in northern England, focusing on employees’ verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of well-being, line manager leadership and corporate social responsibility. Twenty-six interviews were conducted from a diverse range of employees with each interview lasting (45–60 minutes), tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. The research investigated the subjective perceptions of senior managers, managers, senior officers and clerical/secretarial staff regarding their views concerning line management leadership on employee well-being at work. Using the technique of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) provided insight into the life-world of participants, providing the opportunity for employees to share their personal experience of leadership and governance on the front line and its implication for employee well-being at work. The data revealed line management leadership and governance emerged as central to influencing and enabling well-being at work and were linked to individual, social and organisational factors (blame culture, rewards, trust in management, support and communication). Employees’ accounts of line management leadership, well-being and corporate social responsibility identified salient issues, thus providing a basis for broader research in this area. Thus organisations wishing to enhance employee well-being could focus efforts on creating organisational conditions and line management leadership to encourage well-being through the six identified factors. This research has relevance for the employment relationship, corporate social responsibility, service delivery, performance and for practitioners and academics alike.

With the decentralization and deregulation of the labor market over the past decade or so, there has been considerable debate about the future of industrial relations as a discipline or field of enquiry in Australia. Much of this literature assumes a discipline in decline, or at least at a crossroads, in terms of its purpose and continued relevance. In order to both evaluate these general claims and provide a more nuanced understanding of the future of the field in Australia, this chapter examines industrial relations in terms of three major dimensions: as a field of teaching, research, and practice. This exercise reveals important differences about the situation facing the discipline. Despite advances by human resource management (HRM) in universities, the teaching of industrial relations remains important even if its separate identity is contracting slightly at the present time. In terms of research, the multi-disciplinary and policy-oriented approach has much to contribute to understanding the changing world of industrial relations in Australia and remains a strong dimension of the field. However, in the area of industrial relations practice we observe a major decline as industrial relations and human resource professionals in Australia have become less important both in the wider regulation of work and within business organizations. We conclude that the field needs to broaden its focus to ‘work and employment relations’, seek more theoretically informed ways to explain contemporary developments in labor markets and societies, while at the same time remain committed to its traditional goals of equity and efficiency.

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the development of and perspectives on industrial relations (IR) in Germany. The first part deals with forms and degrees of institutionalization, which can be used as measures of the maturity and the potential impact of an academic discipline: IR within universities and research institutes, the professional organization, journals, and textbooks. More recent developments are more in line with those in other continental European states than with Anglo-Saxon countries. The weak, slowly progressing degree of institutionalization leads to the conclusion that IR does not constitute a unitary academic discipline. Nevertheless, research and scholarly interest exist. The second part surveys the structure of scholarly research and disciplinary participation. The German case reveals both common and divergent features compared to other countries. An obvious feature of IR is its disciplinary rather than holistic and interdisciplinary character. Empirical research has been less quantitative, and in more recent times less econometrically oriented than in some other countries. Human resource management's (HRM) institutional as well as personal ties with IR are weak and interdisciplinary debates are rare. Another distinctive feature is the large significance of labor law whose study also follows the strict departmentalization of the university structure in Germany. Empirical research in law is still rare and has definitely no solid position within law schools. On the other hand, industrial sociology has had a substantial impact on IR research for several decades and has covered various parts of IR territory. The third part discusses research topics. For quite some time, trade unions and collective bargaining have been the dominant topic. More recently, the focus of interest has shifted from the meso (sectoral or branch) to the micro (enterprise or shop floor) level. Various forms of codetermination, the institutionalized forms of participation in managerial decision-making, have constituted the other traditional research subject. Throughout the 1990s, the process of German unification constituted a “critical juncture” for IR and was an unexpected new topic. More recently, this kind of “unification research” has come to a natural end. Since the early 1990s, there has been a remarkable increase in scholarly work on IR issues concerning employment regulation and governance within the European Union. Last but not least, some traditionally ignored topics are discussed. Numerous labor market-related issues have been of very limited interest for the core of the IR community. Interest in types of atypical or non-standard employment has remained limited. The same limited attention is true for IR in the expanding non-union sector. Another neglected topic is labor relations in the public sector. The outlook discusses future trajectories of IR research. It is argued that the prospects will be encouraging if younger scholars manage to develop a broader, more integrative definition of the field (e.g., “regulation of all aspects of the employment relationship”).

This study investigates the relationship between financial participation plans, that is profit sharing, share plans and option plans, and firm financial performance using a longitudinal panel data set of non-financial listed companies for the period 1992–2009 comprising 2,216 observations. In addition, it makes a distinction between financial participation plans that are narrow based, directed to top management and executives only, and broad based, targeted to all employees. The panel data also allow us to take into account time lag effects, as profit sharing is usually said to have short-term effects while stock options and share plans are more targeted to longer term impact. Our results show that broad-based profit-sharing plans and combinations of broad-based profit sharing and share plans are positively related with many firm financial performance indicators relative to companies without these plans. However, the results consistently show negative associations between both narrow- and broad-based option plans and firm financial performance.

The effect of variable pay schemes on workplace absenteeism is estimated using two cross-sections of private sector British establishments. Establishments that explicitly link pay with individual performance are found to have significantly lower absence rates. The effect is stronger for establishments that offer variable pay schemes to a greater share of their non-managerial workforce. Matched employer–employee data suggest that the effect is robust to a number of sensitivity tests. Establishments that tie a greater proportion of employees’ earnings to variable pay schemes experience lower absence rates. Quintile regressions suggest that the effect is greater among establishments with a higher than average (‘sustainable’) absence rate. Finally, panel data suggest that a feedback mechanism is present; high absenteeism in the past is correlated with a greater future incidence of individual variable pay schemes, which, in turn, is correlated with lower current absence rates.

In this paper I utilize ethnographic data from the construction industry to demonstrate that occupational safety must be interpreted as having two different forms: the official policies and the actual operating procedures. This distinction is significant because it highlights the difference between rules that are stated – and may even be formally trained – and the rules that actually govern the workplace. It is this latter set of rules, a complex set of decision-making practices balancing the speed of work against acceptable loss, that actually shapes the worker’s individual decision-making. By illuminating the distinctions between these two forms of training, and the structures in which they occur, I challenge a common assumption of much safety-related research in construction, that worker behaviors and worker cultures are the most common causes of policy violations (e.g. Dedobbeleer & German, 1987; Hoyos, 1995; Hsiao & Simeonov, 2001; Lewis, 1999; Lingard, 2002; Personick, 1990; Ringen, Seegal & Englund, 1995; Rivara & Thompson, 2000; Smith, 1993). I argue here that what is often construed as “worker culture” is actually a structurally determined response to the unwritten rules of the construction industry. This is meaningful because the assumption that workers “choose” to forgo occupational safety protections as a cultural choice (generally construed as an enactment of working-class masculinity) is then used to assume or prove workers’ consent to the larger capitalist exchange of wages for work (e.g. Burawoy, 1979; Marx, 1867, 1977). By drawing on the media coverage of the workplace fatality, I highlight the costs and legal ramifications of such a dual system.

HBCUs are significant in their number and in the number of minority students they graduate annually. They are located across Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. They make up approximately 3% of the nation's institutions of postsecondary education. In 2001, they enrolled more than 14% of all Black students in higher education, and more than 30% of Blacks graduated with a baccalaureate degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2004). There are 40 four-year public institutions, 49 four-year private institutions, 11 two-year public institutions, and 5 two-year private institutions. North Carolina has 11 HBCUs, more than any other state. Alabama has nine HBCUs, and Georgia and South Carolina have eight each. Both Mississippi and Texas have seven HBCUs. The first HBCU, Cheyney University, was founded in 1837. It was followed by two other historically Black institutions, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1854) and Wilberforce University in Ohio (1856).

A range of studies have shown that performance is typically higher in organisations with employee share ownership (ESO) schemes in place. Many possible causal mechanisms explaining this relationship have been suggested. These include a reduction in labour turnover, synergies with other forms of productivity-enhancing communication and participation schemes, and synergies with employer-provided training. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper empirically assesses these potential linkages using data from the 2004 and 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Surveys, and provides comparisons with earlier analyses conducted on the 1990 and 1998 versions of the survey.

Substantial differences are found between the 2004 and 2011 results: a positive relationship between ESO and workplace productivity and financial performance, observed in 2004, is no longer present in 2011. In both years, ESO is found to have no clear relationship with labour turnover, and there is no significant association between turnover and performance. There is, however, a positive moderating relationship with downward communication schemes in 2004 and in 2011 in the case of labour productivity. There is no corresponding relationship for upward involvement schemes.

The results are only partially supportive of extant theory and its various predictions, and the relationship between ESO and performance seems to have weakened over time.

The study further questions the rhetoric offered in support of wider ESO.