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In this chapter, we examine the impact of pay-for-performance incentives on learning-by-doing. We exploit personnel data on fruit pickers paid under two distinct compensation contracts: a standard piece rate plan and one with an extra one-time bonus tied to output. Under the latter, we observe bunching of performance just above the bonus threshold, suggesting workers distort their behavior in response to the discrete bonus. Such bunching behavior increases as workers gain experience. At the same time, the bonus contract induces considerable learning-by-doing for workers throughout the productivity distribution who presumably hope to one day hit the target, and these improvements significantly outweigh the losses to the firm from the bunching. In contrast, under the standard piece rate contract, we find minimal evidence of bunching and only small performance improvements at the bottom of the productivity distribution. Our results suggest that contract design can help foster learning on the job, underscoring the importance of dynamic considerations in principle-agent models.

The coronavirus pandemic has, in a matter of months, changed the ways in which people work around the world. It has created a revolution in work from home, and brought to the forefront technologies such as 3D printing and artificial intelligence. In doing so, it has created conditions for challenges to ideas of managing people and work that emerged, along with the first offices and mills, in the very different world of the First Industrial Revolution.

The technologies that have enabled a rapid switch to alternative ways of work and study were already long in place. In this chapter, I look at the rise in adoption of these technologies set against a backdrop of the history of work from home, and argue that the global pandemic has possibly hastened the downsizing of the traditional office, and the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

Relies on cross‐sectional survey data from 1986 and 1993 to explain an increase in the ethnic Turk‐ethnic Bulgarian earnings differential in Bulgaria in the country’s early transition. Empirical evidence indicates that the ethnic Turks closed both the gap in the number of years of education and experience acquired during this time. Further, the Turks began to enter the growing commerce and transportation industries in the early transition. Shifts in the wage structure, however, favored the ethnic Bulgarians, and these changes outweighed ethnic Turk gains in the measured characteristics. In addition to these shifts, an increase in the overall level of inequality in the labor market punished those at the low‐end of the wage distribution, exacerbating the existing ethnic earnings differential. These results imply however, that the ethnic Turks are responding to market signals and if it continues, this trend will diminish the ethnic earnings gap.

As posited by the ecological model of health, improvements in the nutrition and physical activity environments of worksites may facilitate healthier dietary intakes and physical activity patterns of employees. This cross-sectional study describes current policies and practices targeting these environments in five large Texas-based hospitals employing approximately 40,000 adults. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The environmental assessment tool survey, an observation tool, was used to assess these policies and practices in August and September 2012.

Results demonstrated major policy and practice deficiencies, including a lack of policies supporting on and offsite employee physical fitness, no healthy catering or healthy meeting policies, minimal subsidizing of healthy food and beverage options, few health-promoting vending services, and no performance objectives related to worksite health improvement. Hospitals having an active employee wellness staff consistently performed better on implementation of policies and practices supporting healthy eating and physical activity.

This study supports practice recommendations including engaging executive leadership to prioritize worksite wellness and using policies to create an infrastructure that promotes healthy eating and encourages physical activity among employees.

This study is the first to compare and contrast the nutrition and the physical activity environments of large hospitals, allowing for the identification of common environmental barriers and supports across multiple hospital and foodservice systems.

Prior research has documented a generally positive relationship between employees’ standing on constructs that are commonly studied by positive psychologists and workplace outcomes, such as job performance and retention. Constructs such as adaptability, empowerment, hope, optimism, and resilience are believed to reflect psychological resources that employees can draw upon when facing adversity and challenges in their work, while also reflecting a general tendency or disposition to experience positive emotions and engage with others in ways that reflect such positive emotions. As such, positive psychology constructs may be particularly important for performance in jobs characterized by high levels of social interaction, stress, and challenge. In order to explore the manner in which different positive psychology constructs are related to sales performance, this chapter presents findings from a meta-analytic investigation into the relationships between sales performance and a variety of positive psychology constructs. Findings based on data from 59 unique samples and 14,334 salespeople indicate that some positive psychology constructs exhibit moderate to even strong relationships with the performance of salespeople, although the strength of these relationships appears to have been substantially inflated by common-source bias. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for selection and training within sales occupations, and advance an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of individual social capital characteristics in determining wages, both directly through their valuation by employers and indirectly through their impact on individual occupational choice. We find that a person’s level of sociability and care for others works through both channels to explain wage differences between social and nonsocial occupations. Additionally, expected wages in each occupation type are found to be at least as important as a person’s level of social capital in choosing a social occupation. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

As an increasing number of women enter the workforce, the traditional boundaries between work and family become less defined. The two important directions for dealing with this new phenomenon are further research and development of family‐oriented policies by government and corporations. New research involves the use of longitudinal studies and more refined definitions of work and family variables. The focus of the policies, in response to the issues of work and family, revolves around family leave, child and dependent care programmes, flexible work schedules and other assistance. Though there has been some momentum by governments and corporations, much progress is needed in the 1990s to develop more effective policies and to overcome attitudes as the impact of women in the workforce becomes more prominent.

This chapter grapples with the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry through the authors’ personal stories that push back at the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability in order to contribute to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis. We ask: what is the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry? What are the lived experiences of those living within a variety of intersectional and emotional dis/ability narratives that resist and navigate the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability at the intersections?

We use a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) paradigm to construct a collective autoethnography that challenges socially circulating cultural narratives of disability.

Our individual and collaborative narratives illuminate: (1) how master narratives impact self, (2) the ways that dis/abled women of color elevate human dignity and spiritual practices in ways that subvert and speak-back to master narratives, (3) the emotional impact of Learning Disability labeling, (4) forms of epistemic and personal experiences at various institutions of higher education, and (5) the liberatory practices manifest from co-created narratives with DSE students concerning disability identity within higher education.

This collaboration contributes to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis with diverse positionalities of DSE scholars, teacher educators, and professionals within educational contexts. The chapter also suggests ways in which construction of collaborative narratives of resistance can point to paths for positive organizational change.