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The proportion of remote workers in America continues to increase every year. Research has demonstrated that feeling appreciated in the workplace increases employee engagement, reduces turnover and increases profitability. The current study aims to determine if remote workers differ in the manner they prefer to be shown appreciation.

From 2014 to 2018, workers completed the Motivating By Appreciation Inventory (White, 2011a), opting for either the general version designed for face-to-face work settings (N = 86,393) or the version designed for long-distance work relationships (N = 2,640).

Employees in a long-distance work relationship chose quality time (“hanging out” with coworkers, working together on a project, someone taking time to listen to them) as their preferred means to be shown appreciation more frequently (35 per cent) than workers on site (25 per cent). Words of affirmation (oral or written praise) remain high for both groups, but the long-distance group did not value it as much (long-distance: 38 per cent, general: 48 per cent).

The results suggest that supervisors and staff members working in long-distance work relationships must be more proactive than in face-to-face relationships to incorporate meaningful interactions that speak to long-distance colleagues.

This is the first study to assess the differences in preferred ways to be shown appreciation in the workplace with respect to long-distance vs face-to-face work environments.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the unique contributions from social (i.e. trust climate, departmental integration) and organisational factors (i.e. managerial recognition, goal clarity and technology support) to work engagement and identification with the organisation in a human resource offshoring (HRO) context.

Participants were recruited from a large Australian financial institution with an HR centre located in the Philippines. Ninety-one members of the captive HR centre completed the anonymous online questionnaire consisting of quantitative items and open-ended fields. Regression analyses were conducted to ascertain the relationships hypothesised.

The findings suggest that goal clarity is a key predictor of both engagement and identification with the organisation, and that technology support and managerial recognition also influence offshore staff members’ motivation and workplace attitudes.

The cross-sectional, self-report nature of the study, along with the small sample obtained, are noted as limitations of the study. Nevertheless, the high response rate (91 per cent) and availability of qualitative data provide valuable insight into the key factors that impact HRO operations and performance.

The study uncovers social and organisational variables that affect staff motivation and attitudes in an HRO context, and offers a number of guidelines for practitioners operating in these settings, focussing on goal clarity, managerial recognition and technology support.

The study contributes to a growing body of research into the organisational and human capital factors that account for HRO performance and sustainability, and offers preliminary evidence for their unique contributions to key performance drivers. Guidelines for future research and business practice are proposed, namely, the consideration of multilevel and temporal approaches to the management and investigation of HRO operations.

The aim of this paper is to address teams as substitutes for leadership. The article makes use of juridical foundations as a normative basis for addressing substitutes for leadership. Together with the means of management and leadership, the juridical foundations constitute the background for defining sufficient and good supervisory work, which is used as an assistant instrument in addressing the research question: can teams act as substitutes for leadership?

In this article, substitutes for leadership theories are used to analyze the status of teams. The article includes a preliminary empirical study in a timber procurement organization and ideas for further investigations are provided.

Teams often do not act as internal supervisors or as sources of feedback and incentives, even though they are expected to do so. Some team members experience feelings of abandonment. Although planned as substitutes or supplements, teams can instead become neutralizers.

This paper contributes to recognizing the status of teams and to research questions concerned with explanations for the problems of teams.

Almost on a daily basis newspapers and magazines tell us of the exploitative circumstances under which workers produce garments for the global market. While local trade unions, international NGOs, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) officers claim to act in the interests of garment workers, the latter continue to lack voice and representation in their everyday struggles for better and fairer employment. Focusing on a South Indian garment cluster, the article explores the reasons why key labour rights, such as the freedom of association, keep being violated, and why local trade union and international NGO activists fail to prevent such violations. Through the lens of a major labour dispute, we consider the decline of a once successful trade union and the challenges of emerging local–international activist collaborations. The article concludes that for union, NGO, and corporate interventions to be successful in the context of a liberalising state, the political economy of labour has to be taken into account, and labour struggles have to be understood within their political and historical context.

Economic anthropology of bazaar-type markets for material goods has developed a model of markets under uncertain conditions through microscopic analyses of seller–buyer relationships. The model implies that serious lack of information makes the individuals highly risk-averse and leads to long-term, balanced clientelization. Presented in this chapter is another model of uncertain market conditions. In a bazaar-type market of interpersonal service the individuals are likely to be both chance-seekers as well as risk-averters. Such an attitude derives from a combination of unique service characteristics and uncertain market conditions. Transactions of commodified sexual services (termed here “interpersonally embedded services”) among chance-seekers in bangkok go-go bars often result in disequilibration, rather than equilibration, of the seller–buyer relationship.

Various forms of precarious employment create barriers to the integration and inclusion of migrant workers in receiving countries. The purpose of this paper is to review extant research in employment relations and management to identify key factors that contribute to migrant workers' precarious employment and highlight potential avenues for future research.

The authors conducted a narrative literature review drawing on 38 academic journal articles published between 2005 and 2020.

The authors’ review suggests that macro- and meso-level factors contribute to the precarious employment conditions of migrant workers. However, there is a limited articulation of successful practices and potential solutions to reduce migrant work precarity and exclusion. The literature on migrant workers' precarious employment experience is primarily focused on low-skilled sector (e.g. agriculture, hospitality, domestic care) jobs. In addition, few studies have explored the role of worker characteristics, such as gender, class, ethnicity, race and migration status, in shaping the experience of migrant workers in precarious employment.

The results of this research highlight the importance of engaging multilevel actors in addressing migrant employment precarity, including policymakers, employers and employment agencies.

This research contributes to a growing conversation of migrant employment precarity by highlighting the heterogeneity of migrant groups and calling for the use of intersectional lenses to understand migrant workers' experiences of precarious employment.

In neo‐classical economic theory labour is a commodity and the ultimate value of the employer's services is determined by the sales value of the product of these services: the cost of supply reflects both the disutility of work for the recruit and his equalisation of net advantages between jobs. For modern labour economists the assumption that entrepreneurs require identical inputs of labour and the new recruits will therefore possess similar skills (the conditions of free competition) is an unrealistic one. Hence segmental labour market theory has grown out of the need to explain differences between shared needs and commonalities within each group of consumers (employers) on the one hand and suppliers (employees) on the other. In this way it has been possible to carry on assuming the existence of perfect competition on both sides of the market within the boundaries of labour markets thus defined.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.

The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.

The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.

The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.

The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.