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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine whether workers in various hospital job groups differ in their perceptions of the provision of managerial support, and of their up-to-date expertise (UDE), willingness to change (WTC) and employment opportunities (EO). Second, to examine whether and how the relationships between managerial support, workers’ UDE, WTC and their EO are moderated by hospital job type.

Survey data were collected from 1,764 employees of three Dutch hospitals. ANOVAs and structural equation modeling were used to test the hypotheses.

The research findings indicate significant differences between the hospital job groups with regard to UDE, WTC and EO. No support was found for differences on managerial support nor for a moderating effect of hospital job type. The latter means that the relationships of managerial support with workers’ UDE, WTC and EO are independent of job type.

Based on the findings, a classification system is constructed that shows how hospital workers’ UDE, WTC and EO can be explained by the combination of the educational level required by a job and its degree of specialization.

In recent years, scholars have engaged in an especially sharp debate about the structural and ideological arrangements on which business organizations rely in their effort to control the workers they employ. A key issue is the degree to which workers have retained the ability to resist such controls. In this chapter, I develop a critical analysis of the scholarly debate over domination and resistance at work, in an effort to clarify the tasks facing this field. My argument hinges on three major points. First, I argue that scholars have approached the control/resistance binary largely as a class relationship, thereby neglecting intersecting inequalities such as race, gender, and sexuality, which inevitably complicate or over-determine the forms that worker resistance assumes. Second, I argue that scholars have increasingly fixated on symbolic or discursive influences, privileging them at the expense of the material or structural conditions that shape managerial control and resistance to it. Third, I contend that much of the literature has failed to acknowledge the duality of managerial control – that is, its tendency not only to limit but also to enable resistance from below. These problems, taken together, explain why the debate has so often seemed to pursue a circuitous path, as if it were chasing its own tail. The chapter concludes by discussing the conditions that resistance presupposes, and by speculating about the emergence of novel forms of resistance that might be well suited to an age of flexible accumulation.

Managers have a pressing need to contribute to profitability and an ethical responsibility to manage in ways that promote a sense of justice and fair play. But do these goals conflict with one another? More importantly, can managerial citizenship enhance firms’ financial success, and does its absence harm the bottom line? Answering these questions is crucial to understanding the future of work, given that pursuit of greater profits and productivity encourages employers to embrace neoliberal practices known to erode trust and reciprocity in work organizations. Survey data and ethnographic case studies have shown that managerial practices promoting organizational trust, reciprocity, and a sense of organizational justice generate worker satisfaction, commitment, and effort. Until now, however, sociologists have lacked data linking workers’ experiences to direct indicators of firm performance. Evaluating findings from survey research and a meta-analysis of 263 studies (involving nearly 1.4 million employees in 192 firms across 49 industries) conducted by Gallup, I demonstrate that managerial citizenship behaviors enhance growth, productivity, profitability, and earnings, while limiting costly problems such as absenteeism, turnover, accidents, defects, and theft. I conclude that managers have a fiscal responsibility as well as an ethical responsibility to adhere to behavioral norms promoting organizational trust, reciprocity, and justice.

Gauges of the extent of the managerial hierarchy drawn from occupational classifications appear to promise a comprehensive and precise overview of cross‐national comparative developments in work organisation. This paper considers the plausibility of the national historical shifts apparent from such gauges, and explores their comparative relation to alternative indications of work organisation, focusing on the experience of eleven advanced industrialised nations in the post‐war period. It shows that whilst it is clear that in the cases of some nations such gauges meaningfully express at least the comparative extent of managerial hierarchies, it is equally clear that for other nations they do not. The paper concludes that occupational classifications are no basis for inferences about comparative developments in the extent of managerial hierarchies, still less work organisation.

This “Rapport” proposes to examine the function and effect of British social law in the context of the employment/unemployment debate. This debate is a most significant one for it has not only British, but also European and International dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how managerial interactions with employees affect work output, using Ghanaian organizations as a study.

The paper adopts a survey method, using questionnaires to collect data from 120 workers from four Ghanaian organizations to form the basis of the study.

It was found that regular interactions between managers and employees have a direct positive effect on employee work output. Results emerging from the analysis show that for organizations to make any significant impact on performance, both managers and their subordinates must have a very good climate of social interactions. The involvement of lower level employees in organizational activities and decision making is of crucial importance to organizational performance.

The study is limited to the four organizations of the sample and the number of respondents.

The paper's findings call for some behavioural directions for managers in organizations to pay serious attention to the total involvement of workers through effective communication in the running of the organizations.

The paper discusses organizational communication by focusing on managerial interaction with employees, and how it can affect organizational work output. The consequences of lack of effective managerial interaction with employees would result in an increased tendency for individuals to leave the organization due to a lower level of satisfaction with their managers.

This chapter provides an extensive review of literature on the interaction between and interdependence of informal and formal working practices in various workplace settings. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate the organisational, managerial, human relations and social factors that give rise to informal work practices and strategies, on the shop-floor not only at workers and work group levels but also at supervisory and managerial levels. This chapter helps the reader to understand the informal work practice of making a plan (planisa) in a deep-level mining workplace.

This paper undertakes a comparative study of two large UK clothing plants in the 1990s with earlier twentieth century studies of clothing workshops undertaken in the late 1950s by Cunnison and Lupton, and in the late 1970s by Edwards and Scullion. Traditionally the clothing industry is identified with a history of low wages and poor conditions of employment. Though increasingly subject to global market pressures, research findings from this study illuminate workplaces in the 1990s with much in common with the aforementioned historical studies, offering working conditions that leave the clothing worker isolated, individualised and struggling to survive.

The recent economic crisis in Spain is felt most severely in the labour market. The purpose of this paper is to examine job satisfaction among the occupied workers according to their job types throughout the ongoing economic cycle comparing the period of boom and that of bust.

Surprisingly, the average job satisfaction has stayed virtually constant between the two periods, which suggests the existence of compensating forces operating among the occupied population. The authors find first the compositional change of working population, such as a decreasing proportion of temporary contract workers had only small effects, unable to explain the puzzle. The authors also find that macroeconomic conditions affect workers’ job satisfaction differently by the type of workers or jobs. In fact, high-level managerial workers and self-employed employers have suffered a significantly large reduction in their job satisfaction during the crisis while some other types of workers such as ordinary employees have enjoyed increased job satisfaction. In order to explore the causes of these differences, the authors examine the satisfaction in different job domains.

The results suggest that in the case of self-employed, decrease in job satisfaction with respect to wages job stability superior evaluation is significant and the promotion prospect is not relevant for self-employed, while for managerial workers, the only significant decrease is due to superior evaluation.

The Spanish data with a reasonable sample size which include information on job satisfaction are the Spanish Survey of Life Quality at Work. Unfortunately, the survey is not longitudinal, therefore unable to examine the factors affecting transitions in satisfaction level or to control for fixed individual effects, and the data only cover until 2010. Further investigation including more recent data and data from other countries would be helpful to better understand the consequences of economic crisis on job satisfaction.

This paper contributes in two ways. First, the authors show what has been happening to the job-related well-being during the recession in Spain by the type of workers: high-level managers, managers, self-employed and employees. Job satisfaction can be determined by pressures to work harder and longer hours, reduced wages, lower promotion possibility and higher layoff probability, and all of them could have been changed by the economic crisis. Consequently, the second contribution is to analyse different dimensions of job satisfaction as satisfaction with wages, flexibility, stability, stress and promotion to determine the causes of the changes in average level of job satisfaction.

This study focuses on variations of the importance of core values through motivational domains of individuals by their cultural background. The effect of motivational domains on operational performance has also been investigated.

The study used survey as the main data collection method to elicit data from managerial workers in spa businesses in four regions of Thailand. An unpublished database of spa businesses was provided to the study by the Thai Chamber of Commerce.

Significant variations of the importance of motivational domains of managerial workers can be found according to the subculture of each of the four regions of Thailand. In addition, the motivational domains have found their significant impact on worker operational performance.

One of the limitations of this study may be the distribution of samples because the study focuses on spa businesses, most of which in each region are located in big tourism provinces that may not be wholly representative of the characteristics of each region.

This study will be of practical value for practitioners or managers of any firms since it is important to consider value variations when assessing the operational performance; workers, especially managerial workers, in each subculture may have different priorities in the motivational domains of their lives. This could affect their operational performance.

This is an original attempt to ascertain variations of core values through motivational domains by subculture. It fills a knowledge gap in under-researched area in the literature since so far a few studies have examined this issue in the ASEAN countries.