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For much of the scholarly literature regarding retirement, private pensions are incapable of engaging the trust of those who depend on them. However, this appraisal is flawed by its one‐dimensional emphasis on the importance of social solidarity to trust. The purpose of this paper is to develop an assessment of the private sector against a broader range of contingencies that may impact on public confidence in pensions.

This task is approached by reporting the findings of a cross‐national comparative study of existing mandated private pension provision. The country‐specific arrangements are compared in terms of the programme design requirements of six trust benchmarks.

A reliance on the private sector is not necessarily incompatible with trust in retirement provision. Its trust‐enhancing potential is exemplified by the design of mandated private pensions in Switzerland and the UK.

Programme design is not the only important influence on public confidence in pensions. Furthermore, the weighting of the benchmarks and their corresponding design features needs further consideration.

The evaluation provides a foundation for cross‐national policy learning and transfer, by highlighting elements of the design of mandated private pensions that are compatible with trust.

Unlike much of the scholarly work in this field, the assessment defines and operationalises trust in terms of a comprehensive range of contingencies that may impact on public confidence in pensions. Building on this foundation, it provides the first cross‐national review of the capacity of private pensions to build and sustain trust.

According to one influential set of arguments, the privatization of public pensions has been informed by neoliberalism, and has thus been an integral element of a broader program of welfare retrenchment, which is inconsistent with social cohesion. The paper aims to take issue with this negative characterization of pensions privatization.

The argument is illustrated by a cross‐national comparative analysis of the principal design features of 32 mandated private pension arrangements.

The market orientation of mandated private pension arrangements is generally ambivalent. Whilst the architects of these arrangements have embraced market principles, they have also accepted the principle of collective responsibility for retirement futures.

While design is an important indicator of the nature of pension schemes, it does not translate automatically into retirement outcomes.

Collective responsibility for retirement may be pursued through distinctive forms of privatization.

In contrast to the central argument of much of the literature, the privatization of public pensions has not universally or unambiguously been informed by the tenets of neoliberal political economy.

Although neo‐classical economics has undoubtedly driven the global pension privatization reform agenda, it does not provide an adequate framework for the reform of retirement income protection. Indeed, it poses salient decision risks for policy‐makers because of its naturalist epistemology and agency ontology, which deny both the value of hermeneutic knowledge and the existence of structural imperatives. When confronted with the challenge of income maintenance for those in retirement, policy‐makers must necessarily tackle strategically important, values‐laden questions. This requires them to engage in policy discourses that are informed by competing welfare ideologies. Reflecting these discourses, national governments have adopted three reform approaches to public pension privatization. All are consistent with values of community solidarity, social cohesion and citizenship rights, which are seen by national governments to be preferable to the values that underpin neo‐classical economic analysis, namely, individual responsibility, freedom of choice and contractual rights.

Liverpool Conference was amongst the largest, as it was amongst the most successful, of recent years. In all but the weather it excelled, and there were fine intervals even in that. We publish the “Letters on our Affairs” by our well known correspondent, Callimachus, so far as it covers the first three days; the conclusion will follow next month, with what futcher comments seem to be necessary. The Annual Business Meeting was a little less rowdy than that at Scarborough, but one thing emerged from it and that was the determination of the A.A.L. to survive independently. There is more in this than meets the eye, and discussion on it may be postponed until a calmer mood prevails on all sides.

Is public entrepreneurship an oxymoron? Why and how is enterprise/entrepreneurship important for public service delivery? The growing role of enterprise within the public sector has been the subject of much recent debate and policy focus, surrounding issues such as public value, meeting targets, and the need for innovation across public services by policy makers and managers given rapid reduction of budgets in this sector. This chapter reflects on these developments and examines the effects that an enterprise focus in the public services has in terms of vocation. Drawing on the Weberian notion of vocation (1941) in politics and the sciences, what does enterprise mean for the notion of public service? Certainly, historically the public services have enjoyed a strong vocational drive from its workforce, resulting in employee loyalty, and links with communities as well as higher levels of public trust than politicians or bankers, for example. The chapter draws on examples from education, public services and localism, all of which have seen to some degree the parachuting of managers in from the private sector or the aping of these behaviours and cultures in search of more entrepreneurial delivery. Drawing on the Weberian framework of bureaucracy and vocation, the chapter examines the changing role of public service and notions of community and duty, arguably damaged by failures of the Big Society agenda (Shand & Higman, 2014; Smith, 2010) and examines if and how enterprise can maintain the ethos of public service and vocational areas of the public sector in the enduring and pressurised new public management environment of meeting targets and value metrics.

The chapter adopts a Weberian approach in terms of vocation, and applies this concept to the notion of enterprise across the public services. The vocation approach in the public services, drawing upon Weber’s discussion of politics and science, underpins our discussion in this chapter as we argue that the role of innovation needs to be more widely applied and appreciated in the public services.

The chapter finds that examples of innovative behaviour and delivery are evident across the public services, but these need to be understood within the context of culture, values and ethos. These underpinning goals, across several frontline and first respondent public services particularly, are driven by dedication to duty and having to respond to rapid changes in targets, ‘customer’ service, and most recently, austerity. These responses need to be seen as innovative traits, linked to leadership and the Weberian notion of vocation.

The chapter raises several issues driven by failures or mistrust in the practical delivery and underpinning ethos of the public services. The focus on ethos has direct implications for both leadership within the public services and how these leaders’ roles and actions are interpreted by sections of wider society such as the media or the public. Notions of public trust are touched upon in the chapter, which highlight the role of key public services as different from the activities of politicians and bankers, areas which have become central to growing attitudes of mistrust among the public. The notion of vocation in the chapter is applicable to the practical arena as the role of innovation in public service needs to be reconsidered. The chapter suggests that, to date, the idea of innovation in public services has been driven by private sector innovation, and this has led to far too narrow an appreciation of what we term innovation within and across the public services.

This chapter unites debates around trust and innovation in the public and private sectors with the Weberian ideal of vocation, drawing upon key public services and their leadership and delivery to argue that we need to understand the drivers and motivating ethos behind the public services when we consider the role of innovation and indeed how we understand and apply this term within public service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role of family support, co‐worker support, supervisor support, work‐life balance policies (WLBPs), work‐family culture and job characteristics, as the predictors of work‐to‐family (WFE) and family‐to‐work (FWE) enrichment. In addition, it explored whether such effects were gender specific by examining the moderating effect of gender.

Data were obtained from a sample of 485 managers in India. Analysis was done using multiple regressions.

Analyses revealed that family support, co‐worker support, supervisor support, WLBPs, work‐family culture and job characteristics predicted WFE while family support and job characteristics predicted FWE. Little moderating influence of gender was found. Gender moderated the relationship between WLBPs and WFE such that the relationship between the two was stronger for women as compared to men. Similarly, gender moderated the link between job characteristics and WFE such that the relationship between the two was stronger for men than women.

The cross‐sectional design of the study constrains inferring conclusions regarding causality.

WLBPs have to be offered to women executives and organizations do have to make jobs more enriching in order to increase the level of WFE among women and men, respectively.

The construct work‐family enrichment examined in this paper reflects an understanding of work‐family interface from a newer lens in a novel socio‐cultural context and demonstrates the moderating role of gender.

Given the socialisation of men and women to their gender roles and expression of emotion, this study aims to investigate whether there are gender differences in the use of emotive language in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), specifically in online reviews. The authors propose that female reviewers will use strong emotive terms, such as love, more frequently in online reviews than do male reviewers. The authors further propose that the gender of the reviewer influences audience responses to the reviewer’s use of emotive terms in online reviews.

The authors conducted secondary data analysis of restaurant reviews (Study 1) to provide evidence on whether the gender of the reviewer affects the frequency of use of emotive terms in an online review. In addition, three separate experiments (Studies 2–4) were conducted to test the theoretical arguments.

The results of the secondary data analysis indicated that female online reviewers used the term “love” much more frequently in their reviews than male reviewers, whereas there was no usage difference for the term “like”. The experimental studies further showed that an emotive review by a male reviewer containing the word “love” resulted in a higher evaluation of the restaurant being reviewed than a non-emotive review containing the word “like”. This difference was stronger when the overall rating was less salient and for consumers who believe (vs do not believe) that men and women use emotional language differently.

First, the paper extends our understanding of gender differences in emotional expression within the domain of eWOM and online reviews as well as our understanding of consumer responses to these gender differences. Second, the authors identify a boundary condition for these gender effects, namely, the overall rating score. Third, the authors find that consumer beliefs regarding gender stereotypes in emotional expression provide an explanation for these effects.

The results of the research indicate that the electronic algorithms operating on review sites might be modified in terms of their criteria for selecting the reviews to display to consumers, as consumer decision-makers may find greater utility in reviews written by male reviewers that contain strongly positive emotive terms.

The research extends the knowledge on gender differences in emotional expression in online reviews by demonstrating the actual usage patterns and differing responses to the emotional expressions of each gender.

The purpose of this paper is to examine core self‐evaluations (CSEs), family support, co‐worker support, supervisor support, job characteristics, work‐life balance policies (WLBPs) and work‐family culture as the predictors of work‐to‐family enrichment (WFE) and family‐to‐work enrichment (FWE) and explore the moderating effect of CSEs.

Data were collected through a questionnaire survey from 485 employees from six organizations in India representing manufacturing, telecommunications and information technology sectors and were analyzed using hierarchical multiple regressions.

Supervisor support, job characteristics, WLBPs and work‐family culture predicted WFE. CSEs, family support and job characteristics predicted FWE. Little moderating influence of CSEs was found. It moderated the relationship between supervisor support and WFE.

The cross‐sectional design of the study constrains inferring conclusions regarding causality.

This study indicates that from an organizational perspective, involvement in family roles should not be viewed as a hindrance, since it can also benefit employees at work. Employee assistance programs may be introduced to help employees develop the necessary skills and adaptability to increase their work‐family enrichment experience.

The construct work‐family enrichment examined in this paper reflects an understanding of work‐family interface from a newer lens in a novel socio‐cultural context and demonstrates the moderating role of CSEs.

To analyze the relationship between technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW) and well-being in the workplace – burnout and engagement. Furthermore, this study aims to test the relationship between TASW and burnout, mediated by work-to-family conflict (WFC) and the relationship between TASW and engagement mediated by work-to-family enrichment (WFE).

The data was collected from a service company operating in Portugal. A total of 338 responses from a services company in Portugal were analyzed. Two statistical programs were used for the data analysis: IBM statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS 25.0) and SPSS analysis of moment structures (AMOS 25.0).

The results highlight the positive relationship between TASW and engagement and the relationship between TASW and burnout, which only exists when WFC is present. Moreover, the relationship between TASW and engagement is stronger through WFE.

Using the conservation of resources theory as a framework, the results contribute to the literature by shedding further light upon the positive effects of TASW on employees’ well-being and the work and family relationship.