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This article explores the growing rise of behaviour‐based safety programmes in the workplace as a means of preventing on‐the‐job injuries. In it, the authors delve into the history of both incentive‐based and behaviour based safety programmes, exploring the administrative, political, and practical issues involved with each. The authors then present an analysis of a survey conducted of over a hundred practicing safety executives in the United States. While no significant differences were found between survey respondents based on the size or nature of their organisation, the authors did find that tenure on the job was positively correlated with increased receptiveness to the efficacy of behaviour‐based programmes. In the end, it was concluded that success with both behaviour‐based and incentive‐based safety efforts are dependent on top management’s support of such efforts, both through personal involvement and example setting and through provision of the necessary organisational resources to promote workplace safety.

The purpose of this study is to develop a spatio-temporal neighbourhood-level house price index (STNL-HPI) incorporating a geographic information system (GIS) functionality that can be used to improve the house price indexation system.

By using the Malaysian house price index (MHPI) and application of geographically weighted regression (GWR), GIS-based analysis of STNL-HPI through an application called LHPI Viewer v.1.0.0, the stand-alone GIS-statistical application for STNL-HPI was successfully developed in this study.

The overall results have shown that the modelling and GIS application were able to help users understand the visual variation of house prices across a particular neighbourhood.

This research was only able to acquire data from the federal government over the period 1999 to 2006 because of budget limitations. Data purchase was extremely costly. Because of financial constraints, data with lower levels of accuracy have been obtained from other sources. As a consequence, a major portion of data was mismatched because of the absence of a common parcel identifier, which also affected the comparison of this system to other comparable systems.

Neighbourhood-level HPI is needed for a better understanding of the local housing market.

Private investment in advanced economies contracted sharply during the downturn that followed the global financial crisis. A substantial debt overhang has been one proposed explanation for this development. This paper evaluates the role of debt overhang for the slow recovery in investment in Denmark, a country in which levels of private debt rapidly increased before the crisis.

Based on firm-level panel data, this paper evaluates the links between debt and investment dynamics for individual firms during the downturn that followed the global financial crisis.

High leverage contributed to a slow recovery in investment during the downturn that followed the financial crisis, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises. The effect cannot solely be attributed to mean reversion in investment.

Results point to the existence of a separate leverage or “balance sheet” channel with implications for macroeconomic volatility and financial stability.

Macroprudential or microprudential measures to counteract the build-up of excess leverage during upswings may contribute to reducing macroeconomic volatility and improving financial stability.

In contrast to previous studies, the panel dimension of data is used to take mean reversion in investment into account. The large, nationally representative panel data set allows to assess the macroeconomic relevance of the results, as well as enables subsample splits which are used to gain insights into potential mechanisms through which debt overhang impacts investment.

One of major concerns of serial acquirers is to ensure value creation. However, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are well known for the key management problems they generate such as change management, cultural clashes and increased managerial turnover. Despite this, M&As also offer opportunities for integrating best practices. This paper aims to demonstrate how Danaher attempts to cultivate employee engagement in companies it has recently acquired.

This paper adopts a single-case approach to show how Danaher implements its in-house method – the Danaher Business System – a management system during the take over and the postacquisition phase.

The findings from this paper demonstrate best practice management and strategies needed to ensure successful M&As. Almost 40 years after serial acquisitions, Danaher is cited as one of the most successful serial acquirers. Its human approach to takeovers has been a central part of this.

This paper offers a concise and clear outline of the management strategies used by Danaher to ensure successful acquisitions relying on Kaizen and LEAN with a strong focus on the human side. During the takeover and postacquisition integration, Danaher’s human approach would appear to be a key differentiating element.

Controversial information systems (IS) represent a unique context in which certain members of a user's social circle may endorse the use of a system while others object to it. The purpose of this paper is to explore the simultaneous and often conflicting roles of such positive and negative social influences through social learning and ambivalence theories in shaping user adoption intention of a representative case of controversial IS, namely online dating services (ODS).

The model was tested with two empirical studies using structural equation modeling techniques. The data of these studies were collected from 451 (Study 1) and 510 (Study 2) single individuals (i.e. not in a relationship).

(1) Positive social influence has a stronger impact on perceived benefits and adoption intention, while negative social influence exerts a greater impact on perceived risks; (2) positive and negative social influences affect adoption intention toward ODS differently, through benefit and risk assessments; and (3) ambivalence significantly negatively moderates the effects of social influences on adoption.

This study enriches and extends the IS use, ambivalence theory, prospect theory, and social learning theory research streams. Furthermore, this study suggests that it is necessary to focus on not only the oft-considered positive but also negative social influences in IS research.

The premise on which the stakeholder approach toward employees is based is that stakeholder management actions bring a strengthening of internal legitimacy and therefore the possibility of creating better working conditions that will lead to improved company competitiveness in terms of intangible resources developed by company employees. The aims of the paper are: to determine and to measure the system of resources of value developed by employees of a company that has developed a stakeholder management policy; to create a model that permits the company to evaluate the factors which have a major effect on the development of such a system; and to define the applications of the tool as a company's performance measurement and control system.

In order to pursue these aims two surveys were conducted in 2005 and 2006 on the employees of a leading Italian company in the agricultural food sector. Structural equation model methodology and multivariate analysis were used to define the quantitative measures of the system of resources and to determine the role played by stakeholder management policies in the development of the intangible resources.

The authors found that the company's social policies have a significant influence, even though its intensity varies, on most of the resources analyzed, and in particular on trust, job satisfaction, networking and communication, ability to work in a group and low turnover propensity. These results confirm the strong link between the resources of value developed by employees and the social strategy of the company.

The measurement system developed in this research can be used in any firm that wants to measure the intangible resources related to employees and represents a control tool that may support managers in planning and control the social investments of the firm.

The aims of this research are: to develop and test an evaluation model of the intangible resources related to the employees; to value the impact that these intangible resources have on individual work attitudes such as job satisfaction and turnover propensity.

Two surveys were conducted in 2005 and 2006 for employees of a leading Italian company in the agricultural food sector. A structural equation modelling methodology was used to define the quantitative measures of the system of resources and to determine the relations among the different constructs.

It was found that the items adopted in the study capture the constructs of human capital and structural capital and, moreover, these two dimensions positively affect individual work attitudes such as job satisfaction and turnover.

The measurement system developed in this research can be used in any firm that seeks to measure the intangible resources related to employees. The system represents a tool that may support managers in planning and control of human resource investments of the firm. One of the main limitations is that the study is based on surveys of employees, so it only enables comparison among different departments, production plants, professional category or seniority within the company. Moreover, the indicators used are not measured objectively, making it difficult for any inter‐company comparison.

In considering the lager beer industry of Denmark it may not seem out of place to recall the main facts regarding the researches of E. C. Hansen. It is due to Hansen, a Dane, that the brewing industry throughout the world was placed on a scientific basis so far as the employment of pure yeast cultures is concerned. The brewing of lager beer had been for long successfully practised in certain European countries, notably in Germany. In a word what may be termed the mechanical technik was well understood, but a knowledge of the underlying biological principles so far as they related to the nature and action of the yeast employed had not advanced so far. The study of micro‐organisms in general had but just commenced. Their very existence in many cases was not even suspected. The employment of yeast in brewing practice was largely of the “hit and miss” kind, and continued to be so until fifty years ago. It is true, of course, that excellent beer was being made in this country and on the continent, both top and bottom fermentation kinds, as it had been for centuries past, but the power to control the nature of the beer by using a pure culture of a selected variety of yeast was not possible until Hansen had made his investigations and published the results in 1883.

In the USA a nationwide grid of metropolitan areas with populations beyond the million mark has emerged. The strength of the national economy appears to be exhibited through those large agglomerations and the linkages that they have developed amongst themselves, other components of the national economy and in some instances elements external to that economy. Metropolitan areas in the size class referred to, and some not quite so large, are expanding their boundaries or spheres of influence in ways that signal changes for the urban areas in question and indeed for the national economy. The current discussion reviews and synthesizes recent thinking concerning urban peripheries and adjacent areas with an eye to understanding their role in a changing economic infrastructure. In keeping with advances in transportation and communications and the emergence of service industries, developments on the metropolitan peripheries are assisting with the ongoing functional linkages of their metropolitan hosts to the national economy and beyond, and thus are contributing to their continuing viability.