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In recent years, in research and policy circles, there is growing interest in the subject of speaking up (and silence) within the health sector, and there is a consensus that it is a major issue that needs to be addressed. However, there remain gaps in our knowledge and while scholars talk of a voice system – that is the existence of complementary voice channels designed to allow employees to speak up – empirical evidence is limited. We seek to explore the notion of a voice system in a healthcare organisation as comprising structures and cultures as seen from different stakeholder perspectives. What do they see and how do they behave and why? To what extent do the users see a voice system they can access and easily navigate?

Interviews and focus groups were conducted with a voice stakeholder group (e.g. designers of the system from senior management and HR, which comprised 23 staff members) as well as those who have to use the system, with 13 managers and 26 employees from three units within a metropolitan hospital: an oncology department, an intensive care unit and a community health service. Overall, a total of 62 staff members participated and the data were analysed using grounded theory to identify key themes.

This study revealed that although a plethora of formal voice structures existed, these were not always visible or accessible to staff, leading to confusion as to who to speak up to about which issues. Equally other avenues which were not designated voice platforms were used by employees to get their voices heard.

This papers looks at the voice system across the organisation rather than examining a specific scheme. In doing so it enables us to see the lived perceptions and experiences of potential users of these schemes and their awareness of the system as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to take a serious look at the relationship between joint consultation systems at the workplace and employee satisfaction, while at the same time accounting for the (possible) interactions with similar union and management-led high commitment strategies.

Using new, rich data on a representative sample of British workers, the authors identify workplace institutions that are positively associated with employee perceptions of work and relations with management, what in combination the authors call a measure of the “good workplace.” In particular, the authors focus on non-union employee representation at the workplace, in the form of joint consultative committees (JCCs), and the potential moderating effects of union representation and high-involvement human resource (HIHR) practices.

The authors’ findings suggest a re-evaluation of the role that JCCs play in the subjective well-being of workers even after controlling for unions and progressive HR policies. There is no evidence in the authors’ estimates of negative interaction effects (i.e. that unions or HIHR negatively influence the functioning of JCCs with respect to employee satisfaction) or substitution (i.e. that unions or HIHR are substitutes for JCCs when it comes to improving self-reported worker well-being). If anything, there is a significant and positive three-way moderating effect when JCCs are interacted with union representation and high-involvement management.

This is the first time – to the authors’ knowledge – that comprehensive measures of subjective employee well-being are being estimated with respect to the presence of a JCC at the workplace, while controlling for workplace institutions (e.g. union representation and human resource policies) that are themselves designed to involve and communicate with workers.

In the early 1980s Tesco had provisionally agreed plans with the property developer, Provincial Properties Wales, to build a new store in Barry. Michael Hepker, the owner of Ravensbury Investments, was keen to buy into the project and persuaded Johnson Matthey Bankers (JMB) to lend him the capital to purchase Provincial Properties. JMB were to have the store as security for the loan. Unfortunately, planning permission for the building was refused, but, if accusations subsequently made in the House of Commons are to be believed, this fact was never disclosed to JMB. The bank never thought to check on the progress of the building work, so it remained blissfully unaware that its loan was unsecured. At the same time, JMB was lending ever increasing amounts to another client, who was later convicted of fraud in New York in October 1994. Together these two concentrated exposures exhausted JMB's capital base, so that when repayments started to dry up the bank faced collapse. The Bank of England (the Bank), as lender of last resort and UK supervisor of the banking industry, became concerned because JMB was regarded as playing a key role in maintaining the UK's central position in the international gold bullion market. The Bank feared a run on gold deposits which might have spread to the ordinary and unconnected deposit‐taking industry and perhaps led to a currency crisis. The markets were already edgy after the collapse of Continental Illinois National Bank in the USA, which had prompted a run on the dollar, and so the Bank believed it might have been difficult to persuade the markets that JMB's problems were confined to its lending business only. As a result of the JMB debacle, Barry never got its Tesco's and the Bank of England found itself obliged to rescue JMB using money from the government and City institutions.

Social class has long existed in tension with other forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality, both in academic and popular debate. While Marxist-influenced class primacy perspectives gained prominence in US sociology in the 1970s, they faded from view by the 1990s, replaced by perspectives focusing on culture and institutions or on intersectional analyses of how multiple forms of social difference shape durable patterns of disempowerment and marginalization. More recently, class and capitalism have reasserted their place on the academic agenda, but continue to coexist uneasily with analyses of oppression and social difference. Here we discuss possibilities for bridging the gap between studies of class and other forms of social difference. We contend that these categories are best understood in relation to each other when situated in a larger system with its own endogenous dynamics and tendencies, namely capitalism. After providing an historical account of the fraught relationship between studies of class and other forms of social difference, we propose a theoretical model for integrating understandings of class and social difference using Wright et al.‘s concept of dynamic asymmetry. This shifts us away from discussions of which factors are most important in general toward concrete discussions of how these factors interact in particular cases and processes. We contend that class and other forms of social difference should not be studied primarily as traits embodied in individuals, but rather with respect to how these differences are organized in relation to each other within a framework shaped by the dynamics of capitalist development.

The various opportunities and strategies afforded to commercial banks by the advent of the Single Market in 1992 are identified and assessed. Proposed European financial legislation is outlined and the implications for commercial banks are examined. Particular emphasis is focused on the banker‐customer relationship, considered to be the single most important barrier to entry confronting commercial banks in Europe. Empirical evidence is analysed, both in terms of the emerging strategies of individual institutions and the developments in selected European countries to support the findings.

Legislative protections supporting New Zealand's compulsory arbitration system made unions a vital part of industrial relations from 1894 to 1991. Following a dramatic shift to a more deregulated labour market, the union movement suffered a sharp decline in influence and membership during the 1990s. In October 2000 the Labour‐Alliance Coalition that formed government in 1999 introduced its Employment Relations Act that includes new protections for registered trade unions. The early impact of the legislation has been to promote the registration of a plethora of new unions. However, the new unions formed since the introduction of the Act represent very few workers and have narrow interests. Although they exist formally as unions, these organisations are more accurately alternative forms of employee representation that exist to facilitate enterprise bargaining and, in some instances, to allow employers to frustrate the activities of larger, established unions.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of professional and academic identities in online teaching practices in higher education.

This paper draws on data from a longitudinal study of five professional degree academics teaching subjects in nursing, teaching, engineering, allied health sciences, and journalism (here a “subject” refers to a course or unit which is usually undertaken over a semester and forms a part of a larger degree program). The research utilises community of practice as a social theory of learning, and the construct of identity, to better understand the connection between academic teachers' pedagogical beliefs and their teaching practices in a web‐enhanced learning setting. The authors contend that lecturers' online teaching practices are mediated by their continually negotiated identities as members of multiple communities of practice.

This research has found that the professional degree lecturers intentionally utilised the available technologies and tools to enact pedagogical strategies in ways that enabled them to manage the integrity of their occasionally conflicting identities as educators, professional practitioners and institutional employees.

This research goes beyond the assumption that past experiences flavour teachers' pedagogical styles. A lecturer continually negotiates and maintains multiple identities where each represents a fundamental understanding of the world and can sometimes be at odds with one‐another. This study has revealed how educational technologies have mediated the gap between the multiple identities held by teaching academics and been used as a bridging mechanism to connect beliefs with practice.

Downtime data have been acquired from a 1980 MW capacity coal‐fired power station. These data refer to a pulverised fuel system which comprises ten mills, each of which, for the purpose of reliability analysis, has six sets of components liable to failure. The majority voting of the mills was a seven‐out‐of‐ten system. Individual unit failure patterns are determined using a family of exponential models and are used to provide total group reliability patterns, and a computerised alogorithm for analysis of the voting system is developed. A methodology for scheduling majority vote equipment working with non‐symmetrical overhaul downtimes is presented.