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Procurement is a specific, yet dynamic area of work and study that is recognized as an occupation by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). However, there is growing literature that substantiates differences in theory and practice, between procurement practitioners in the private and public sectors. The purpose of this paper is to validate the procurement occupational duties identified by the BLS with actual job activities performed and managed by public sector practitioners.

The paper is based on a survey of public sector practitioners to obtain information with regards to occupational duties and job activities in public procurement, as compared to a BLS proxy for procurement.

Public procurement practitioners complete the occupational duties identified by BLS, yet there is one occupational duty in public procurement that is absent from the BLS description for procurement.

Empirical data and analysis identifies the potential for public procurement to be considered its own occupation separate from private sector procurement, providing a foundation for development, management, and professionalization of the field.

The public procurement practitioners who completed the survey have a high degree of professional orientation based on certifications held and professional association membership, a foundation for generating applicatory results for studying the actual occupational duties in procurement. The specialized job activities performed and managed in perhaps the fastest growing occupation within public sector management are catalogued in this study.

This review compares the primary occupational safety and health (OSH) laws of the ASEAN members against the major provisions of the primary OSH laws of the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) grouped under the themes for OSH law adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

This review employs the 11 themes for OSH law adopted by the ILO as the basis of comparison. As the themes lack specificity in terms of their respective contents, specific facets of the themes are drawn from the review of the primary OSH laws of the UK and the US.

The review shows that primary OSH laws of the ASEAN members encompass the fundamental aspects of the ILO OSH themes particularly the regulatory framework, scope, roles of authorities, duties of employers and employees as well as safety inspection and enforcement. The review demonstrates a lack of provision of worksite consultation by the authorities, the emphasis on research, experiment and demonstration by the government as well as certain aspects of training.

OSH in many developing members of the ASEAN is still evolving to advocate the basic rights of employees, protect the safety of the public and ensure the welfare, safety and health of employees are upheld at workplaces. There is an obvious disparity in the coverage of the primary OSH laws of the nations, resulting in widely varied OSH implementation. This study contributes to advancement of the primary OSH laws in developing ASEAN members by highlighting areas of their primary OSH laws that can be improved. Improvement of the primary OSH laws is crucial to subsequent improvement and development of subsidiary laws to provide for adequate protection at workplaces.

Most studies of OSH laws in the ASEAN are country-specific and often theme-specific. There is currently no study which compares the primary OSH laws of ASEAN nations using themes derived from the ILO as well as primary OSH laws of the UK and the US. This review is one of its kinds to use such an approach in providing a comparative overview of the primary OSH laws of all ASEAN nations.

This paper is based on a talk given by Philip Ryley and John Virgo to the Association of Pension Lawyers at their annual conference in Bournemouth in November 1998. In it the authors provide an outline of some of the key legal issues that have arisen out of the pensions mis‐selling litigation.

The purpose of this paper is to add a little piece to the research on boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation by addressing two questions: how do actors perform boundary work in an inter-occupational cooperation project that seeks to improve the personnel health work in a hospital setting? What impact does the boundary work have on such cooperation in the personnel health project?

The study is based on individual, in-depth interviews and participative observations of focus group discussions conducted at a regional municipal organization in Sweden. Respondents are hospital line managers, experts and strategists in the HR departments, and experts from the internal occupational health service.

The concepts on boundary work, which include closing/opening boundary strategies, provide the framework for the empirical illustrations. The cooperation runs smoothly in the rehabilitation work because of an agreed upon process in which the professionals’ jurisdictions are preserved through closing strategies. Illness prevention and health promotion are not areas of inter-occupational cooperation because the stronger actors use closing strategies. While the weaker actors, who try to cooperate, use opening boundary strategies in these areas, they are excluded or marginalized.

The empirical investigation concerns one cooperation project and was completed at one data collection point.

No similar study of boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation in a hospital setting is available despite the frequency of this professional group configuration in practice. A more inclusive concept of professionalism may facilitate the study of boundary work and inter-occupational cooperation among actors with different professional authority.

In order to reduce the number of injuries on construction sites, a European Directive prescribes that the clients shall appoint safety and health coordinators in their projects. The purpose of this paper is to find out who are appointed to be health and safety coordinators for the design and planning phase and what they do in order to prevent injuries on sites.

Since the 1st of January 2009, there shall be a coordinator for the design and planning phase in Swedish construction projects. Telephone interviews were made with the coordinators in 42 Swedish building projects.

The coordinators’ education and experiences varied widely, as well as their descriptions of their duties: no duties, administration and active injury prevention. The coordinators who were classified as most active had at least one additional leading role in the projects.

The study is qualitative for an increased understanding, not a statistical reflection of the coordinator population.

The legislation needs to clarify whether the early conceptual phase of the project is included in the coordinator's commission and whether she/he is supposed to participate in identifying, assessing and reducing risks through design changes. These clarifications will have an influence on when the coordinator should be appointed and what competence she/he needs.

The study increases the understanding of how the health and safety coordinators of the planning and projecting phase of building projects perceive their mission and what factors, according to them, have an influence on what they do.

The relationship between routine work stress and psychological distress was investigated among 733 police officers in three US cities, during 1998‐1999. The Work Environment Inventory (WEI) was developed to assess exposure to routine work stressors, while excluding duty‐related traumatic stressors (critical incidents). The WEI and its general properties are presented. The relationship between routine work stress exposure and psychological distress is then explored. Exposure to routine work stressors predicted general psychological distress (r = 0.46), as well as post‐traumatic stress symptoms following officers’ most traumatic career incident (rs = 0.26 to 0.39). Multivariate analyses found that these effects were independent of, and larger than, the effects of cumulative critical incident exposure. (Time since the most traumatic event, social support, and social desirability effects were also controlled statistically.) Routine occupational stress exposure appears to be a significant risk factor for psychological distress among police officers, and a surprisingly strong predictor of post‐traumatic stress symptoms.

In recent years, a wide range of psychosocial health interventions have been implemented among military service members and their families. However, there are questions over the evaluative rigor of these interventions. We conducted a systematic review of this literature, rating each relevant study (k = 111) on five evaluative rigor scales (type of control group, approach to participant assignment, outcome quality, number of measurement time points, and follow-up distality). The most frequently coded values on three of the five scales (control group type, participant assignment, and follow-up distality) were those indicating the lowest level of operationally defined rigor. Logistic regression results indicate that the evaluative rigor of intervention studies has largely remained consistent over time, with exceptions indicating that rigor has decreased. Analyses among seven military sub-populations indicate that interventions conducted among soldiers completing basic training, soldiers returning from combat deployment, and combat veterans have had, on average, the greatest evaluative rigor. However, variability in mean scores across evaluative rigor scales within sub-populations highlights the unique methodological hurdles common to different military settings. Recommendations for better standardizing the intervention evaluation process are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to draw meaningful relationship between two foci of commitment (i.e. affective organizational and affective occupational) and two types of turnover intentions (i.e. organizational and occupational turnover intention).

Using random sampling approach, the authors collected data from both academic and support staff of a Dutch university. An online questionnaire was developed and sent through electronic mail to 752 of the total employees. A total of 153 employees responded; yielding approximately 21 percent response rate.

The results revealed that affective organizational commitment and affective occupational commitment were positively related to each other. Affective organizational commitment was negatively related to organizational turnover intention and this relationship was buffered by affective occupational commitment. Affective occupational commitment was negatively related both to occupational and organizational turnover intention. Last study hypothesis, however, could not gain support as affective organizational commitment did not moderate the affective occupational commitment-occupational turnover intention relationship.

Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed in the end.

The study poses some valuable contributions to the existing body of literature by exhibiting the role affective occupational commitment in the models of organizational turnover intention and that of affective organizational commitment in occupational turnover intention models which has been over looked so far.

Research vitality addresses the perseverance that faculty members in the organization sciences experience in maintaining their research quantity and quality over an extended period of time. The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical model of research vitality.

The authors propose a model consisting of individual and situational factors which influence the motivation and commitment of a professor to continue to conduct quality research over an extended period of time. Additionally, the authors identify benefits that may accrue when faculty members possess research vitality and discuss human resource management implications for schools engaged in hiring, tenuring, promoting, and socializing faculty members. A set of propositions about research vitality and contextual factors that influence this construct are presented and discussed.

An individual‐level construct that represents a time related measure of the quality and quantity of individual contributions to the scholarly discipline of management is developed. Every individual in the organizational sciences field has the capability to contribute in a meaningful way.

The model presented has a number of personal implications and departmental implications such as how to predict research vitality in junior faculty members.

The framework should be used for understanding one element of success in the organizational sciences.

The paper develops a model of research vitality to explain why some faculty continue to be productive, even in the face of a challenging research process.

Purpose – To ascertain how the institutional environment of the armed forces has differentially impacted men and women in their experiences of sexual harassment.

Methodology – Logistic regression analyses of the 1995 Armed Forces Sexual Harassment Survey and the 2002 Status of the Armed Forces Survey – Workplace and Gender Relations.

Findings – Gender does not override all other factors in determining who is most likely to be targeted for sexual harassment in the military. Gender is shown to be most informative about the likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment for women only when combined with race and rank. For men, however, it seems that race is more salient than rank in determining the likelihood of being targeted for sexual harassment.

Research limitations – One glaring omission in this analysis is the effect of same-sex sexual harassment on the work environment of the military. There simply was not sufficient time or space to cover that aspect in this analysis, but it is an important direction for further research on sexual harassment in the military to explore.

Practical implications – Policy makers in the Department of Defense must be more attuned to the interlocking effects of race and gender as they combine with rank to properly address the problem of sexual harassment in the military. It is not enough to simply provide training about sexual harassment; personnel comprising the chain of command within the hierarchical structure of the military must become more cognizant of the microlevel interactions occurring between personnel as part of the everyday work environment.