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With an increasing number of Chinese private firms establishing primary level CPC Party committees, it is important to study the role of Party organizations in these firms. Using a nationwide survey of private firms in 2006, we empirically study the firm-level CCP committee's effect on workers' benefits and firm performance.

To overcome the potential endogeneity, we employ the regression discontinuity approach by utilizing the following rule from the Constitution of the CCP: Primary party committees should be established in any basic work unit with more than 3 full party members.

Our empirical results show that party committees in private firms have positive and statistically significant effects on many types of workers' benefits, including pension, unemployment insurance and workplace safety.

This paper highlights CCP committees as an important alternative mechanism in coordinating labor relationships in China when formal labor protecting institutions are weak.

The purpose of this paper is under the analysis framework of the system theory, analyzing the optimal contract mode of agricultural supply chain to guarantee the stability of agricultural supply chain and the equilibrium of agricultural product market, to analyze the effect of farmers’ risk attitude on the selection of contract modes and to find the way to encourage farmers’ productive effort and to avoid farmers’ hitchhiking behavior, to guarantee the stability of agricultural supply chain.

Under the guidance of the system theory, using the Stackelberg model and the nonlinear programming theory, this paper comparatively analyzes farmers’ effort (productive effort and sales effort), farmers’ income and the stability of agricultural supply system of four types of contract modes between farmers, third-party organizations and market.

First, in the agricultural market, market-type contract cannot maximize farmers’ income. The main reason is that farmers do not have enough ability to avoid market risk and to bargain. Second, for farmers of risk seeking, choosing a market-type contract and secondary-income contract can increase their income. Third, under the fixed-purchase price contract, the hitchhiking behavior would happen. Fourth, when farmers’ productive efforts are the same, farmers’ income under the secondary-income contract is higher than under the fixed-purchase price contract. Because under the secondary-income contract, farmers have the opportunity to obtain the secondary distribution of benefits, farmers’ hitchhiking behavior could be avoided.

Analyzing the contract modes between farmers and the third-party organization in the agricultural market could reduce the influence of price fluctuation, avoid the uncertainty of the relationship between the supply and demand, stimulate the productive effort of farmers and provide theoretical guidance for establishing efficient and stable agricultural supply system.

Organizations from the same industry or field often tend to become more similar over time, despite being different in terms of for example strategies, goals, or performance. However, recently scholars pointed out that organizational fields are dynamic entities with permeable boundaries, thus indicating that prior literature may have oversimplified the phenomenon. Indeed, in this paper we draw attention to an organizational field that centers on text, and revolves around shared (or debated) meaning stemming from that text. The guiding research question is, “To what extent do organizations converge or diverge from meaning embedded in interconnected text?” We investigate party manifestos and press releases of organizations from the field of politics, focusing on the topic of immigration. We extract meaning from these texts, using document scaling and similarity analysis. Our results show that while most parties become more similar in their framing of immigration, the anti-immigrant PVV actually radicalizes further and as a result takes an isolated position in the policy space. Thus, Dutch political organizations became similar (converge) as well as different (diverge) over time through interaction, in terms of their shared meaning systems. This paper substantiates findings of isomorphic tendencies of organizations within a shared organizational field. At the same time, we find that Dutch politics constitute an issue field, where parties compete about meanings and framings on controversial issues. Our analysis shows that meaning embedded in texts changes over time; this indicates that change mechanisms in organizational fields may be brought about through changes in meaning systems.

Massive shifts in the recruitment landscape, the continually changing nature of work and workers, and extraordinary technological progress have combined to enable unparalleled advances in how current and prospective employees receive and process information about organizations. Once the domain of internal organizational public relations and human resources (HR) teams, most employment branding has moved beyond organizations’ control. This chapter provides a conceptual framework pertaining to third party employment branding, defined as communications, claims, or status-based classifications generated by parties outside of direct company control that shape, enhance, and differentiate organizations’ images as favorable or unfavorable employers. Specifically, the authors first theorize about the underlying mechanisms by which third party employment branding might signal prospective and current employees. Second, the authors develop a framework whereby we comprehensively review third party employment branding sources, thus identifying the different ways that third party employment branding might manifest. Third, using prototypical examples, the authors link the various signaling mechanisms to the various third party employment branding sources identified. Finally, the authors propose an ambitious future research agenda that considers not only the positive aspects of third party employment branding but also potential “dark sides.” Thus, the authors view this chapter as contributing to the broader employment branding literature, which should enhance scholarly endeavors to study it and practitioner efforts to leverage it.

This study explores labor relations management behaviors of administrators and Party organizations in resource-based state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China based on social exchange theory and embeddedness theory. It builds up a process model for managing collective labor conflicts in resource-based SOEs in the Chinese context.

A comparative case study is conducted using two resource-based SOEs with similar backgrounds but differing in effectiveness of the management of collective labor conflicts. Data are collected from interviews, archival sources and a one-month participatory investigation.

The administrators and Party organizations of resource-based SOEs manage collective labor conflicts by means of human resource practices (HRPs) and Party organizations' boundary-spanning behaviors (PBSBs), respectively; foremen and unions perform a mediation role, especially under circumstances where administrators employ high-performance HRPs and PBSBs are closely integrated with the production process. The marketization of the “new danwei system” exerts a “provocation effect” but does not necessarily lead to collective labor conflicts. The root cause of conflicts lies in the inherent defects of specific HRPs and PBSBs, as well as the absence of the Simmelian tie in the social exchange interaction of actors.

First, this study develops a new construct of PBSBs for enterprises' Party organizations and explores its underlying mechanisms, which enriches the range of actors studied in the context of Chinese labor relations; Second, the authors develop a new dimension called “exemplification” building on the existing three-dimensional structure of boundary-spanning behaviors, which expands boundary-spanning theory. Third, the findings that Simmelian tie structure could better maintain the stability of labor relationship in the mediation process of labor-capital conflict management enrich the social exchange theory from the perspective of structure. Finally, this study deepens the existing research on HRPs by proposing a new explanation for disputes.

The chapter uses a comparative case study design to address the mutations and trajectories of transparency in two organizations. We chose organizations that are similar in that they favor extensive forms of self-disclosure, but also different in terms of which sector they inhabit, audiences, and organization type: the Pirate Party of Germany and the lobby organization Epsilon. The findings, in close dialog with different threads in the transparency literature, unveil three crucial dimensions in which transparency regimes are likely to trigger unintended consequences: first, organizations have to cope with the tension between the disclosure of internal information on the one hand, and the need to appear consistent in public on the other. Second, transparency strategies can, however, turn into surveillance and trigger new forms of data ordering, sorting, and aggregating practices. Third, disclosure practices create and undermine complex hierarchies and power relations for organizational members. The comparison of the cases demonstrates that it is crucial to observe the practical implications and multiple trajectories of transparency practices.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the boundary-spanning behaviors of Party organizations, and the processes and constraints of these behaviors in controlling worker unrest in Chinese resource-based state-owned enterprises in the “new work-unit system” using boundary-spanning theory.

This case study was carried out in a resource-based state-owned enterprise in the “new work-unit system” in China. The research utilized interviews and archival documents, and then coded and analyzed the data using NVivo.

In China, Party organizations’ boundary-spanning behaviors (PBSBs) in labor relations management are identified, and classified into the behaviors of the ambassador, task coordinator, and scout. Worker unrest can be controlled by these behaviors through the mediation effect of the behaviors of agents in the “new work-unit system” but can also be provoked in the transformation of the “new work-unit system.”

The Communist Party plays a key role in labor relations management in China’s SOEs; however, this role has not been explored in any depth. This study builds a model to reveal the “black box” in which the PBSBs influence the agents’ behaviors and how the agents’ behaviors then influence the workers, and in this way control worker unrest.

This paper develops a new theory arguing that party change results from ruptures in political parties’ ties to civil society organizations. I demonstrate the utility of this approach by using it to explain why the Rhode Island Democratic Party (RIDP) changed from a hierarchical machine to a porous political field occupied by multiple interlegislator cliques and brokered by extra-party political organizations and professionals. While others attribute party change to bureaucratization, electoral demand, or system-level changes, I analyze historical, observational, and interview data to find that a severance in the RIDP’s relationship with organized labor prompted party change by causing power to diffuse outward as leadership lost control over nominations and the careers of elected office holders. In the spaces that remained, interest groups and political professionals came to occupy central positions within the party field, serving as brokers of the information and relationships necessary to coordinate legislative activity. This analysis refines existing theories of party change and provides a historically-grounded explanation for the institutionalization of interest groups and political professionals in American party politics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the apparent norm of partying that persists in the hotel industry despite evidence suggesting it can negatively affect both employees and organizations.

Telephone surveys of 544 managers from 65 hotels were conducted. Multiple regression analyses and analyses of variance were performed to examine the extent to which differences in hotel organizational culture, hotel classification, hotel corporate organization, hotel size and manager age affect the extent to which employees spend time gathering and partying with their work colleagues outside work.

The paper finds that in hotels with organizational culture oriented towards work and family balance, managers displayed less partying behavior. It also finds that such work and family culture may vary based on certain hotel corporate organizations, hotel location classifications, and hotel sizes, because partying behavior significantly varies based on such corporate, locational and size differences. Findings also indicate that relatively older employees spend less time than younger employees partying with work colleagues outside work.

Limitations include the use of self reports of hotel managers from full‐service hotels in the USA.

A workplace culture oriented towards work and family balance may yield less partying behavior, which may be particularly relevant in certain hotel types and sizes, and may have positive implications for reducing turnover and health care costs.

This study explores the common practice, but understudied topic of hotel employees partying with colleagues outside work. In so doing, it provides greater understanding of the phenomenon to researchers and practitioners.