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Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

Weapon use is recognised as a key crime concern in England and Wales but has received relatively little focused research. The purpose of this paper is to examine weapon use by sexual offenders to develop new insights relevant for a police audience. Specifically, to examine the prevalence of weapons within sexual offenders and explore the differences between weapon and non-weapon enabled offenders on a range of characteristics.

A sample of 1,618 single, stranger, solved, serious sexual assaults were provided by the Serious Crime Analysis Section of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. In all, 20 per cent of offenders were weapon enabled.

There were almost no demographic differences between weapon enabled and non-weapon enabled offenders. In terms of the offence itself, there were many significant differences between the groups in terms of precautions used, victim involvement, injury, attack behaviours, victim approach and attack location. Further multivariate analysis revealed aspects of the offence that were associated with weapon use; these are broadly discussed within themes of violence and evidence of planning.

The authors argue that an examination of weapon use is valuable in illustrating how offenders differ in their offence and provide insights for the investigation of such crime.

Longevity risk, that is, the uncertainty of the demographic survival rate, is an important risk for insurance companies and pension funds, which have large, and long‐term, exposures to survivorship. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model to describe this demographic survival risk.

The model proposed in this paper satisfies all the desired properties of a survival rate and has an explicit distribution for both single years and accumulative years.

The results show that it is important to consider the expected shift and risk premium of life table uncertainty and the stochastic behaviour of survival rates when pricing the survivor derivatives.

This model can be applied to the rapidly growing market for survivor derivatives.

Executive stock option grants are intended to remove corporate governance problems by aligning the managers’ interests with those of the outside shareholders. Conventional schemes leave several problems in place. Exotic option structures can resolve these. In this paper, such structures are proposed and tested on the Dow Jones constituents over a 10-year period. These alternative schemes increase the financial rewards to the better performing managers, at no extra cost to the company whilst offering a resolution or mitigation of the identified agency problems No one scheme dominates the others and a portfolio of option types is indicated.

Organisational change is typically conceptualised as moving from the status quo to a new, desired, configuration to better match the environment. Change could, therefore, be seen as a departure from the norm, or alternatively as normal and simply a natural response to environmental and internal conditions. Static models of organisations are being displaced by dynamic models, which reflect the discontinuous nature of organisational change. Developments in theory suggest limitations to contingency approaches, which carry the assumptions of static models of change. Analysis of this case at PowerCo in Australia reveals a number of issues related to changes aimed at achieving a more commercial, profit‐oriented, focus. Points out that the contextualist approach is holistic, in which these aspects interact with each other as change unfolds temporally. A contextualist framework permits models of change to be visualised as dynamic rather than static, having a temporal setting which has multiple causes acting as loops rather than simple lines. This enables change to be understood as a discontinuous phenomenon having the benefits, without the limitations, of rational contingency models.

This paper reports on research currently being undertaken into change in performance evaluation and control systems. Case study research involving the use of repertory grids, in‐depth interviews and observation has been undertaken to examine the impact of these systems on behaviour and the potentially problematic nature of change in performance evaluation and control systems. This contrasts with previous research which has often assumed that such systems can be treated almost as easily manipulable independent variables. The case study illustrates the ways in which performance evaluation and control systems provide a formative context which means that change can be difficult to achieve and requires an understanding of the cultural assumptions underpinning both current and desired systems.