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You have just entered two pages of carefully‐composed material into your word processor when the lights in your office dim and the computer screen goes dark. A few minutes later, the lights come back on again and you restart your computer. As it grinds through its start‐up procedures you wonder whether it will behave normally or leave you with a serious repair problem. This time you are lucky and your normal applications are available. However, when you open your word processor and look at the file you were entering, you find that your last two pages are missing.

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems are typically designed to provide power to computers for five to thirty minutes after all utility company power has failed. In addition to providing blackout and brownout protection, many UPS systems also protect against spikes, surges, sags, and noise, and some also offer many of the features found in power distribution units (PDUs). The major components or subsystems of a typical UPS system are detailed, and a sample bid specification is appended. Three sidebars discuss UPSs and air conditioning, the maintenance bypass switch (MBS), and literature for further reading.

If you have ever been caught by a power blackout or brownout — caused by lightning, storm damage, or simply a blunder by a repairman — and have completely lost work which was keyboarded but not yet stored on disk, you know how frustrating and infuriating that experience can be. There is little comfort, at such a moment, in realizing that your work habits should really include more frequent disk storage commands. Nor does it help to reflect that memory resident routines are available which automatically store keyboarded material to disk at frequent intervals.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of power in cases of upwards bullying by examining the bases of power that staff members use, and how these bases create power imbalances.

Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six managers from several organisations. After completion of each interview, verbatim transcripts were created and examined using NVivo, allowing in-depth thematic analysis. The broad coding schema, developed through a review of the literature, was refined as analysis progressed.

Three major themes emerged: a loss of legitimate power, coercive power, and structural power. The findings suggest a “power cycle” exists in upwards bullying episodes, which is presented diagrammatically. Discussion focusses on the processes that commence with a decrease or loss of a manager’s legitimate power, associated with a lack of organisational support, and staff members’ perceptions of illegitimacy. Managers indicated vulnerability to inappropriate behaviours by staff members, and the potential for greater power imbalances to build due to these behaviours triggering a feedback mechanism, with managers experiencing a further loss of legitimate power.

The study recommends that research into the perspectives of staff members (such as alleged perpetrators) can further strengthen our understanding of the use of power in workplace bullying, and in upwards bullying in particular. Given the applicability of the outcomes of this research to our understanding of workplace bullying, such theory development can also foster practical approaches to addressing workplace bullying within organisations. Understanding the nature of power within workplace bullying processes can inform organisational strategies to disrupt the cycle of inappropriate behaviours, upwards and otherwise.

Protecting Against the Arctic Express. The Arctic Express blew through the northwest on December 18, 1990, giving the area its first White Christmas since 1965. It also managed to uproot a few thousand trees, knock down a few telephone poles, and make the sales of chains and snow tires skyrocket. Unfortunately, 60 mile per‐hour winds and below‐zero temperatures made the power go out around here, in some places for as much as a week.

Non-technical skills are of increasing importance for safety engineers to perform their job. In their position as expert consultants, they work closely with managers. Thus, gaining management support is oftentimes crucial for safety engineers to successfully improve occupational health and safety. Drawing on organizational support theory (OST), this study investigates how safety engineers’ non-technical skills in communication and persuasion (i.e. rational and hard influence tactics) are related with their management support, and how management support is related with their individual task proficiency (ITP). The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of safety engineers’ expert power in this context.

Using an online questionnaire, survey data were collected from 251 safety engineers working in Austria.

Rational influence tactics are positively related to ITP via management support, whereas hard influence tactics are not. Safety engineers’ expert power moderates the relationship between influence tactics and management support and, consequently ITP. High (vs low) expert status strengthens the positive relationship of rational influence tactics on ITP via management support. For hard influence tactics, high (vs low) expert power buffered the negative relationship of upward appeal and pressure on ITP via management support.

Safety engineers should rely on rational persuasion when cooperating with management to obtain support and improve their own performance.

This study connects the effect of influence tactics in the context of safety engineers’ work performance with OST. It demonstrates that safety engineers’ influence tactics are related to work role performance through management support and that these relationships are moderated by expert power.

The purpose of this paper is to understand better why employees voice. Drawing on social information processing theory and insights derived from the literature on power, the authors suggest that leader–member exchange (LMX) fosters voice by reducing the perceived risk of voicing. The authors further contend that high perceived leader power will strengthen this mediated relationship.

The authors relied on a sample of 265 employee-supervisor dyads collected from Chinese organizations to test the study hypotheses.

Results indicated that perceived risk of voicing significantly mediated the positive LMX–voice behavior relationship. In addition, perceived leader power strengthened the effect of LMX on voice behavior via perceived risk of voicing. The relationship of LMX to perceived risk of voicing was more negative, and the indirect effect of LMX on voice behavior was more positive when employees perceived that leader power was high.

Organizations seeking to promote voice behaviors should support leaders to develop high-quality relationships with employees. Organizations should also ensure that leaders are sufficiently empowered to fulfill their roles, and ensure that employees are aware of their leaders’ influence.

Findings suggest that, in the context of high quality leader–member relationships, employees’ perceptions of their leaders’ power may help to overcome barriers associated with speaking up. Thus, this study helps explain the conditions that encourage employees to voice.

In operating any computer system, whether a small personal computer or a large main‐frame system, power protection should be considered with respect to protecting computer data and possibly the hardware. But how much protection is needed? This article addresses basic issues computer users should consider before selecting power protection. Although some of the information applies chiefly to mainframe computers, the basic concepts (backing up data and line filters) apply to all systems.

Power conditioning measures are taken to ensure the supply of ‘clean’ electrical power for electrical and electronic installations. This article looks at the circumstances that create a need for power conditioning, with particular reference to library installations. The first part of the paper examines the causes and effects of power problems, treating some of the basic issues and problems associated with clean power, while the later sections focus on preventative measures and solutions to allow an installation to operate with clean power. Finally, the question of static electricity is briefly addressed and some protective measures are suggested.