Search results

This paper aim to examine the implication of section 172(1)(b) on employment rights, particularly on workers on precarious employment contracts. The aim of the paper is to analyse whether company directors have any liability for potential abuse of worker on precarious employment contracts. The paper examine the advantage of companies recruiting staff on precarious employment contracts and the effect of such contract on the worker.

The paper reviews case law, statutory provisions and academic opinions on precarious employment contracts and its advantages and disadvantages to the company and the worker. The paper critically reviews the impact of Section 172(1)(b) of the Companies Act 2006 on precarious employment contract workers.

The paper argues that companies benefit more from precarious employment contracts than workers do. The Companies Act 2006 is silent on whether directors should factor the interest of precarious employment worker when making company decision, thereby leaving these workers in a vulnerable position and at the mercy of the employers.

The paper offers a different argument about why the use of precarious employment contracts is on the rise in the UK. It highlights the silence of the Companies Act 2006 as a driver for the increase in the use of precarious employment contracts in the UK.

This paper aims to examine how functional and numerical flexibility can be successfully combined without workforce segmentation or flexible employment contracts, by implementing a highly integrated human resource management (HRM) system.

Six case studies were conducted between January 2002 and June 2003 in Portuguese affiliates of multinational management consulting firms using a grounded theory approach.

Evidence from the case studies showed that some of these companies were able to explore both functional and numerical flexibility in a combined and interdependent way, by operating a tightly run and highly coordinated set of HRM practices geared towards the development of internal labour markets.

The study uses a sample of large multinational companies in a single sector, which limits the scope of these findings.

It is suggested that a strategy combining numerical and functional flexibility through an integrated set of HRM policies and practices will be more effective than segmenting the workforce or choosing between those two sources of flexibility.

The paper presents a new breadth for the role of HRM in achieving flexibility. Theoretically, it challenges the established notion that commitment‐based HRM serves only functional flexibility and that numerical flexibility can only be achieved through precarious employment.

The study intends to examine employee relations with a changing workforce resulting from the business-like transformation in the charity sector. The authors investigated sector-specific employment practices that can alleviate job stress (as a given and which has been made worse by the transformation). Developed from the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation framework, the findings can inform human resource management practices in its new efficiency-seeking business model.

The authors collected both quantitative (through a staff survey and administrative records of sick leave in the previous 12 months) and qualitative data (through interviews and focus groups) from one branch of an internationally well-established and UK-based religious charity between 2017 and 2018.

The quantitative results support a strong mediating effect of job satisfaction between job stress and staff sick leave. The negative correlation shown between job stress and job satisfaction is subject to paid staff perception of meaningful work and their level of involvement in decision-making, with the latter having a stronger moderating effect. The qualitative data provides further contextualized evidence on the findings.

It is important for charities to uphold and reflect their charitable mission towards beneficiaries and paid staff during the shift to an efficiency-seeking business model. Charities should involve their new professional workforce in strategic decision-making to better shape a context-based operational model.

The study examined employee relations in the non-profit charity sector with a changing workforce during the transition to a more business-oriented model. In particular, the authors revealed sector-specific factors that can moderate the association between job stress and absenteeism, and thereby contribute to the understanding of human resource management practices in the sector.

To investigate the level of organizational commitment in agency workers compared with permanent workers by taking into account relations between the two groups.

A mixed methods design was employed comprising of a quantitative survey of 157 call centre workers followed by 29 qualitative interviews with permanent workers, agency workers and employers.

Agency workers had a significantly lower level of organizational commitment compared with permanent workers once the relation between agency and permanent workers was controlled. Significant correlations were found within the sample between organizational commitment, being valued and job satisfaction further supported by a hierarchical multiple linear regression.

As with all cross‐sectional research causality cannot be confirmed and difficulty accessing call centre workers led to a restricted sample size. The measurement of worker relations needs developing. Further research is proposed to address these limitations and extend the findings.

The implication for human resource management is that employers must be aware of the possible adverse influence that agency workers may have on permanent workers and as such try to incorporate agency workers within the organization to support their commitment.

Previous studies have found inconsistent variations in the relative organizational commitment of permanent and temporary employees; a counter‐intuitive finding given the precarious employment contract held by temporary workers. This study casts light on these results by controlling for the relation between agency workers and permanent workers.

This paper aims to show that the experience of workers on the margins of international business is akin to the funeralesque. The funeralesque is understood as the appropriation of the value generated by workers across the production networks of international business.

Drawing from the engagement with crematorium workers, the narratives of workers are articulated, describing the insecurities and injustices experienced by them. The authors draw from six-month-long qualitative engagement with seven workers in a crematorium in Ahmedabad, India.

The experience of marginal subjects provides important insights into how international business, in conjunction with states, structures inequality for marginal subjects. Precariousness, social exclusion, low wages and subjectivities of humiliation are the experiences of marginal subjects. The reproduction of marginality in globalising cities is an important element of the funeralesque through which extraction and re-distribution of value across international networks is legitimised.

In understanding international business as the funeralesque, the authors demystify the power relations constituted by it. The authors provide a metaphor for dethroning the legitimacy of international business and indicate that its modern practices are similar to the practices of value appropriation that occur in a funeral.

The authors develop the metaphor of the funeralesque to gain insights into the experiences of workers on the margins of international business. The authors are, thus, able to theorise the underbelly of globalising cities in a poetic, subversive way.

This paper studies social inequality in the vital field of employment in Spain during the crisis period 2009-2014.

Factor analysis is used to build a synthetic index of employment exclusion. The starting information matrix collects data from a wide set of employment variables for all 17 Spanish autonomous communities and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Based on this information, four factors are extracted which explain employment exclusion in different situations of vulnerability, such as unemployment, temporality, poverty or low pay.

In the territorial ranking, Madrid, Basque Country, Aragon and Catalonia show the lowest risk of employment exclusion, whereas Ceuta, Andalusia, Extremadura and Canary Islands show the highest ones.

The main value of this research is that it confirms the need for coordination of public policies in order to foster social and territorial cohesion in Spain.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct the study in two states of India to covers the perception of students and their parents about the attractiveness of Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) in India.

Three ITIs were selected each from the states Maharashtra and Haryana for data collection. Students pursuing trade fitter, electrical and beauty courses and their parents were selected. The instrument used to collect the data from students and parents was interviews with students and families.

The results show that the attractiveness of ITIs has shifted over time. The low status associated with these institutions is slowly fading away. The skills acquired at an ITI can provide the basis of successful careers. Once considered a last resort, today it is being considered as a possible career option. However, ITIs have yet to develop a better image and higher attractiveness within society for it to become an interesting option for young people and their parents when choosing educational pathways.

Some implications of this study are presented as suggestions in formulating policies to improve the image of technical education and vocational training.

This purpose of this paper is to use the concepts of performance and emotional labour to shed new light on the skills workers use on two workflows in one call centre. In addition, the paper demonstrates how different workflows impact on workers everyday emotional experiences and wellbeing.

Using an auto-ethnographic approach to data collection the paper provides insights by focusing on both the self and others as objects of research. The underpinning theoretical inspiration is drawn from Labour Process Theory but considering the interactive nature of front-line call centre work, it adopts Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical concepts and draws on micro-sociological analyses of the labour process, particularly Hochschild (1983).

The case study illustrates how workers use social skills, through the performance of emotional labour, to different extents on contrasting workflows. The concept of performance is also used to demonstrate how management rely on worker's social skills to deliver fast and quality customer service. Contrary to other research, this study finds that the greater time front-line workers spend on calls and the wider scope they have for exercising discretion does not necessarily mean they experience greater levels of satisfaction and emotional wellbeing. Rather, the workflow with the tightest scripting and shortest call cycles – which inhibit the need to perform emotional labour – offered the greatest protection from the emotional demands of the job.

This paper is the first to apply Goffman's theatrical metaphors and concepts of performativity to unpack the nature of front-line call centre workers’ skills.

This meta-analysis aims to verify the efficacy of occupational health and safety (OHS) training in terms of knowledge, attitude and beliefs, behavior and health.

The authors included studies published in English (2007–2014) selected from ten databases. Eligibility criteria were studies concerned with the effectiveness of OHS training for primary prevention of workplace injury; and studies focused on examined outcome related to OHS.

The selected studies (n = 28) highlighted a strong support for the effectiveness of training on worker OHS attitudes and beliefs and, to a lesser extent, on worker’s knowledge but only medium for behavior and small evidences for its effectiveness on health.

Future research should more deeply investigate the efficacy on knowledge increase of trainings delivered by experts and researchers, applying different methods, in a small group; training delivered by peer and by researcher, applying different methods; and trained workers less than 29 years and more than 49 years old, considering that workers in these age groups are particularly vulnerable to fatalities.

Our study is a contribution for those they intend to grant effective training, in response to specific needs of OHS. The evidences presented could be considered a first step to identify the factors related to the efficacy of OHS training to plan adequate interventions.

The OHS training is effective on the basis of the extent interventions are carried out for each specific learning outcome.

This meta-analysis suggested that classroom training, although the most used and studied, does not ever revealed itself very effective: it was not significant for outcomes in terms of knowledge and showed a decreasing efficacy for attitudes and beliefs, behaviors and health. It seemed that there was a distinction between interventions on knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, as opposed to behavioral interventions and health.

This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework of HR praxis.

The paper is based on interviews with HR practitioners in Sweden and a review of articles that examine aspects of HR practitioners' work.

The HR practitioners' work is fragmented and reactive, filled with meetings and affords few opportunities to work undisturbed. Operational tasks are prioritised over strategic work, and their work sometimes involves tasks that are not HR's responsibility. The nature of HR practitioners' daily work mimics the work of their main “customer”, i.e. managers within the organisations.

The HR practitioners were working mainly in the service of managers, which suggests that they have an internal focus. Consistent with current, prescriptive HR discourse, HR practitioners should adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective of human resource management (HRM) and a more external focus that is necessary to contribute to wider, organisational effectiveness. The findings could enrich what is taught in higher education by providing students with an account of the reality of HR practitioners' daily work.

The study provides a situated account of the daily work of HR practitioners, which is largely absent from the literature.