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Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

Since China initiated its “go global” policy that promotes its overseas investment, China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) has increased almost twenty times during the last 10 years, reaching $55.9 billion in 2008. The issue of internationalization of Chinese OFDI has attracted increasing attention of researchers from a business perspective. This article systematically reviews the previous studies on overseas investments by Chinese MNEs and discusses the characteristics of Chinese internationalization behavior at both firm level and country level. The internationalization of Chinese companies cannot be understood as a simple game of “catch up” with established MNEs, and more firm‐level empirical studies should be carried out on how these characteristics influence firms’ strategic decisions.

We describe an automatic classroom capture system that detects and records significant (stable) points in lectures by sampling and analyzing a sequence of screen capture frames from a PC used for presentations, application demonstrations, etc. The system uses visual inspection techniques to scan the screen capture stream to identify points to store. Unlike systems that only detect and store slide presentation transitions, this system detects and stores significant frames in any style of computer‐based lecture using any program. The system is transparent to the lecturer and requires no software or training. It has been tested extensively on lectures with multiple applications and pen‐based annotations and has successfully identified “significant” frames (frames that represent stable events such as a new slide, bullet, figure, inked comment, drawing, code entry, application entry etc.). The system can analyze over 20000 frames and typically identifies and stores about 100 significant frames within minutes of the end of a lecture. A time stamp for each saved frame is recorded and will in the future be used to compile these frames into a jMANIC multimedia record of the class.

The pattern of prosecutions forfood offences has changed very little in the past decade. Compositional offences have rarely exceeded 5 per cent and, since the 1967 batch of regulations for meat products, are mostly in respect of deficient meat content. Food hygiene offences have also remained steady, with no improvement to show for all the effort to change the monotony of repulsive detail. The two major causes of all legal proceedings, constituting about 90 per cent of all cases—the presence of foreign matter and sale of mouldy food—continue unchanged; and at about the same levels, viz. an average of 55 per cent of the total for foreign matter and 35 per cent for mouldy food. What is highly significant about this changed concept of food and drugs administration is that almost all prosecutions now arise from consumer complaint. The number for adulteration as revealed by official sampling and analysis and from direct inspectorial action is small in relation to the whole. A few mouldy food offences are included in prosecutions for infringements of the food hygiene regulations, but for most of the years for which statistics have been gathered by the BFJ and published annually, all prosecutions for the presence of foreign matter have come from consumer complaint. The extent to which food law administration is dependent upon this source is shown by the fact that 97 per cent of all prosecutions in 1971 for foreign bodies and mouldy food—579 and 340 respectively—resulted from complaints; and in 1972, 98 per cent of prosecutions resulted from the same source in respect of 597 for foreign matter and 341 for mouldy food. Dirty milk bottle cases in both years all arose from consumer complaint; 41 and 37 respectively.

Successful sensorless collision detection by a robot depends on the accuracy with which the external force/torque can be estimated. Compared with collaborative robots, industrial robots often have larger parameter values of their dynamic models and larger errors in parameter identification. In addition, the friction inside a reducer affects the accuracy of external force estimation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a collision detection method for industrial robots. The proposed method does not require additional equipment, such as sensors, and enables highly sensitive collision detection while guaranteeing a zero false alarm rate.

The error on the calculated torque for a robot in stable motion is analyzed, and a typical torque error curve is presented. The variational characteristics of the joint torque error during a collision are analyzed, and collisions are classified into two types: hard and soft. A pair of envelope-like lines with an effect similar to that of the true envelope lines is designed. By using these envelope-like lines, some components of the torque calculation error can be eliminated, and the sensitivity of collision detection can be improved.

The proposed collision detection method based on envelope-like lines can detect hard and soft collisions during the motion of industrial robots. In repeated experiments without collisions, the false alarm rate was 0 per cent, and in repeated experiments with collisions, the rate of successful detection was 100 per cent. Compared with collision detection method based on symmetric thresholds, the proposed method has a smaller detection delay and the same detection sensitivity for different joint rotation directions.

A collision detection method for industrial robots based on envelope-like lines is proposed in this paper. The proposed method does not require additional equipment or complex algorithms, and highly sensitive collision detection can be achieved with zero false alarms. The proposed method is low in cost and highly practical and can be widely used in applications involving industrial robots.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

The attention of the Board is drawn from time to time to advertisements in trade papers and circulars of preservative substances sold under proprietary names. These consist for the most part of well‐known preservatives or mixtures of preservatives which are easily detected by the analyst in food substances to which they have been added. A new preservative, sold under the name of “Mystin,” for preserving milk and cream has recently been advertised as possessing the advantage that its presence cannot be detected by analysis. Samples have been sent to farmers and milk vendors accompanied by a trade circular from which the following extracts have been taken:—

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions in the relationship between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness.

A total of 366 valid questionnaires were received from employees of high-tech enterprises in China, regression-based moderation and bootstrapping analyses were adapted to analyze data and test hypotheses by using the PROCESS syntax in SPSS software.

Differential leadership can positively contribute to team decision-making effectiveness, and thriving at work mediates the relationship between the two, and cooperative goal perception plays a moderating role in the relationship between thriving at work and team decision-making effectiveness and cooperative goal perception moderate the mediating effect of thriving at work between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness.

The findings suggest that managers need to focus on leadership style to promote improved team decision-making effectiveness by enhancing thriving at work and cooperative goal perception.

Overall, this study is based on the conservation of resources theory to uncover the “black box” between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness and to highlight the important role of thriving at work and cooperative goal perception.