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The purpose of this paper is to discuss Ireland's national apprenticeship programme, introduced in 1993, in the context of the country's evolving economic and social policies.

A critical analysis is undertaken of the industrial climate in Ireland, which prevented the introduction of a national apprenticeship programme, until 1993.

The paper argues that the main factor for the successful implementation of this programme in 1993 was the emergence of a new climate of cooperation among the social partners providing the institutional foundations for the programme. This cooperation was a result of the 1991 ground‐breaking “social partnership” agreement between employers, trade unions and government, in signing up to a joint national framework programme.

The paper only briefly looks at earlier efforts – from the 1960s onwards – to introduce a well‐functioning programme, which are seen as a learning period, underpinning the breakthrough of the 1990s.

In acknowledging the success of the programme, the paper asks whether this success can be built on further. This could be achieved through increasing the number of apprenticeships, through enlarging the apprenticeship regulatory framework. This could then have a knock‐on effect on employment generation and skill development as, for example, has happened in Australia.

The paper shows that, despite comments about Ireland being institutionally unsuited for apprenticeship – owing to the lack of an industrial cultural tradition of cooperation, it did, in fact, create an industrial cultural climate to provide the social foundations for a well‐functioning programme.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the degree to which trends and structural change may have altered crop insurance expected loss cost ratios across time. Because loss experience is used to set rates for the program, these changes can impact the premiums paid by producers and cost to the government.

County level adjusted loss cost data was merged with climate division weather data for the 1980‐2009 period. Crop‐specific regional‐level regression models were estimated to test for trends and structural changes in the loss experience for major crops (corn, soybeans, sorghum, cotton, winter wheat, and spring wheat). Climate data was used to control for the effect of weather.

For several crops and regions, a significant break point in the loss cost data is found at 1995. This is consistent with the policy changes that occurred in in the program due to the 1994 legislative change. In most instances loss experience prior to 1995 is higher than more recent years even when controlling for the effect of weather. The exception is in winter wheat where it appears recent experience may be worse rather than older experience.

This paper provides a large‐scale assessment of the magnitude of improved crop insurance loss experience across time.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of new nurses in Singapore of their experiences of role transition and to examine the implications for managers in terms of employee training, development and retention.

This qualitative study was conducted using a constructivist grounded theory approach. In total 26 novice nurses and five preceptors (n=31) from five different hospitals participated in the study. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews and reflective journal entries and analysed using the constant comparative method.

The findings revealed that novice nurses remained emotionally and physically challenged when experiencing role transition. Two major constructs appear to play an important part in the transition process; learning how to Fit in and aligning personal with professional and organisational identities. The findings highlight factors that facilitate or impede Fitting in and aligning these identities.

Although the concept of Fitting in and its relation to the attrition of novice nurses has been explored in global studies, that relationship has not yet been theorised as the dynamic alignment of multiple identities. Also, whilst most research around Fitting in, identity and retention has been conducted in western countries, little is known about these issues and their interrelationship in the context of Singapore. The study should inform decision making by healthcare organisations, nurse managers and nursing training institutions with respect to improving the transition experience of novice nurses.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the emergence, operation and features of the time banks that were created during the recent financial crisis in Greece as grass-roots initiatives of different communities, and to examine their relation to the concept of “co-production” and possible relevance to foresight. Time banks are particularly interesting for the future of services: they address all sorts of services while the time-bank “value” of these different types of services does not necessarily reflect their actual value in the free market; impacts may spread from the mere coverage of people’s needs, to increased social capital and community empowerment; and some scholars consider them as flexible forms of co-production, or even as enablers of wider social change. The purpose of the paper is to examine the emergence, and features of the time banks created during the recent financial crisis in Greece as grass-roots initiatives.

Primary information and data were gathered through eight extensive face-to-face interviews with key members of the four time banks based on a semi-structured questionnaire. The methodology also included desk research and review of the information included in time banks’ websites. The selection of these four time banks was based on the fact that they are the most active ones in Athens, which is the capital of the country gathering around 40 per cent of the Greek population and presenting the severest consequences of the financial crises in terms of unemployment, poverty, shutdown of businesses, share of people with no insurance, etc.

Based on a specific analytical framework summarising the available literature, the Greek time banks are compared with each other but also in relation to the findings in the literature, where some interesting differences emerge. The paper also explores the role that foresight can plan in the development of alternative initiatives like time banks. The interesting conclusion is that foresight can help time banks as much as time banks can help foresight in upgrading its processes to deal with challenges of the twenty-first century.

The research focuses on the four most active time banks in Athens. While this selection is justified, future research would be good to include all the time banks in Greece.

The paper explores how time banks in Greece emerged as well as how they can further develop. This is of direct relevance to society as time banks are by default a community initiative.

Time banks in Greece have not been previously studied. Second, time banks in general were never linked to approaches like foresight. This becomes increasingly important in examining possible approaches toward more sustainable and resilient societies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of emotional culture on the quality of employee–organization relationships (EORs). To understand the nuances of the influence of positive and negative emotional cultures on employee relational outcomes, this study specifically examined four fundamental emotional cultures, namely, joy, love, fear and sadness, in the cultivation of EORs. Further, as more recent emotional connotations of culture delve into the connections between employees’ fundamental need for psychological satisfaction and business success, likewise, this study proposes employees’ psychological need satisfaction as a potential mediator that explains how emotional culture influences employee–organization relational outcomes.

To test the hypothesized model, the authors conducted an online survey on a random sample of 509 employees working in 19 diverse industry sectors in a one-week period in February 2017, with the assistance of a premier global provider of survey services, Survey Sampling International. To test the hypothesized model, structural equation modeling analysis was employed using AMOS 24.0 software.

Results indicated that joy, happiness, excitement, companionate love, affection and warmth could meet employees’ psychological need for mutual respect, care, connection and interdependence within the organization. Such culture contributed to employees’ feelings of trust, satisfaction, mutual control and commitment toward the organization. By contrast, employees in organizations with a dispirited, downcast and sad emotional culture were less inclined to develop quality relationships with the organization. Employees in organizations where the emotional culture was fearful, anxious, tense or scared were less likely to satisfy their psychological need for relatedness.

This study is among one of the earliest attempts to theorize and operationalize organizational emotional culture, which fills the research gap in decades of organizational culture research that focused predominantly on the cognitive aspect. Also, this study expands the thriving relationship management literature, in particular, employee relationship management research by showing the positive impact of emotional culture of joy and love and negative impact of emotional culture of sadness on employee relational outcomes.

This paper aims to analyze how knowledge networks can be configured within a value chain and provide evidence of the coexistence of multiple knowledge networks in the same value chain.

The empirical setting is the Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG wine cluster in the Veneto region of Northeast Italy. Data was collected through the administration by telephone of a semi-structured questionnaire to 37 oenologists, sales managers, production managers and owners of bottling companies in the district. The authors used social network analysis tools to map knowledge networks in the Prosecco cluster.

The results shed light on the importance of singling out knowledge networks in clusters at the value chain level to aid practitioners and researchers in this field. In fact, this research proves the existence of knowledge networks specificities related to the various phases of the production process.

This study has certain limitations. The most relevant is connected to the choice to limit the analysis to a specific cluster. Future research might extend this type of analysis to multiple clusters in different locations.

The authors explain that in the cluster they studied, internationalization, as a common objective, might be made easier if firms could establish a more developed sales knowledge network.

The relational approach to value chain enables disentangling specific roles of each actors. The social dimension of the value chain is taken in consideration.

The authors show that a firm operating in the wine industry can have different knowledge networks in the same value chain. This work adds to previous literature on knowledge networks in clusters by shedding light on an important, but still understudied aspect in the cluster functioning. Knowledge diffusion in clusters is not only uneven but is also value chain stage specific. By intersecting literature on knowledge networks, value chain and cluster research, the authors proposed a new perspective of analysis of the wine industry.

Faith‐based activism in living wage campaigns is on the rise. Summarizes recent campaigns to enact living wage ordinances in US municipalities, underscoring the role of community‐church partnerships such as Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, and other local organizations in the struggle for wage justice. Explores the theological bases of this activism by tracing the evolution of the concept of a just, living wage in Christian social economic thought. To illustrate the historical and philosophical roots of living wage discourse, provides textual analysis of major Roman Catholic and Episcopal Church documents and briefly considers writings by US social economists in the first half of the twentieth century.

This systematic literature review aims to identify how literature approaches motivations for committing fraud in financial statements and presents a framework on these motivations in the light of organismic integration theory (OIT).

Therefore, initially, 251 articles were analyzed. Through a systematic review of the literature, 25 were submitted to content analysis.

The findings suggest that the OIT explains motivational processes neglected by traditional theories, such as the fraud triangle and agency theory. Both theories consider that all human beings are utilitarian by nature. The authors expect that the better we understand the motivational factors that contribute to the large-scale endorsement of immoral behavior, it would be easier to prevent accounting fraud incidents.

This work went to the limit of the proposition of premises; however, other authors can be to advance to the empirical tests.

So, different people have different motivations for committing fraud. For this reason, it is important that organizations, auditors, regulatory and professional bodies that are engaged in combating such dysfunctional behaviors seek to know more deeply whether people are more externally or internally motivated.

This recognition will make it possible to design adequate rules and controls, rather than assuming that everyone is equal, and will be discouraged from committing fraud only when there is a severe punishment associated with it.

This study adds to the stream of scholars who analyze fraud from a broader perspective than the assumption that all beings are rational and seek to maximize their well-being. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the phenomenon of fraud from the perspective of the OIT.

Reports the findings from a study examining how overseas students adapt to their new country of residence. Looks at the place attachment process of migrant students studying in Australia and Singapore. Focuses the analysis on adaptation to the physical and social environments. Discusses attachments to objects and provides suggestions as to how universities can assist in the adjustment process.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model investigating the impact of three constructs, environmental uncertainty, power asymmetry and information sharing on opportunism engagement in exchange relationships.

Data were collected from procurement or sales managers of 99 manufacturing firms in Kampala, Uganda’s capital using a cross-sectional survey. Hypotheses were tested in both the agricultural and non-agricultural manufacturing sectors using multiple regression runs in the SPSS software.

Environmental uncertainty increases opportunism in the agricultural sector whilst power asymmetry increases opportunism in the non-agricultural sector. Across both sectors, information sharing does not have a significant impact on opportunism.

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of opportunism in a developing country context by highlighting the contextual factors within the agricultural and non-agricultural manufacturing sectors that influence opportunism engagement under conditions of environmental uncertainty, power asymmetry and information sharing. This paper presents implications for practice and policy to minimise opportunism with the goal of enhancing the participation of Ugandan manufacturing firms in global supply chains.