Search results

This paper presents a synoptic account of the emerging knowledge‐based forms of intelligent working and the new approaches to the management of space and time, so that groups, teams and individuals can work independently of location, time and place. The challenge for facility management and facility design is to provide fast response agile systems and short duration business space and infrastructure to provide high quality work‐space and work‐time settings to support the knowledge‐based businesses of the future.

The efficient functioning of the labour market is an important factor that affects long-term economic growth. The interaction of supply and demand on the labour market is influenced by institutions which change the motivations and behaviour of economic actors and, ultimately, the flexibility of the labour market. There is no consensus in the literature on the effect these institutions have on labour market outcomes. This chapter focuses on a set of selective labour market institutions (employment protection legislation, minimum wages, unemployment benefits, labour taxation, trade unions and active labour market policies), compares their relevance to other European Union (EU) countries and through the lens of the Beveridge curve it tries to evaluate their impact on effectiveness of the Czech labour market. The international comparison shows that most of the considered institutions/regulations do not reach such importance (except employment protection legislation) and that they have a significant negative effect on labour market outcomes. Even the model of the Beveridge curve does not indicate that the Czech labour market is characterised by rigidities that would impair the effectiveness of a matching process at the aggregate level.

Unwarranted allocation of personal space and the accumulation of personal ‘stuff’ can become impediments to business agility, turning conventional offices into ‘millstones’ which suppress an organisation’s ability to change direction smartly in the face of new competition and other business forces. Workplace design needs to cater for perpetual change of occupancy, organisation, work processes and messages about the business. Tangible assets should be dynamic, adaptable and even portable. Setting aside arguments in favour of ‘showpiece’ corporate headquarters, this paper advocates that what is needed to help business units to stay competitive is a ‘minimalist workspace’ ‐ kept free of ‘stuff’ that clutters and impedes quick and inexpensive adaptation to local needs, every few months rather than every few years. The minimalist workplace does not need to be bland or impersonal. Imaginative design and minute attention to detail of the physical environment and the tools, technology and support services can produce attractive and ‘liveable’ environments which can successfully accommodate personal preference and promote a sense of belonging as well as mobility. This paper outlines four ‘golden rules’ for best practice in the minimalist workplace, demanding more proactive space management and more intelligent real estate design and specification to cater for greater utilisation of facilities.

Organisations cannot effectively implement advanced workplace strategies and investment projects without clearly communicated vision, prioritised objectives and appropriate performance metrics. With any business strategy and investment project, the objectives and metrics selected will combine both quantitative and qualitative elements and aim to achieve both internal and external impact. This multidimensionality of objectives indicates the use of a balanced scorecard system of measurement. This paper argues that a coherent evaluation and feedback system should be an integral part of any workplace change programme, and that time and expenditure should be budgeted for learning from prototyping or piloting, review, adaptation and communication of feedback. Without such a learning loop, real estate professionals will fail to convince business leaders of how changes in corporate workplaces contribute to business success.

Many organisations have increased collaborative performance by introducing new technologies and new processes; by integrating these with innovations in the working environment they can catalyse additional and sustained improvements in collaborative performance. If planned, designed and managed as an integrated system encompassing people, process and place issues, the workplace environment can be a powerful catalyst for business change.

Based on a presentation entitled “Modernising government workplaces”, looks at how modernisation can help in increasing productivity in the workplace. Examines public buildings as economic and social assets and factors of productivity while taking into account the work of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Concludes that CABE should set up an independent research body that produces evidence‐based knowledge, applied in educational programmes at universities, commercial training bodies and professional institutes, and which provides evidence‐based knowledge, not just experience‐based learning.

This paper provides initial findings from a pilot to introduce graduate mental health workers into primary care, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) across three localities in the north west of England in the UK. The progress of the pilot was monitored by gathering information from students, managers, supervisors and mentors regularly throughout the 12 month period, during which the pilot cohort were being formally trained. The potential of the new role of primary care graduate mental health workers to address problems of volume and access to services, particularly how the role might contribute to developing nonspecialist primary care services, is considered.

Haworth Press, the well known publishers in the library and information science field, have recently cottoned on to an interesting idea: devote a special issue of one of their journals to a special theme, and at the same time produce a hardback book, reasonably priced, that reproduces the articles. The idea is to appeal to a market other than the libraries that will typically subscribe to the Haworth journals. Success depends upon the collection of chapters forming a coherent whole. This book, reproduced from a special issue of The Reference Librarian, partly succeeds. The 150 page hardback book comprises seven articles, from five different authors (two authors supply two articles each) with an editor's introduction. The articles are fairly typical journal articles, reporting research results; some could easily have graced the pages of Online and CD‐ROM Review. The articles vary somewhat in length and style, but generally either review the literature of a particular topic, or describe some recent research work. The title is somewhat misleading, as the book is NOT comprehensive; a better subtitle would have been ‘Aspects of Use and User Behavior’.

Purpose – David Gordon (1996) contended that the size of the managerial/administrative class has expanded in recent decades and that this has contributed to growing earnings inequality. This argument, however, has received insufficient attention despite its potential to explain some of the growth of earnings inequality in recent decades. We assess whether managerial intensity contributes to earnings inequality in affluent democracies, and thus evaluate his argument and extend it with a comparative perspective.

Methodology/approach – Our analyses are based on panel analyses of 17 affluent democracies from 1973 to 2004. Utilizing random- and fixed-effects models, we include three different measures of earnings inequality and an original measure of managerial intensity.

Findings: We show that managerial intensity is positively associated with all three measures of earnings inequality in random-effects models. As well, managerial intensity is positively associated with earnings inequality in the fixed-effects models for the 90/50 ratio of earnings inequality, but is not significant for the other two measures.

Originality/value – This study provides one of the few tests of Gordon's argument. We demonstrate that growing managerial intensity has contributed to rising earnings inequality in affluent democracies. In contrast to previous research, we argue that much of the rise of earnings inequality is due to political/institutional factors rather than labor market and demographic change. One of the reasons for Europe's relatively lower level of and slower increase in earnings inequality is its lower managerial intensity.

Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to explore whether variation in the distribution of union members across the income distribution affects the role of unions in redistributive politics.

Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual part of the study provides a theoretical motivation for disaggregating organized labor by income. The empirical part uses European Social Survey data for 15 West European countries 2006–2008 to describe the composition of union membership by income across countries and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the implications of where union members are located in the income distribution for social protection and redistribution.

Findings – In most countries, workers with incomes above the median are better organized than workers below the median and the income of the median union member exceeds the income of the median voter. The political implications of the overrepresentation of relatively well-off workers depend on the mechanism of preference aggregation within unions and the influence of unions in the policymaking process. While leaving a thorough examination of these issues for future research, we present descriptive regression results suggesting that the membership composition of unions by income is related to income inequality and redistribution but not social insurance.

Originality/value of paper – This is the first comparative study to map the distribution of union members across the income distribution and to examine the implications of compositional variation by income for redistributive politics.