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Relationships have changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Fewer couples are marrying, more are cohabiting. Reasons for this shift include more attractive labor market opportunities for women and changing social norms, but the shift may have consequences of its own. A number of models predict that those cohabiting will specialize less than those marrying. Panel data on time use – particularly housework time – as well as on the degree of specialization in more narrowly defined household tasks from the 2001–2019 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to test this prediction.

The time use data for men provides only limited supporting evidence for specialization. The results for women are much stronger. Women who marry without first cohabiting increase their reported housework time more than those who enter cohabitations (by 3.7 hours versus 1.2 hours). The latter generally make up a third of the difference if they do marry. Expanding the analysis to other uses of time yields some further evidence of specialization.

Survey responses on the degree of specialization are more informative. The raw data show substantial intrahousehold specialization and further analysis reveals that on average married couples specialize more than cohabiting couples. Adding couple-specific fixed effects reveals that specialization increases when cohabiting couples marry. Interestingly, there does not appear to be a substantial tradeoff between tasks; partners who report specializing more on one task are more likely to report specializing on other tasks as well. Given the important roles couples have in family formation and the labor market, it is important to understand this intrahousehold behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to use de Sitter's design theory to show how organizational structures can be designed so as to attenuate organizational disturbances and amplify regulatory potential. It is argued that organizational structures with low values on so‐called design‐parameters are themselves no source of disturbances and have the required built‐in regulatory potential.

Key concepts from de Sitter's design theory are introduced and used to show how structures can attenuate disturbances and amplify regulatory potential.

The analysis in this paper deepens our understanding of the role of organizational structures for dealing with organizational complexity, and of the design parameters that should be manipulated to achieve structural attenuation and amplification.

Having a structure permitting organizations to attenuate and amplify is a crucial condition for organizational viability. This paper provides guidelines for the design of such structures.

This is one of a limited number of studies that makes apparent how general insights from (management) cybernetic (e.g. viability, attenuation and amplification) may be realized in organizations by their structural design.

The present paper aims to highlight how manufacturing expansions under conditions of increasing returns, which involve the growth of intermediate goods specializations, support advanced service employment. In addition, the increasing use of manufacturing products in services highlights additional, new service sector employment opportunities.

This paper investigates (1) the manufacturing and service interactions and (2) the investment behaviour in manufacturing using Auto-Regressive Distributed lags (ARDL) and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. The models allow for different specifications to study whether investment behaviour in manufacturing supports dynamic manufacturing and service interactions.

The results underpin how Kaldorian manufacturing as an engine of growth is still relevant in Indian growth and is key to achieving higher advanced employment, export-orientation and services and manufacturing nexus outcomes. What matters, though, is that manufacturing investments are to be guided mainly by intermediate goods specializations. The slowdown of these specializations, explaining the slowdown of manufacturing investment, is therefore, a concern.

A reinterpretation of manufacturing as an engine of growth in which primacy is given to investment behaviour in technical progress functions that can support the growth of specializations in manufacturing and such specialized service employment.

This study aims to investigate how the situational factors that facilities managers (FMs) in Singapore face in their jobs affect their work outcomes. Job situation factors such as types of tasks, interpersonal relationships in teams, supervisors’ actions and advancements opportunities are classified into job characteristics, social environment characteristics, leadership and organisational practices categories.

Based on a systematic literature review, a questionnaire was designed to collect data on work outcomes and job situational factors from FMs working in public housing estates in Singapore. Using the Statistical Package for the Social Science software, inferential statistical analyses were carried out.

FMs reported that they used economical means and resources to carry out their work significantly frequently and achieved significantly high productivity. Complaints are received significantly frequently and maintenance defects are regularly encountered. Many of the job situational factors are present and found to be significantly correlated with work outcomes and some of these may be used to predict FMs’ work outcomes. Based on the correlation results, the frequency of complaints from residents may be reduced through the following ways: make FMs’ work tasks less challenging; reduce the variety of work tasks that FMs need to execute; reduce FMs’ work volume and speed of work.

This study is limited to FMs managing public housing estates in Singapore. The work outcomes are self-reported, and thus susceptible to bias. However, as the respondents reported significantly frequent complaints and defects, this might indicate that the bias is not serious.

FMs’ jobs should be broken down into small parts/tasks and assigned to different FMs to specialise. This makes FMs’ tasks less challenging, and allows them to specialise to increase their productivity, improve their quality of work and overcome the problem of high work volume or demanding work speed. By adopting job specialisation, the frequency of receiving complaints from residents may be reduced.

This study discovered strategies to reduce the number of complaints from residents of public housing about facilities management. The contribution to knowledge is that complaints by residents on facilities management can be reduced by adopting job specialisation but not job enlargement. Decomposing work into different tasks and allowing FMs to focus on a few tasks would lead to a reduction in complaints. It also enables FMs to master the skill and complete the tasks without much oversight or supervision.

The purpose of this study is to offer an integrated literature review of shared services’ organizational structures by specifically focusing on centralization, specialization, control, and formalization mechanisms.

A sample consisting of 103 empirical and conceptual articles, identified in a structured literature search in Science Direct and Scopus, was analyzed. The focus was on exploring the structural dimensions of shared services in various fields: Supply Chains, Finance, Human Resource Management, and Information Technologies. Findings from the selected articles were codified alongside the structural dimensions drawn from contingency theory.

Most of the papers identified were concerned with the Human Resource function or with Accounting and Finance in the private sector. Purchasing was only mentioned in a few general articles and Marketing not represented at all, even though the literature suggests that shared services do exist in this field. This uneven distribution across fields, as well as the reality that many articles fail to make clear divisions between disciplines, is hardly conducive to identifying trends for individual disciplines, and only general trends for each dimension could be identified. Although centralization was one of the most discussed dimensions, there was no consensus as to whether shared services should be centralized or decentralized. Standardization and formalization were both found to be highly important, although a need for customization was also emphasized.

Future research should be oriented toward the structural dimensions of shared services in a broader range of fields as current findings are dominated by the Human Resource function. Another implication of our findings is that scholars could usefully test empirically the dimensions, especially those where opinions differed the most: centralization and specialization.

Earlier conceptualizations noted that the mixed shared service outcomes stem from the diversity in governance and several contingency factors. This work continues the exploration of the contingency factors and mechanisms that, through integration, allow shared services to respond to the environmental uncertainty. The value of this chapter is in examining the structures of different functional types of shared services that are reported as successful in the literature, thus offering an overview of best practices in organizing shared services.

The purpose of this exploratory study is explaining the effects of control and interdependence on decision making at the level of product innovation projects in dyadic strategic alliances.

Drawing on alliance research, strategic decision‐making research and product innovation literature a conceptual framework is developed using a multiple case research methodology.

The empirical case results indicate that decision‐making effectiveness in product innovation projects is dependent on the nature of the decision‐making process which, in turn, is affected by alliance governance structure characteristics.

The case research results only gives an in‐depth understanding of the nature of the effects. A large‐scale quantitative study is needed to arrive at generalizations taking into account industry‐specific and firm‐specific factors.

Managers may want to take the effects on decision making into account when deciding on the alliance governance structure for a new product innovation project.

This paper contributes to earlier research first, by viewing product innovation as a joint activity for which not only one organization is responsible, and second, by relating alliance governance structure to decision making beyond the strategic management level at the level of product innovation projects.

In relation to the analysis of inequality and skill‐bias innovation, this article develops a theoretical model for determining the influence of work organisation on incentives and earnings. In a linear agency model, which explains innovative work organisation practices from an incentive perspective, we show that the static impact of organisational forms on expected earnings can be decomposed into two effects (a risk premium effect and a task complementarity effect originated in learning and information diffusion). Such effects drive productivity and expected pay‐offs upward, as observed in many recent empirical studies. Thus, the development of new work practices based on a greater degree of delegation contributes to the increase of earnings inequality. In a dynamic perspective, the model shows that knowledge dissemination will in general sustain the same trend. However, when initial efforts and productivity are relatively high, output and pay‐offs will decline during the transition to the steady‐state. The overall impact of organisational forms on earnings and inequality may therefore be ambiguous, depending on the importance of learning.

The development of web information systems (WISs) requires modelling on various layers of abstraction. Based on an abstract abstraction layer model (ALM) the work in this article approaches the modelling on the highest layer dealing with strategic modelling. Strategic modelling addresses a very general characterisation of WISs in terms of its content, functionality, context, usage and presentation, and pragmatic guidelines for achieving these. The article discusses branding, utilisation space modelling, utilisation portfolio modelling and atmosphere modelling as the major parts of a strategic model. Furthermore, techniques based on linguistic analysis, communication analysis and metaphors make up the informal means to approach WISs in strategic terms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public cultural organizations use ambidextrous design to balance exploitation and exploration given their organizational structure that mainly stimulates exploitation.

The authors use an abductive methodology and, perform an in-depth comparative case study. The data sample consists of two Belgian public cultural centers located in the Flemish area. In all, 21 semi-structured interviews where analyzed using Nvivo.

Results show, first, that although both cases have the same formal organization chart, their informal structure differs. Second, both cases have a different point of view toward exploitation and exploration. Third, no “pure” ambidextrous designs were found. Finally, the paper formulates theoretical propositions for ambidexterity and public sector research.

Limitations of this paper are threefold. First, the authors only compared two cases, so generalization of the findings is limited. Second, although the authors managed to make contributions to ambidexterity and public sector research, theory building is not finished. Finally, researchers have to improve empirical evidence focusing on which design elements lead toward ambidextrous public organizations.

This paper makes a threefold contribution to ambidexterity literature and public sector research. First, the focus on public sector organizations is a rarely taken approach in ambidexterity research. Second, the specific use of ambidextrous design attributes to the limited public sector research that has focused on ambidexterity. Third, the focus on small organizations with limited resources is a rarely taken focus in ambidexterity and public sector research.

The article seeks to analyse and explore the contradictions and variations in the concepts “team” and “teamwork” and their use in the NSW, Australia, commercial cleaning industry.

The article utilises an ethnographic study of a large Australian cleaning firm. Data were collected using participant observation, field notes, and interviews with managers.

The study provides evidence for the limited uptake of the idealised form of teamwork in commercial cleaning and suggests that teamworking is another means of coordinating groups of workers. Furthermore, the findings support previous research into the paradox of teams without teamwork.

The research provides an insight into the largely neglected area of the reorganisation of work in commercial cleaning. It also provides a critique of the concept of teams and teamworking.