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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the supply chain management (SCM) skills that support the sensing and seizing of opportunities in a changing business environment.

Based on the previous literature on the T-shaped model of SCM skills, data were collected through a mail survey among Australian business executives. The resultant skill sets are grouped along factors that support the sensing vs seizing of opportunities.

Interestingly from an SCM perspective, functional logistics-related skills are important to maintain competitiveness but are not the ones contributing to a firm’s ability to sense opportunities and threats, and to seize opportunities in a changing business environment. The authors, therefore, support the notion that supply chain managers should be managers first. Factual SCM knowledge is the solid basis, but otherwise only an entry requirement in this field.

Problem-solving skills, along with forecasting and customer/supplier relationship management, stand out as important components that support the ability of supply chain managers to sense and shape opportunities and threats in a turbulent business environment. This focus would tend to suggest the importance of supply chain integration and collaboration as management approaches. Other SCM skills from warehousing and inventory management to transportation and purchasing are more prevalent for maintaining competitiveness.

The results of the survey and the consequential analysis indicate that the content of tertiary-level educational programmes should be significantly reviewed to deliver two distinct (but partially overlapping) streams that focus on the generalist and functionalist managers who must work together in the management of the increasingly global and complex supply chains.

Functional skills often form the basis of training and education programmes for supply chain managers. Whilst these form the solid foundation for their jobs, they are entry requirements at best. In a changing business environment, other skills are needed for success. Given that turbulence is becoming the norm rather than the exception, this finding necessitates rethinking in training and education programmes, as well as in the recruitment of supply chain managers.

Testing the T-shaped model of SCM skills from a dynamic capabilities perspective, the results of the factor analysis lead to a regrouping of skill sets in terms of sensing and seizing opportunities in a turbulent business environment.

Aims to broaden the discussion of labour market changes to include inactivity. Examines the spatial structures of employment, unemployment and inactivity at two dates, 1984 and 1992, which were similar points in the economic cycle. Uses personal and socio‐economic characteristics, as suggested by economic theory, in a multinomial logit model to explain the probability that an individual will be in a given labour market state. Examines the importance of location by taking an average British male and female in both years and observing changes to their predicted probabilities as they move across the regions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine distinctions between embeddedness and belonging in ethnographic fieldwork to make sense of a researcher's identity position in the field.

A confessional ethnographic narrative was retrospectively crafted from field notes from a 12-month fieldwork period. This narrative is presented and critically discussed to problematize the author's remembered sense of place and temporality in the field.

Regardless of whether a researcher “longs to belong” in the field, the paper finds that the research and the researcher belongs to the field. The temporality of an ethnographer's being in the field causes its inhabitants, the research participants to assign him/her a distinct and hybrid identity position.

It is recognized that the research presented is bound by nostalgia. However, such reflexive intersubjectivity must be accounted for in ethnography. The identity position of a researcher influences the research process and outcomes. And that identity is not at the discretion of the researcher.

Adopting the trope of habitus and postcolonial principles, this research illustrates the criticality of reflexive intersubjectivity in ethnography to positioning the researcher as “Other,” not the research participants. For organizational ethnographers, and qualitative researchers more widely, to recognize this ethical consideration has consequences for how fieldwork is practiced and reported.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First to identify economic activities and broader spatial logistics functions that characterise an urban setting, and second to delineate significant spatial logistics employment clusters to represent the underlying regional geography of the logistics landscape.

Using the four-digit Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification, industries “explicitly” related to logistics were identified and aggregated with respect to employment. A principal component analysis was conducted to capture the functional interdependence of inter-related industries and measures of spatial autocorrelation were also applied to identify spatial logistics employment clusters.

The results show that the logistics sector accounts for 3.57 per cent of total employment and that road freight, postal services, and air and space transport are major employers of logistics managers. The research shows significant spatial clustering of logistics employment in the western and southern corridors of Melbourne, associated spatially with manufacturing, service industry and retail hubs in those areas.

This research offers empirically informed insights into the composition of spatial logistics employment clusters to regions that lack a means of production that would otherwise support the economy. Inability to measure the size of the logistics sector due to overlaps with other sectors such as manufacturing is a limitation of the data used.

The research offers policymakers and practitioners an empirically founded basis on which decisions about future infrastructure investment can be evaluated to support cluster development and achieve economies of agglomeration.

The key value of this research is the quantification of spatial logistics employment clusters using spatial autocorrelation measures to empirically identify and spatially contextualize logistics hubs.

After 15 years of successful operation, the British Low Pay Commission’s management of the National Minimum Wage was threatened in 2015 by the government’s introduction the National Living Wage. The purpose of this paper is to consider the underlying principles of previous minimum wage fixing, and the additional thinking of the Living Wage Foundation and the review of the issue by the Resolution Foundation.

The paper draws on the 2016 reports of the Commission to argue that the two statutory wages are unavoidably interlinked and are tied to incompatible criteria.

The paper concludes that the predicted eventual impact of the National Living Wage on the labour market will be unsustainable.

The paper is relevant to minimum wage research.

The paper is relevant to minimum wage policy.

The paper is relevant to low pay policy.

The paper provides original analysis of minimum wage policy.

Distinguishing what employers in different areas of Great Britain need to pay to attract and retain labour has been a central component of public-sector resource allocation decisions. This paper examines how changes in the pattern of spatial wage differentials following the global financial crisis have impacted on the formulae which allocate government funding to local government and health providers in the NHS.

Using employer-reported data on earnings, we examine spatial patterns of private-sector wages in Great Britain between 2007 and 2017. The method permits the analysis of finely defined geographical areas and controls for differences in industry and workforce composition to distinguish those differences that are attributable from unmeasured characteristics, such as differences between areas in the cost of living and amenities. These standardised spatial wage differentials (SSWDs) underpin the funding allocation formulae.

The analysis shows that since 2007 private-sector wage dispersion, both within and between regions, has reduced: lower paid areas have experienced a relative increase in wages and higher paid a relative decline. Over the period, there was a significant reduction in the London wage premium.

This paper demonstrates the importance of ensuring established policies are applied using contemporary data. The SSWDs used to distribute government funds have not been re-estimated for some time. As a result, the current resource allocation model has overcompensated the London region and undercompensated others during this period.

The factors which influence costs of production of food and the prices to the consumer have changed dramatically during this century, but especially since the establishment of trading systems all over the world. Gone are the days when the simple expedients of supply and demand alone governed the situation. The erosion of these principles began at the turn of the century, mainly as a result of the introduction by the rapidly developing industrial power of the USA to protect her own industries against the cheaper products of European countries. They introduced the system of tariffs on imported manufactured goods; it grew and eventually was made to apply to wide sectors of industry. European countries retaliated but the free trade policy of Britain's Liberal government was making the country a dumping ground for all other country's cheap products and surpluses.

The earliest law of the adulteration of food imposed divisions among the local authorities of the day in functions and enforcements; most of the urban and rural sanitary authorities possessed no power under the law. Provisions dealing with unfit food — diseased, unsound, unwholesome or unfit for human food — were not in the first sale of food and drugs measure and there duties were wholly discharged by all local authorities. Rural sanitary authorities were excluded from food and drugs law and boroughs and urban authorities severly restricted. Enforcement in the rural areas was by the county council, although local officers were empowered to take samples of food and submit them for analysis to the public analyst. Power to appoint the public analyst for the area was the main criterion of a “food and drugs authority”. The Minister had power to direct an authority with a population of less than 40,000 but more than 20,000 to enforce the law of adulteration.