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This chapter examines the role of corporate image-making in the everyday life of organizations and its contribution to the mundane reproduction of discrimination. With British Airways as an example, it is argued that images found in corporate materials reflect the organization’s construction of “male” and “female,” “white” and “non-white,” in distinct ways. Further, these images have profound consequences for the ways in which employees visualize themselves, their colleagues and their subordinates. This chapter also shows how organizational images can restrict diversity by identifying certain organizational roles and positions with specific demographic characteristics. It is suggested that (a) these various images have sanctioned and encouraged certain types of “male”/female,” “white”/“nonwhite” behavior, and implicitly prohibited others and (b) these images can be linked to the exclusion of women and people of color from positions of power, authority, and prestige within the airline industry.

Air carriers and aircraft manufacturers are investing in technologies and strategies to reduce fuel consumption and associated emissions. This chapter reviews related issues to assess airline fuel efficiency and offers various empirical evidences from our recent work that focuses on the U.S. domestic passenger air transportation system. We begin with a general presentation of four methods (ratio-based, deterministic frontier, stochastic frontier, and data envelopment analysis) and three perspectives for assessing airline fuel efficiencies, the latter covering consideration of only mainline carrier operations, mainline–subsidiary relations, and airline routing circuity. Airline fuel efficiency results in the short run, in particular the correlations of the results from using different methods and considering different perspectives, are discussed. For the long-term efficiency, we present the development of a stochastic frontier model to investigate individual airline fuel efficiency and system overall evolution between 1990 and 2012. Insight about the association of fuel efficiency with market entry, exit, and airline mergers is also obtained.

The vertical relationships literature has considered situations where both producers and retailers have a degree of market power. On one hand, retailers may have certain freedom in deciding what price to charge to the final consumers. On the other hand, large retailers may also pressurize producers (Wal-Mart is a classic example; see also Comanor and Rey (2000) for a formal treatment of this topic). At the same time, producers may pressurize retailers via resale price maintenance. The interplay of producers' and retailers' bargaining power, in addition to the structure (both horizontal and vertical) of product and distribution markets, eventually determine the sticker price faced by an unsuspecting consumer.

Following deregulation, the airline industry has dramatically changed. In addition to numerous mergers and bankruptcies, the industry has also seen an influx of small, “low-cost” carriers who offer differentiated competition to the traditional legacy carriers. These low-cost carriers traditionally avoided the hub-and-spoke networks of legacy carriers, offering point-to-point service often on adjacent routes. However, events of the past 10–15 years, including the terrorist attacks of 9/11, rising fuel prices, and economic recessions, have led to a shift in the operations of these airlines. The legacy carriers have unbundled many of their services, most notably through baggage fees, seeking to improve efficiency. Low-cost carriers have expanded services into major airports and have shifted to more direct route level competition with the legacy carriers as they use their cost efficiency advantages to their advantage. In this chapter, we examine airport and route choice decision to serve by legacy and low-cost carriers over time. Our descriptive and econometric models point to convergence of operations in terms of the airports and routes that low-cost and legacy carriers serve, with the implication that the current competitive atmosphere improves efficiency as the distinctions between legacy and low-cost carriers have become less obvious.

We investigate the relationship between airline network structure and airport congestion. More specifically, we study the ways in which airlines adjust capacity to delays depending on the network type they operate. We find some evidence suggesting that airlines operating hub-and-spoke structures react less to delays than airlines operating fully connected configurations. In particular, network airlines have incentives to keep frequency high even if this is at the expense of a greater congestion at their hub airports. We also show that airlines in slot-constrained airports seem to react to higher levels of congestion by using bigger aircraft at lower frequencies; thus, we conclude that conditioning the number of available slots on the levels of delays at the airport seems an effective measure that creates the right incentives for airlines to reduce the congestion they generate.

In recent years, inspired by poststructuralist theory, the study of “sex discrimination” has moved from universalistic to con(textual) analysis. Alvesson and Due Billing (1997), for example, argue for analysis of localized constructions and understandings of masculinity and femininity, and Collinson and Hearn (1994, 1996) argue for a greater understanding of different forms of masculinity and the implications for discrimination. In this chapter, we explore the impact of local cultural rules on the social construction of gendered images in three different airlines—Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA), Pan American Airways (PAA), and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). This comparative investigation reveals both differences and similarities across the airlines in the workplace practices that result in discriminatory outcomes for females. Using a rules approach (Helms Mills & Mills, 2000), this study explores the dynamic nature of localized, social phenomena that create, maintain, and unsettle gendered practices. It is through such an exploration that we interpret the notion of hegemonic masculinity and attempt to unravel the “truths” of unquestioned, mundane practices.

Purpose – To study misbehavior as a form of dissent and resistance in an organized labor situation where traditional forms of labor unrest are suppressed and the implications for how we understand the socio-political processes through which misbehavior is constructed.

Methodology/approach – Archival research, cluster analysis, thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis, actor-network theory

Findings – Misbehavior is linked to a series of sociological practices not least of which is the production of knowledge through actor-networks and their relationship to far-reaching discourses. In the empirical material we find a conflict between discourses of labor solidarity and unfair management practices and discourses of patriotism and anticommunism.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – This research is based on archival data, as such it is subject to the choices of holders to contribute and archivists to collect.

Practical implications (if applicable) – This work has implications for labor leadership in the understanding of which disputes may be constrained by contextual discourses and by management in the exploration of possible means of suppressing labor unrest.

Social implications – We have found that labor unrest may be constrained by contextual discourse but that suppressed unrest may result in misbehavior and other forms of counterproductive workplace activities.

Originality/value of chapter – The relationship between contextual discourse and employee misbehavior has not been studied in depth. This work presents a new view of the struggles of the unionized workplace.

This chapter examines the impact of recent airline consolidations in the United States on the technical efficiencies of the airlines involved. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to assess the efficiencies, and the consolidations examined are those that occurred among major network carriers between 2005 and 2013. The airline production process is conceptualized as the transformation of labor, fuel, and fleet-wide seating capacity into available seat-miles, or, under an alternative model specification, into user value, as measured by the airline’s operating revenue. Efficiency is conceptualized in terms of minimizing the airline’s usage of the three inputs, given its output level. The analysis seeks to determine whether the airlines that consolidated were more efficient, post-consolidation, than they were prior to consolidation, compared to airlines that did not enter into consolidations. Although there are limitations owing to the small number of airlines in the dataset, the chapter finds no evidence that the consolidations enhanced the efficiencies of the airlines involved, relative to the efficiencies of the airlines that did not enter into consolidations.