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The missing employee voice has become a salient topic in China. This paper aims to document the newest developments relating to the topic by reviewing the recent literature on employment relations and employee voice. The findings of this paper suggest that the purposes of and channels for the employee voice in China have been undergoing significant changes. Different stakeholder groups have approached the issue. ‘Democratic management’ in China, the country’s home-grown concept of employee voice, has been resurrected to encourage more effective employee representation. Apart from this top-down influence from the government and All-China Federation of Trade Unions, this paper also identifies the bottom-up approach driven by the workers, and the external influence from the global corporate social responsibility campaign and nongovernmental labour organizations. Based on the review of the newest developments in workplace democracy and the employee voice in China, this paper proposes a stakeholder framework incorporating these developments. The authors also suggest some directions for future research.

In this paper, the authors examine the strategies used to reduce labour costs in three public hospitals in South Africa, which were effective and why. In the democratic era, after the revelations of large-scale corruption, the authors ask whether their case studies provide lessons for how public service institutions might re-make themselves, under circumstances of austerity.

A comparative qualitative case study approach, collecting data using a combination of interviews with managers, focus group discussions and interviews with shop stewards and staff was used.

Management in two hospitals relied on their financial power, divisions between unions and employees' loyalty. They lacked the insight to manage different actors, and their efforts to outsource services and draw on the Extended Public Works Program failed. They failed to support staff when working beyond their scope of practice, reducing employees' willingness to take on extra responsibilities. In the remaining hospital, while previous management had been removed due to protests by the unions, the new CEO provided stability and union–management relations were collaborative. Her legitimate power enabled unions and management to agree on appropriate cost cutting strategies.

Finding an appropriate balance between the new reality of reduced financial resources and the needs of staff and patients, requires competent unions and management, transparency and trust to develop legitimate power; managing in an authoritarian manner, without legitimate power, reduces organisational capacity. Ensuring a fair and orderly process to replace ineffective management is key, while South Africa grows cohorts of competent managers and builds managerial experience.

In the context of budget constraints and the current quality crisis facing UK healthcare, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of trans-disciplinary community groups (TCG) – an innovative and inexpensive initiative for improving patient care.

Using an action research study, TCG was implemented within a private healthcare firm for vulnerable adults. Qualitative data were gathered over 12 months from 33 participants using depth interviews and focus groups.

TCG led to improved patient activities and increased patient decision-making and confidence in self-advocacy. Key prerequisites were top management commitment, democratic leadership and employee empowerment. However, staff nurses resisted TCG because they were inclined to using managerial control and their own independent clinical judgements.

Whilst the findings from this study should not be generalized across all healthcare sectors, its results could be replicated in contexts where there is wide commitment to TCG and where managers adopt a democratic style of leadership. Researchers could take this study further by exploring the applicability of TCG in public healthcare organizations or other multi-disciplinary service contexts.

The findings of this research paper provide policy makers and healthcare managers with practical insights on TCG and the factors that are likely to obstruct and facilitate its implementation.

Adopting TCG could enable healthcare managers to ameliorate their services with little or no extra cost, which is especially important in a budget constraint context and the current quality crisis facing UK healthcare.

The purpose of this paper is to study the loss of solidarity in three kibbutz factories as an outcome of the process of privatization in their kibbutz communities.

The research was a qualitative investigation, including interviews in three factories.

The research found high a sense of vertical and horizontal solidarity before the privatization. The solidarity stemmed from socialistic principles of the kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) and their factories functioned as an extension of the kibbutz clan: close inter-personal relationships, a devotion to collective needs and democratic decision making in the kibbutz general assembly directly influencing the factories. After the privatization, the organizational solidarity decreased because of formal and procedural issues: the factory became hierarchical, work conditions deteriorated and the familiar spirit of the clan vanished.

There are more than 130 kibbutz factories, most of them in privatized kibbutzim. This paper presents only three of those factories, so it can only represent preliminary and partial findings. It is important to extend this research to examine other kibbutz factories.

The research suggests how factories, in kibbutzim and throughout the world, could respond to weak organizational solidarity: to increase trust and cooperation between management, to create flexible working conditions and to achieve higher productivity.

This is the first study to focus on kibbutz enterprises through the sociological lens of the solidarity theory. Previously, most post-privatization research has focussed on economic questions of profitability.

Energy systems are quickly in transition and their complexity has been dramatically increased. Although there are numerous studies and researches about future of energy in terms of technology or fuels, few studies have been done based on comprehensive socio-technical dimensions of energy systems’ futures. One key question to fill this gap is that how can we consider electricity as a sustainable common good/resource, beyond some conventional considerations related to public or private sector orientation? The purpose of this study is to find an acceptable answer for this question..

To achieve the purpose of this study, after reviewing some relevant studies, key effective factors on the future of energy have been recognized in an expert panel and structurally analyzed by Micmac software based on cross-impact analyze method. Thereafter, four scenarios for transforming the electricity distribution from a monopoly good to a common resource have been developed and described based on scenario workshops method..

Four scenarios for transforming the electricity distribution from a monopoly good to a common resource have been developed and described. These scenarios include “spider grid,” “local grid,” “intermediate grid” and “off-grid.” Furthermore, different dimensions of electricity as a common good/resource have been investigated. As a result, the authors find out that common resource is a creatable concept that can be referred to some goods depending on certain conditions.

Electricity, like any other resource with common characteristics, can be considered and treated as a common resource, depending on the way we generate, share and distribute it, ownership and property rights, management and decision-making mechanisms, social participation processes and governance criteria.

The need to survive in a capitalist economy provides considerable constraints within which co‐operatives must operate. Existing research has been misplaced in believing that the co‐operative doors can be closed and analysis made without reference to the economic environment. Within these constraints some control over the labour process is still possible. Some potential for democratic control by the workforce exists. This control of the labour process within the co‐operative is complex and rests on three levels: control of the work process; control of the co‐operative process; control at the level of the individual. Further investigation is needed into the processes that are at work in the crucial transition from early exhilaration to practical control of the co‐operative process and through that the work process itself.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between organizational democracy and political behaviors in universities.

To examine the relationship between organizational democracy and political behaviors in higher education institutions, a correlational survey model was utilized. Data were collected from 283 academic staff members.

It was found that there is a moderate and negative relationship between organizational democracy and the frequency of encountering political behaviors and that organizational democracy predicts the frequency of encountering political behaviors.

These data shed light on the relationship between organizational democracy and political behaviors according to the views of academic staff. The study has provided empirical evidence that political behavior declines in the presence of organizational democracy.

A crisis typically has three characteristics. First, a crisis is unexpected, a complete surprise. Second, a crisis is normally unpleasant in that current plans are found to work less well than had been anticipated. Third, a crisis requires an urgent response of some kind. That is to say, an immediate change of plans is expected to reduce or avoid the worst consequences associated with the unpleasant surprise. These characteristics imply that not every public policy problem is a crisis, because many public policy problems are anticipated or long-standing. The present social security problem faced by most Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations is not a crisis, although it is a serious problem. Other policy problems are clearly worsened rather than improved when current policies are abandoned. This may be said of constitutional law, in cases in which minor unexpected problems arise from longstanding political procedures. Other policy problems lack immediacy, even when they are unanticipated. This might be argued, for example, of global warming, which was unanticipated prior to 1990 yet is anticipated to take decades to emerge. Not every serious problem is a crisis.¹

Although the research on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) has increased dramatically in diverse fields during the past decade, little is known about the OCBs in the information systems area. The purpose of this study was to explore whether total quality management (TQM) mediates between OCB and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system success.

Data were collected with a questionnaire from subordinates of leaders in steel melting industry in Iran and were used to test the model introduced.

The authors discovered the relationship between OCB and ERP success and the mediating role of TQM in this model.

Based on the findings of this study, managers who try for the success of ERP systems can revise their assessment systems through TQM to identify and reward employees who have positive impact in the field of OCB.

Limited knowledge is available on the mediating role of TQM between OCB and ERP success in the managing field. The authors prepare a model and test this model in that company.

This paper aims to provide an examination of the extent to which different leadership styles impact employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) through a case analysis in the construction sector.

The research is based on a survey of three companies, one client organization, one consultancy firm and one contracting company. The useable survey comprised 251 individual responses from 600 distributed, giving a response rate of 41.83 percent.

The findings show that consultative and consensus leadership styles are prevalent in the construction sector in the UAE. Further, it was found that an employee's job satisfaction is strongly affected by leadership, with more than 50 percent of survey respondents stating that leadership strongly influences their job satisfaction. Leadership style was found to moderately to strongly affect organizational commitment of employees in the industry in the UAE.

The survey provides a useful instrument by which organizations across other sectors and within different cultural contexts can evaluate the significance of leadership style, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

The work is unique in that it is an examination of the impact of organizational leadership style within a contemporary regional context. A number of studies have been carried out in the Arab world that suggest that leadership in Arab culture nurtures consultative and participative tendencies. These are all outdated by more than a decade and no recent study in the Arabian Gulf region exists and none which explore leadership styles' impact on employees.