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The purpose of this paper is to examine the marketization of domiciliary care, its consequences for employment practice, specifically fragmented time, and the implications for care quality.

Focus groups and face-to-face or telephone interviews were conducted with care commissioners, service providers and care workers across Wales. There were 113 participants in total.

These demonstrate fragmented time’s negative consequences for service providers, care workers and, ultimately, care quality.

No care recipients were interviewed and care quality was explored through the perceptions of other stakeholders.

For policy makers, tensions are evidenced between aspirations for high-quality care and commissioning practice that mitigates against it. Current care commissioning practices need urgent review.

The research extends the definition of fragmented time and integrates with a model of care quality to demonstrate its negative consequences. Links between employment practice and care quality have only previously been hinted at.

This chapter draws on longitudinal case study research that focused on the experiences of hospitality employees working in a UK university who worked split shifts in the morning and evening while completing NVQ 2 and 3 apprenticeship training. We show how fragmented working time (Rubery, Grimshaw, Hebson, & Ugarte, 2015) rather than long hours led to the apprenticeship training further eroding an already blurred work-life boundary as workers were required to complete training activities in their non-work time which for them is during the middle of the day. We argue current depictions of the positive impact of training and development on low paid workers are decontextualized from the challenges and priorities of workers whose work-life interface is already complex because of working fragmented hours across the day. This is complicated even further by the dynamic and evolving experiences of workers themselves as they experience the highs and lows of combining paid work and training. We situate the research in the context of wider conceptual debates that call for a more inclusive approach to research on the work-life interface (Warren, 2021) and highlight implications for HR practitioners who want to offer such opportunities to low paid workers in sectors such as hospitality, while also recognizing the complex challenges such workers may face.

The rise of knowledge work has entailed controversial characteristics for well-being at work. Increased intensification, discontinuities and interruptions at work have been reported. However, knowledge workers have the opportunity to flexibly adjust their work arrangements to support their concentration, inspiration or recuperation. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the experienced well-being of 46 knowledge workers was subject to changes during and after a retreat type telework period in rural archipelago environment.

The authors conducted a longitudinal survey among the participants at three points in time: one to three weeks before, during, and two to eight weeks after the period. The authors analyzed the experienced changes in psychosocial work environment and well-being at work by the measurement period by means of repeated measures variance analysis. In the next step the authors included the group variable of occupational position to the model.

The analysis showed a decrease in the following measures: experienced time pressure, interruptions, negative feelings at work, exhaustiveness of work as well as stress and an increase in work satisfaction. There were no changes in experienced job influence, clarity of work goals and work engagement. Occupational position had some effect to the changes. Private entrepreneurs and supervisors experienced more remarkable effects of improvement in work-related well-being than subordinates. However, the effects were less sustainable for the supervisors than the other two groups.

This paper provides insights into how work and well-being are affected by the immediate work environment and how well-being at work can be supported by retreat type telework arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

The purpose of this paper is to identify motivational factors for using wearable healthcare devices and examine the process by which these factors are integrated with the technology acceptance model (TAM) and contribute to the adoption of the devices.

An online survey assessed the proposed motivational factors for the adoption of wearable healthcare devices. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted on collected data (n=877) to demonstrate the reliability and validity of the measurement and structural model.

Perceived control and interactivity of wearable healthcare devices as well as users’ innovative tendencies are positively associated with usage intention, while perceived cost has no significant effects on user intention to use the devices. The results also supported the explanatory strength and predictability of TAM.

Although the promising role of wearable devices in healthcare industries has gained much consumer attention, limited empirical investigations have been conducted on explicating how user attitude and usage intention are shaped regarding the devices. This study serves as one of the first attempts to empirically examine the adoption process, with implications for the future usage of wearable technology in the healthcare context.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Describes research into managers′ experiences of significant organizational change attempts. The research project was aimed at developing frameworks which: describe, illuminate and enable a better understanding of managers′ journeys through organizational change; serve as a template for bringing together the very diverse and fragmented literature relating to individuals experiencing change; highlight issues and pointers for the design and facilitation of effective organizational change initiatives. The first part describes the context, spirit, intentions, sample and methodology of the research. Also, reviews a broad range of literature which can inform our understanding of individuals in change. Propounds the need to open up the “real world” of organizational change, as perceived and experienced by managers, rather than any “ideal” view of how that world is desired or supposed to be. Presents and discusses research findings on the sensed and initiating “primary” triggers for change‐that is, the formal and communicated organizational change objectives; and the perceived and felt “secondary” triggers for change‐that is, the issues raised by, and the implications of, the organizational changes for individual managers. The second part presents a framework depicting the phases and components of managers′ journeys through organizational change. On the framework, the experience of managers can be located, in terms of their thoughts, feelings and behaviours, as the processes of change unfold. While each manager′s journey was found to be unique, the framework proved to be ubiquitous in enabling the mapping of all the managers′ journeys, and it also accommodates literature on phenomena as diverse as learning, personal transition, catastrophe and survival, trauma and stress, loss and “death”, and worry and grief. The findings emphasize the profoundness and deeply felt emotionality of many managers′ experiencing of change in organizations. Finally, identifies the outcomes of managers′ journeys through significant attempts at organizational change. Also presents the reported helping and hindering factors to those journeys. Implications of these findings are pursued, particularly in terms of the leadership and development roles and behaviours required, if the organization and its management are to move beyond simply requiring change towards actively facilitating its achievement.

Examines the history of the Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR) 1969‐74 ‐ its origins, organization and policies ‐ and then evaluates its contribution as an agent of reform in the context of the perceived problems of the 1960s and 1970s. Considers whether there are any lessons to be learnt for the future given the possibility of a Labour Government, developments in Europe and the 1995 TUC policy document Your Voice at Work. Despite the drastic changes in industrial relations and in the economic, political and social environment, the answer is in the affirmative. In particular, the importance of a new third‐party agency having an independent governing body like the CIR and not a representative body like the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS); in its workflow not being controlled by government; and in its decisions on recognition being legally enforceable.