Gender, choice and constraint in call centre employment

This paper examines the genderised experience of employment in call centres. While existing studies have acknowledged structural and agential constraints on women in the workplace, this paper goes further by illustrating the gendered nature of career choice and progression in a context which, in certain respects, appears to have benefitted women's desires for advancement. Drawing on quantitative and in-depth qualitative data from four Scottish call centres, the study provides evidence of gender inequality shaped by structural and ideological workplace and household constraints

Propagators and Violation Functions for Geometric and Workload Constraints Arising in Airspace Sectorisation

Airspace sectorisation provides a partition of a given airspace into sectors, subject to geometric constraints and workload constraints, so that some cost metric is minimised. We make a study of the constraints that arise in airspace sectorisation. For each constraint, we give an analysis of what algorithms and properties are required under systematic search and stochastic local search

Organisational participation and women - an attitude problem?

Employee participation is a dynamic and contested area of organisational behaviour, attracting continuing academic, practitioner and policy interest and debate. This chapter focuses on organisational participation and women

The Patient-Physician Relationship: Overcoming Language and Cultural Barriers

The patient-physician relationship governs the field of medicine, forming the basis for all relationships, interactions, and procedures in medicine. The degree to which a patient trusts his physician and thus is willing to be receptive to medical advice and adhere to assigned treatment is dependent on the quality of his relationship with his physician. The method of relationship chosen will dictate how the patient feels he is perceived and thus to what extend he will participate in his healthcare. A patient-centered approach to medicine will increase this confidence and lead to improved clinical results. Additionally, the rise of physician burnout has also had an effect on this foundational relationship, creating division between the patient and his physician primarily due to complaints against the excessive use of EHRs (electronic health records) and time constraints. Furthermore, in a country of immigrants, the differences in not only language but also between separate cultures and levels of health literacy divides physicians and large populations of their limited English proficiency (LEP) patients. This is a huge detriment to the patient-physician relationship. Lawmakers have created federal and state laws in an effort to install legal action to remedy this, but significant work is still needed to fully bridge the gap. Several solutions have been proposed to do this with the hopeful effect of finally providing equal and better care to all

The Determination of the Union Status of Workers

A model of the determination of the union status of workers is developed that incorporates the separate decisions of workers and potential union employers in a framework which recognizes the possibility of an excess supply of workers for existing union jobs.This theoretical framework results in an empirical problem of partial observability because information on union status is not sufficient to determine whether nonunion workers are nonunion because they do not desire union representation or because they were not hired by union employers despite a preference for union representation.The problem is solved by using data from the Quality of Employment Survey that have a unique piece of information on worker preferences which allows identification and estimation of the model.The empirical results yield some interesting insights into the process of union status determination that cannot be gained from a simple logit or probit analysis of unionization. Chief among these relate to the unioniza-tion of nonwhites and southerners.The well-known fact that nonwhites are more likely to be unionized than otherwise equivalent whites is found largelyto be due to a greater demand for union representation on the part of non-white workers. The equally well-known lower propensity to be unionized among southern workers is found to be due to a combination of a lower demand for union representation on the part of southern workers and a supply of union jobs which is more constrained relative to demand than in the North.

The SEC-system : reuse support for scheduling system development

Recently, in a joint cooperation of Stichting VNA, SAL Apotheken, the Faculty of Management and Organization, and the University Centre for Pharmacy, University of Groningen in the Netherlands, a Ph.D-study started regarding Apot(he)ek, Organization and Management (APOM). The APOM-project deals with the structuring and steering of pharmacy organization. The manageability of the internal pharmacy organization, and the manageability of the direct environment of pharmacy organization is the subject matter. The theoretical background of the APOM-project is described. A literature study was made to find mixes of objectives. Three mixes of objectives in pharmacy organization are postulated; the product mix, the process mix, and the customer mix. The typology will be used as a basic starting point for the empirical study in the next phase of the APOM-project.

Confronting objections to performance pay: A study of the impact of individual and gain-sharing incentives on the job satisfaction of British employees

The increasing interest in incentive pay schemes in recent years has raised concerns regarding their potential damaging effect on intrinsic job satisfaction, or the security of employment. This study explores the impact of both individual and gain-sharing incentives on the overall job satisfaction of workers in the UK, as well as their satisfaction with various facets of jobs, namely total pay, job security, and the actual work itself. Using data from six waves (1998-2003) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and after correcting for the sorting problem that arises, no significant difference in overall job utility is found between those receiving performance-related pay (PRP) and those on other methods of compensation. In addition, non-economic arguments that PRP crowds-out the intrinsic satisfaction of jobs are also not supported, as are popular concerns regarding the adverse impact of PRP schemes on job security. An important asymmetry in the manner in which individual and gain-sharing incentives affect the utility of employees is nonetheless unearthed, as the latter are consistently found to have a positive effect on employee well-being

How Do Workers Fare During Transition? Perceptions of Job Insecurity among Russian Workers, 1995-2004

Labor market conditions deteriorated substantially in the1990s during Russia’s transition from plan to market, generating pervasive and prolonged economic insecurity. Our objective is to document perceptions of job insecurity among Russian workers over the course of the transition period and evaluate whether these perceptions are consistent with actual economic outcomes. We use RLMS data to examine perceptions of job insecurity among Russian workers between 1995 and 1998, when economic conditions were relatively chaotic, and between 2000 and 2004, when economic conditions had stabilized. We employ two measures to assess worker perceptions of job insecurity: one reflects workers’ concerns about job loss, and the second evaluates their concern about ability to find employment in case of a lay-off. Our descriptive analysis focuses on workers who perceived their job situation as insecure during this period, categorizing workers based on their socio-demographic characteristics, job characteristics and region of residence. Using ordered probit analysis, we study conditional distributions of our measures of perceived job insecurity, and how those varied by worker characteristics, current economic conditions, and over time. Similar to studies conducted in developed market economies, we find that perceptions of job security are higher among workers with more education, among workers with status positions (supervisory responsibilities), and among workers who live in locales that are not adversely affected by economic conditions. Unlike these studies, however, we find that perceptions differ between men and women; age is negatively, rather than positively, correlated with confidence in keeping one’s current job; and longer job tenure does not improve perceptions of job security. We find that worker perceptions are largely consistent with actual labor market conditions. Specifically, perceptions of job security were very low in years of major economic change and uncertainty (1995-1998), but improved during the years of relative economic stability (2000-2004). In both periods, workers with relatively weak positions in the labor market tended to have lower perceptions of job insecurity.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57251/1/wp871 .pd

Why Do Non-Union Employees Want To Unionise? Evidence from Britain

The introduction of a statutory recognition procedure offers British unions the opportunity to reverse membership decline by organising non-union workers. The aim of this paper is to test theories of individual union joining in order to assess the likely impact of the new procedure on British union membership. Responses of a nationally representative sample of non-union employees to the question 'how willing would you be to join a union if one were available at your workplace?' are analysed. Results suggest that the new legislation will cause union membership to rise among manual employees, but that unions will face a much harder challenge organising non-manual employees. Unless unions can change their environment, or change themselves then long-term decline is likely.Trade Unions, employee attitudes, unionisation