Partnership in practice

This paper examines human resource management practices adopted in a group of eight case study firms and their tendencies towards versus away from partnership. The analysis is based on data collected during interviews with 124 employees (75 in organisations tending towards partnership and 49 in organisations tending away from partnership) and senior managers, conducted in 1997-1998 for the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Survey (JIWIS). Drawing on the perspectives of senior managers and employees, we examine the tendency of firms towards and away from partnership in employment relations; and in keeping with the JIWIS methodology (Burchell et.al., 2001) we combine quantitative and qualitative evidence in our analysis. Specifically, we are interested in what partnership looks like in these different contexts, the reasons it is pursued (or not), the degree to which companies have been successful in achieving their partnership objectives (from the perspective of both management and employees), and the conditions that have either facilitated or impeded partnership in relationships with employees

Partnership in Practice

This paper examines human resource management practices adopted in a group of eight case study firms and their tendencies towards versus away from partnership. The analysis is based on data collected during interviews with 124 employees (75 in organisations tending towards partnership and 49 in organisations tending away from partnership) and senior managers, conducted in 1997-1998 for the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Survey (JIWIS). Drawing on the perspectives of senior managers and employees, we examine the tendency of firms towards and away from partnership in employment relations; and in keeping with the JIWIS methodology (Burchell et.al., 2001) we combine quantitative and qualitative evidence in our analysis. Specifically, we are interested in what partnership looks like in these different contexts, the reasons it is pursued (or not), the degree to which companies have been successful in achieving their partnership objectives (from the perspective of both management and employees), and the conditions that have either facilitated or impeded partnership in relationships with employees.industrial partnership, corporate governance, cooperation

Computational Approaches to Consecutive Pattern Avoidance in Permutations

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in consecutive pattern avoidance in permutations. In this paper, we introduce two approaches to counting permutations that avoid a set of prescribed patterns consecutively. These algoritms have been implemented in the accompanying Maple package CAV, which can be downloaded from the author's website. As a byproduct of the first algorithm, we have a theorem giving a sufficient condition for when two pattern sets are strongly (consecutively) Wilf-Equivalent. For the implementation of the second algorithm, we define the cluster tail generating function and show that it always satisfies a certain functional equation. We also explain how the CAV package can be used to approximate asymptotic constants for single pattern avoidance.Comment: 12 page

Beyond shareholder primacy? Reflections on the trajectory of UK corporate governance.

Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers, the Combined Code on Corporate Governance and the law on directors’ duties, are strongly orientated towards the norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, however, stakeholder interests are better represented, in particular at the intersection of insolvency and employment law. This reflects the influence of European Community laws on information and consultation of employees. In addition, there are signs that some institutional shareholders are redirecting their investment strategies, under government encouragement, away from a focus on short-term returns, in such a way as to favour stakeholder-inclusive practices by firms. On this basis we suggest that the UK system is currently in a state of flux and that the debate over shareholder primacy has not been concluded

People Matters: Accounting for Culture in Mergers and Acquisitions

People_matters.pdf: 664 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Supersymmetry versus Gauge Symmetry on the Heterotic Landscape

One of the goals of the landscape program in string theory is to extract information about the space of string vacua in the form of statistical correlations between phenomenological features that are otherwise uncorrelated in field theory. Such correlations would thus represent predictions of string theory that hold independently of a vacuum-selection principle. In this paper, we study statistical correlations between two features which are likely to be central to any potential description of nature at high energy scales: gauge symmetries and spacetime supersymmetry. We analyze correlations between these two kinds of symmetry within the context of perturbative heterotic string vacua, and find a number of striking features. We find, for example, that the degree of spacetime supersymmetry is strongly correlated with the probabilities of realizing certain gauge groups, with unbroken supersymmetry at the string scale tending to favor gauge-group factors with larger rank. We also find that nearly half of the heterotic landscape is non-supersymmetric and yet tachyon-free at tree level; indeed, less than a quarter of the tree-level heterotic landscape exhibits any supersymmetry at all at the string scale.Comment: 29 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, 7 table

Cis-regulatory module detection using constraint programming

We propose a method for finding CRMs in a set of co-regulated genes. Each CRM consists of a set of binding sites of transcription factors. We wish to find CRMs involving the same transcription factors in multiple sequences. Finding such a combination of transcription factors is inherently a combinatorial problem. We solve this problem by combining the principles of itemset mining and constraint programming. The constraints involve the putative binding sites of transcription factors, the number of sequences in which they co-occur and the proximity of the binding sites. Genomic background sequences are used to assess the significance of the modules. We experimentally validate our approach and compare it with state-of-the-art techniques

Precision Calibration of Radio Interferometers Using Redundant Baselines

Growing interest in 21 cm tomography has led to the design and construction of broadband radio interferometers with low noise, moderate angular resolution, high spectral resolution, and wide fields of view. With characteristics somewhat different from traditional radio instruments, these interferometers may require new calibration techniques in order to reach their design sensitivities. Self-calibration or redundant calibration techniques that allow an instrument to be calibrated off complicated sky emission structures are ideal. In particular, the large number of redundant baselines possessed by these new instruments makes redundant calibration an especially attractive option. In this paper, we explore the errors and biases in existing redundant calibration schemes through simulations, and show how statistical biases can be eliminated. We also develop a general calibration formalism that includes both redundant baseline methods and basic point source calibration methods as special cases, and show how slight deviations from perfect redundancy and coplanarity can be taken into account.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures; Replaced to match accepted MNRAS versio