Safety climate in the service industries: the example of catering operations

The policy of self-regulation, which is central to occupational safety and health law in the United. Kingdom, is reviewed in the context of the catering industry. The influence of service and service quality on selfregulation and safety climate is considered. Some previously unpublished fiudings from a larger study on the factors affecting safety behaviour in lecturer chefs are reported and examined in terms of the above. It is suggested that the traditional autonomy and autocracy of chefs in catering organisations give them a pivotal role in self-regulation. In addition, the pursuit of service quality influences the chefs in certain ways, some of which may be negative in terms of safety management. It is argued that the pivotal role of chefs in delivering service quality can potentially adversely affect his or her role in safety management. Finally, it is proposed that the conflict between safety and production in the service industries may be more acute than in manufacturing because of the need for worker and, more particularly. supervisor concurrence rather than mere compliance with service quality strategies

Construction Partnering: Can These Protocols Build a Stronger Labor-Management Community?

In an expansive marketplace where large organizations in the construction, manufacturing, service and union industries are facing increased global competition, collaborative labor relations are essential to maximizing efficiency and productivity. It is for this reason that developing collaboration between labor and management is highly researched and consulted by academics and professionals throughout the world. Although various models of collaboration have been developed, none have been found to clearly overcome that insidious conflict and paradigm of Labor vs. Management. The purpose of this paper is to provide academics and consultants (mediators/facilitators) an additional perspective for designing, developing and implementing the best possible collaborative labor-management relationship model. This paper will provide a model by which the roles in the construction industry parallel and match the roles of management and labor in the manufacturing/service industry. Then five specific protocols in construction partnering will be reviewed and considered for their applicability and potential benefit to the labor-management community. Throughout, the effect upon the role of the mediator/facilitator will be discussed

Applying a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis for conflict resolution during new service development

The management of the New Service Development (NSD) process remains a key research priority for service organizations. As a diverse mix of team members with different skills, perspectives and backgrounds participate in development teams and close collaboration is required among them, conflicts are likely to arise among team members. Different team members perceive conflict episodes in a different way and often embrace different conflict management behaviours and orientations (e.g. competing, avoiding) to deal with them. This study recognises NSD team as a complex system, through which individual members’ conflict management style choices enable team developmental dynamics, which sequentially lead to intragroup conflict resolution. Although a lot of work exists around the role of individual members’ conflict management styles, little research scrutiny is attracted on how teams solve intragroup conflicts and even limited empirical evidence is available regarding the linkages between individual and team factors can contribute to resolve intragroup conflicts. The present study taking under consideration the causal complexity, asymmetry and idiosyncratic nature of NSD conflict resolution, utilizes Complexity theory and leverages the advantages of fs/QCA in order to shed light on the NSD intragroup conflict resolution. Data was collected from employees in several service industries such as advertising, financial, insurance, consulting, IT services and telecommunications providers. The results confirm the major tenets of Complexity theory highlighting that any attempt to examine complex phenomena, such as NSD conflict resolution, as simple ones, based on symmetrical methodological approaches, may lead to simplistic and distorted explanations. In fact, the results demonstrate that there is not a ‘one fits all’ solution in order to solve NSD conflicts. Different facets for both the conflict-management styles and team dynamics act in various combinations in order to predict high scores in NSD conflict resolution

The Appropriate Resolution of Corporate Disputes: A Report on the Growing Use of ADR by U.S. Corporations

A quick scan of the business and legal press reveals that, compared with a few years ago, many more disputes are being resolved through negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. The change is an incremental one, on the upper end driven by costly, difficult cases involving business risks that have called for the innovative handling of dispute resolution processes, and on the everyday level driven by the need for lower-cost, streamlined ways to handle growing numbers of ordinary disputes. Policy makers at all levels of government have encouraged this trend. Accompanying this public policy movement, increasing numbers of law firms and corporate legal departments are establishing alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practice sections, acquiring expertise or hiring experts in dispute resolution. Many corporations are encouraging the use of ADR not only where it has traditionally been used but also to solve an ever-widening range of conflicts between the corporation and other businesses, individuals, and government agencies. In each of these relationships, it appears that the overwhelming costs of litigation have pushed corporations toward increasing their use of ADR processes. This growing trend and the widespread need for information about appropriate means of resolving corporate disputes motivated us to conduct the survey reported on here

Water Resources In Nepal: Institutional Analysis Based On Legal Provisions

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Volume 9, 200

Insurance Industry and E-Business

亀井利明教授古稀記念特

Innovation in Isolation: Labor-Management Partnerships in the United States

In the United States, as in other advanced industrial countries, worker participation in management has taken on increasing importance, placing pressures on employers and unions to change how they deal with employees/members, and with each other. This paper examines two of the most impressive cases in the U.S.: the partnerships between General Motors (G.M.) and the United Autoworkers union (U.A W.) at Saturn and between BellSouth and the Communication Workers union (C.W.A.). We outline the evolution and the basic features of these innovations, as well as highlighting certain ongoing problems. These problems, we argue, confront the parties to employment relations in the U.S. more generally, reflecting profound ambivalence about such experiments, and their continued isolation as ‘islands of excellence ’. As such, these cases both illustrate the vast potential for labor-management partnerships as well as the dampening effect of the employment relations context in the U.S

“Volunteering” to Arbitrate Through Predispute Arbitration Clauses: The Average Consumer’s Experience

This article helps build the empirical foundation necessary for an informed debate regarding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts by providing preliminary insight into how businesses\u27 use of these clauses affects consumers\u27 ability to pursue their legal rights. To this end, the article reports the results of a study investigating, in a wide variety of consumer purchases, the frequency with which the average consumer encounters arbitration clauses, the key provisions of these clauses, and the implications of these clauses for consumers who subsequently have disputes with businesses they patronize