Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice

John W. Budd contends that the turbulence of the current workplace and the importance of work for individuals and society make it vitally important that employment be given a human face. Contradicting the traditional view of the employment relationship as a purely economic transaction, with business wanting efficiency and workers wanting income, Budd argues that equity and voice are equally important objectives. The traditional narrow focus on efficiency must be balanced with employees\u27 entitlement to fair treatment (equity) and the opportunity to have meaningful input into decisions (voice), he says. Only through a greater respect for these human concerns can broadly shared prosperity, respect for human dignity, and equal appreciation for the competing human rights of property and labor be achieved. Budd proposes a fresh set of objectives for modern democracies—efficiency, equity, and voice—and supports this new triad with an intellectual framework for analyzing employment institutions and practices. In the process, he draws on scholarship from industrial relations, law, political science, moral philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, and economics, and advances debates over free markets, globalization, human rights, and ethics. He applies his framework to important employment-related topics, such as workplace governance, the New Deal industrial relations system, comparative industrial relations, labor union strategies, and globalization. These analyses create a foundation for reforming employment practices, social norms, and public policies. In the book\u27s final chapter, Budd advocates the creation of the field of human resources and industrial relations and explores the wider implications of this renewed conceptualization of industrial relations

Diversifying the uniform? The participation of minority ethnic personnel in the British armed services

This paper considers the pressures on the British armed services to increase the participation of minority ethnic groups and assesses recent government policy on this issue. Limited progress has been made towards the realisation of current goals, which are framed largely in terms of the concept of ‘equal opportunities’. The authors argue that while the concept of diversity appears to provide a more sociologically well founded basis for future government strategy on this aspect of service personnel policy, there remain significant obstacles to effective implementation of practical measures. These concern in particular the way in which the armed services relate to wider questions of British identity. Successfully increasing the participation of minority ethnic communities in the British armed services, we contend, entails developing a new framework for British identity and citizenship that cannot be accomplished by the armed services alone. Rather it is a responsibility of both government and wider society as a whole

Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts

In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalisation of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterisation of the agreement according to the normative concepts of: obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been implemented in the course of our work.

National Profiles of Work Integration Social Enterprises: United Kingdom

This paper is part of a larger research project entitled "L'entreprise sociale : lutte contre l'exclusion par l'insertion économique et sociale" (ELEXIES). This project is run jointly by the European Network of Social Integration Enterprises (ENSIE), the European Confederation of Workers' Co-operatives, Social Co-operatives and Participative Enterprises (CECOP) and the EMES European Research Network. The ELEXIES project is financed by the European Commission (DG Employment and Social Affairs) in the framework of the "Preparatory Action to Combat and Prevent Social Exclusion". The part of the project in which this paper takes place is co-ordinated by Eric BIDET (Centre d'Economie Sociale, University of Liège, Belgium) and Roger SPEAR (Co-ops Research Unit, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK)