Employee Perceptions of HRM and TQM and the Effects on Satisfaction and INtention to Leave

There is a growing interest in theory and in practice with regard to the relationship between human resource management [HRM] and total quality management [TQM] as well as the relationship between these two perspectives and business performances. Empirical research suggests significant effects of HRM/TQM on the performances of an organisation. The majority of research in this area is focused on the effects of HRM/TQM at the organisational level. Research on the perceptions of individual employees might obtain new insights for further discussion on the effectiveness of HRM/TQM in an organisation. The authors have the opportunity to analyse a relatively large database with recent data of individual employee perceptions from a knowledge-intensive organisation in The Netherlands. This analysis gives new insight in relation to concepts like 'co-operation', 'information', 'leadership', 'salary', 'work conditions', and 'goal setting' in relation to employee satisfaction and the intention to leave the organisation.employee morale;human resources management (HRM);total quality management (TQM)

Reforming Copyright Law to Encourage Creativity in Kenya: A Comparative Study of Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States

This thesis proposes reform to Kenyan copyright law for the encouragement of creativity. It is argued that the encouragement of creativity is the key objective of copyright law. Creativity is a highly derivative process drawing on existing ideas and concepts. Kenyan creativity draws heavily on its culture, particularly its traditional cultural expressions. Kenya’s traditional cultural expressions are currently protected under a sui generis regime that restricts the creative re-use of ideas. It is therefore urged that the tried and true edifice of copyright law is a more appropriate regime for the regulation of traditional cultural expressions, in order to encourage creativity. However, as will emerge, copyright law is not free from its own inadequacies. As its methodology this thesis employs legal and theoretical perspectives. Regarding legal perspectives, an examination, review and comparison of the copyright laws of Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States demonstrates that the structure of copyright law has led to a failure in it adequately encouraging creativity. Instead of understanding and providing for the true nature of creativity, as a derivative process, copyright law valorises the Romantic “author-genius”. Theoretical perspectives reveal that this position has arisen due to copyright law being dominated by economic concerns. The domination of law as well as culture by economic concerns is cautioned in the theory of social three-folding put forward by the economist Rudolf Steiner. Social three-folding calls for a freeing of law and culture from economic dictates. This research draws on Steiner’s theory of social three-folding as a framework through which Kenyan copyright law can be reformed and conceptualises creativity, primarily, with regard to John Locke’s “theory of knowledge”. On this backdrop an online database for traditional cultural expressions in Kenya is proposed. The unique aspect of this database would be that it would contain a guiding statement on what may be deemed as ideas, the building blocks of creativity, in a particular traditional cultural expression

The firm relocation decision: a logit model

This paper deals with the relocation of firms. There are indications from former research, that age, size and market are determinants of relocated companies. This paper aims to demonstrate that mobile firms are younger, more export oriented and more rapidly growing. With the use of two theories, Location theory and the theory of Organisational Ecology, it is tried to construct a theoretical background for an age-related bias in the decision to relocate. Location theorieexplain from different perspectives the location of economic activities. Spatial movements of firms represent only a small part of industrial change, but it does influence the overall change of production and employment levels. Organisational Ecology deals with the causes of vital events (birth, death and mobility) of firms in the organisational population, because mobility is one of the visible outcomes of the selection process. The theoretical constructs for this decision are tested with the use of the Cranet database that provides information on company relocation in eighteen European countries in 1996-1999. First, a general analysis of the phenomenon in the European countries is presented. Second, the connection between relocation and age, size and market of companies in three example countries (Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) is described on the basis of the literary review. The findings are in general that when firms grow older they are too large and too embedded in the spatial environment to move. Younger firms are more likely to relocate, because they are expected to have higher growth rates and therefore need more space, one incentive to relocate.

Spatio-structural granularity of biological material entities

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the continuously increasing demands on knowledge- and data-management that databases have to meet, ontologies and the theories of granularity they use become more and more important. Unfortunately, currently used theories and schemes of granularity unnecessarily limit the performance of ontologies due to two shortcomings: (i) they do not allow the integration of multiple granularity perspectives into one granularity framework; (ii) they are not applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities, which cover most of the biomedical material entities.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The above mentioned shortcomings are responsible for the major inconsistencies in currently used spatio-structural granularity schemes. By using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a top-level ontology and Keet's general theory of granularity, a granularity framework is presented that is applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. It provides a scheme for granulating complex material entities into their constitutive and regional parts by integrating various compositional and spatial granularity perspectives. Within a scale dependent resolution perspective, it even allows distinguishing different types of representations of the same material entity. Within other scale dependent perspectives, which are based on specific types of measurements (e.g. weight, volume, etc.), the possibility of organizing instances of material entities independent of their parthood relations and only according to increasing measures is provided as well. All granularity perspectives are connected to one another through overcrossing granularity levels, together forming an integrated whole that uses the <it>compositional object perspective </it>as an integrating backbone. This granularity framework allows to consistently assign structural granularity values to all different types of material entities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The here presented framework provides a spatio-structural granularity framework for all domain reference ontologies that model cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. With its multi-perspectives approach it allows querying an ontology stored in a database at one's own desired different levels of detail: The contents of a database can be organized according to diverse granularity perspectives, which in their turn provide different <it>views </it>on its content (i.e. data, knowledge), each organized into different levels of detail.</p

Continuing Case Against Inter-Period Tax Allocation

The annual and industry-based behavior of deferred tax balances is analyzed and the accounting theory and procedures required by the FASB are examined in the context of the unit problem. The unit problem involves the selection of the appropriate perspective (either individual or aggregate) for applying measurement and recognition conventions to phenomena of interest. From an individual event perspective, the FASB's conclusions regarding liability recognition are inconsistent with the definition of liabilities found in the Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts No. 6. In addition, the use of inconsistent perspectives by S109 creates disagreements with the FASB&rsquo;s position, where both the individual and aggregate perspectives are used simultaneously as the basis of the FASB's decisions. The impact of eliminating deferred taxes and adjusting the liability and stockholders equity balances on the debt-to-equity (DTE) ratio is computed for each year and 20 industries in the COMPUSTAT database (1997 &ndash; 2006). The change results in significant decreases in DTE each year and in all industries

COMPARISON OF DRYING SHRINKAGE AND DRYING CREEP KINETICS IN CONCRETE

The aim of this paper is to show and compare the time evolution of drying shrinkage and drying creep in concrete from three different perspectives. The first one analyzes the basic equations defined in the most common design codes and prediction models for the description of the long-term behavior of concrete (ACI 209, EC2, Model Code 2010, B3, B4). Next, the evolution of drying creep and shrinkage is examined by processing suitable experimental data available from the database developed at the Northwestern University. Finally, the last point of view investigates the results obtained from the finite element simulations employing the material point approach, in particular, the material model based on the Microprestress-Solidification theory

Structural adjustment and forest resources - the impact of World Bank operations

Over two decades, the World Bank has undertaken many structural adjustment operations withgovernments of developing countries. During negotiations for structural adjustment loans (SALs), partner governments agree to specific policy reforms, whose implementation becomes a condition for disbursement of SAL funds. Conditionality varies with local circumstances, but generally supports privatization of state enterprises, liberalization of the domestic economy, and openness in international trade. Structural adjustment operations have often been controversial because they are explicitly political. Opposition, or support reflects ideological perspectives, perceptions of who gains, and who loses economically from a SAL, or beliefs about its environmental, and social impacts. Environmental groups express particular concern about SALs'impacts on the rate of deforestation. Debate about adjustment, and deforestation has been fueled largely by anecdotes, and a few country cases bases on limited time-series data. The authors broaden the analysis by combining a complete record of Bank SAL operations, with a 38-year socioeconomic database for 112 developing countries. They find that adjustment has greatly affected imports, exports, consumption, and production in many forest products sectors (such as fuel-wood, sawn-wood, panels, pulp, and paper). Some activities have increased, and some declined, but overall, the effects have balanced each other. The net impact on domestic round-wood production, the authors'proxy for forest exploitation, has been almost exactly zero. Their results suggest that growth in round-wood production is explained well by population growth, urbanization, and world demand for forest products. Their findings suggest that adjustment has not promoted domestic deforestation, but it has increased net imports of wood products, implying some displacement of pressure onto other countries'forest resources. They also find that devaluations have significantly increased the exploitation of forest resources.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Silviculture,Consumption,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Silviculture,Forestry,Consumption

Work in Progress: A meta-literature review of Moral Foundations Theory as applied in game studies

This paper outlines an in-progress systematic review of extant research in game studies that has incorporated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), or relevant extensions of that theory to media entertainment, such as the Moral Intuition and Media Entertainment/Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME). Due to the interdisciplinary nature of these theoretical perspectives as well as game studies broadly, systematic review is critical to helping us collectively understand and collate the research in this area. The systematic review is done in two parts, one as a deep description of the characteristics of included studies, and one as a statistical analysis (as well as a qualitative assessment) of the quality of those included studies. At this stage, an initial set of 24-26 articles focused on gaming and MFT/MIME have been uncovered via systematic database searching, and both study characteristic and study quality coding sheets in progress (shared, within)

Employee Perceptions of HRM and TQM and the Effects on Satisfaction and INtention to Leave

There is a growing interest in theory and in practice with regard to the relationship between human resource management [HRM] and total quality management [TQM] as well as the relationship between these two perspectives and business performances. Empirical research suggests significant effects of HRM/TQM on the performances of an organisation. The majority of research in this area is focused on the effects of HRM/TQM at the organisational level. Research on the perceptions of individual employees might obtain new insights for further discussion on the effectiveness of HRM/TQM in an organisation. The authors have the opportunity to analyse a relatively large database with recent data of individual employee perceptions from a knowledge-intensive organisation in The Netherlands. This analysis gives new insight in relation to concepts like 'co-operation', 'information', 'leadership', 'salary', 'work conditions', and 'goal setting' in relation to employee satisfaction and the intention to leave the organisation

Design for the contact zone. Knowledge management software and the structures of indigenous knowledges

This article examines the design of digital indigenous knowledge archives. In a discussion of the distinction between indigenous knowledge and western science, a decentred perspective is developed, in which the relationship between different local knowledges is explored. The particular characteristics of indigenous knowledges raise questions about if and how these knowledges can be managed. The role of technology in managing indigenous knowledges is explored with examples from fieldwork in India and Kenya and from web-based databases and digital archives. The concept of contact zone is introduced to explore the space in which different knowledges meet and are performed, such as indigenous knowledge and the technoscientific knowledge of the database. Design for the contact zone, this article proposes, is an intra-active and adaptive process for in creating databases that are meaningful for indigenous knowers. The meta-design approach is introduced as a methodology, which may provide indigenous knowers tools for self-representation and self-organisation through design