Organizational Primacy after the Demise of the Organizational Career: Employment Conflict in a Post-Standard Contract World

[Excerpt] There is a contradiction at the heart of dispute resolution in the contemporary workplace. The locus of determination of the terms and conditions of employment, including processes for the resolution of disputes concerning these terms and conditions, has become increasingly decentralized to the organizational level, at the same time that long term attachment of employee careers to these same organizations has been diminishing. The result is a disconnect between the nature of current employment disputes, which increasingly involve issues relating to entry to and exit from relationships with organizations, including questions of the formation and content of employment contracts, and dispute resolution procedures that assume membership within an organizational community and acceptance of its rules and norms. In this paper, I examine these two trends in employment dispute resolution and explore the tensions between them. I begin by discussing the increase in organizational ordering of terms and conditions of employment and how it is reflected in the development of organizationally focused dispute resolution mechanisms. Then I turn to examining examples of types of growing employment conflicts that revolve around issues relating to the formation and termination of employment relationships. Following this, I conclude by discussing how dispute resolution procedures and systems might be re-envisioned to better fit a world in which standard long-term employment contracts with a single organization are no longer the paradigmatic model

Why Business Schools Need Radical Innovations: Drivers and Development Trajectories

Business education is undergoing paradigmatic changes, and business schools are feeling the brunt of these changes. This article proposes that "business as usual" is over for traditional business schools. Using Ohmae's 3Cs—customers, competitors, and company—as an analytical framework, I examine important changes from different vantage points. From the perspective of customers, the focus lies on technological and value changes. In terms of competitors, the analysis centers on the growing number of alternative suppliers of business education and the geographic shifts in the business school landscape. As to the company dimension, I comment on the vast number and heterogeneity of business schools and suggest that they are heading toward a business model competition. In considering potential development paths for business schools, the article concludes that they require radical innovations to stay relevant

Big Data and the Internet of Things

Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things - IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to "improve" their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.Comment: 33 pages. draft of upcoming book chapter in Japkowicz and Stefanowski (eds.) Big Data Analysis: New algorithms for a new society, Springer Series on Studies in Big Data, to appea

Innovation, skills development and labour: a European perspective

LSE Enterprise was approached by Microsoft, a software developer engaged in lobbying the European Commission and Parliament, to appoint an expert team of academic consultants to research and write a series of four reports on various aspects of innovation. Working with our nominated academic director, LSE Enterprise put together a strong research team, who continue to work closely with the client to deliver each of the reports to a standard suitable for consumption by top EU policy-makers, the client's industry sector, the press and the public. The reports are designed and printed professionally to ensure maximum quality and consistency across the series