Inter-firm dependency and employment inequalities : Theoretical hypotheses and empirical tests

This article highlights the importance of power relations in inter-firm relations and analyses their impact on firms' employment management practices. We show, firstly, that the use of subcontracting creates a chain of inter-firm economic dependency because it leads the principal contractor to plan and control the activities of the subcontractors. We then advance the hypothesis that this chain of dependency influences both the skill structure and wage levels. Empirical tests carried out on French data confirm that firms that subcontract outsource execution tasks and that the hierarchy of firms impacts employees' wage levels.Subcontracting ; skills ; wages ; power relation

Regulating Clothing Outwork: A Sceptic's View

By applying the strategies of international anti-sweatshop campaigns to the Australian context, recent regulations governing home-based clothing production hold retailers responsible for policing the wages and employment conditions of clothing outworkers who manufacture clothing on their behalf. This paper argues that the new approach oversimplifies the regulatory challenge by assuming (1) that Australian clothing production is organised in a hierarchical ‘buyer-led’ linear structure in which core retail firms have the capacity to control their suppliers’ behaviour; (2) that firms act as unitary moral agents; and (3) that interventions imported from other times and places are applicable to the contemporary Australian context. After considering some alternative regulatory approaches, the paper concludes that the new regulatory strategy effectively privatises responsibility for labour market conditions – a development that cries out for further debate

Enacting global competition in local supply chain environments: German “Chemieparks” and the micro-politics of employment relations in a CME

Drawing upon the debate on institutional mediation of macro processes, we examine how multinational enterprises (MNEs) engage with global competition through restructuring their operations situated in local supply chain environments and how employment relations (ER) of coordinated market economies are reconfigured in the course of this restructuring process. Our empirical setting is the German chemical industry which is both an exemplar of coordinated labour-management-collaboration and highly exposed to global competition. Using a comparative case study design, we observe how MNEs re-structure two local production sites into ‘Chemieparks’. Our empirical data suggest that local agency diverges in the extent to which the social partnership type of ER is maintained or disrupted. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of micro-political practices for understanding the restructuring outcome as well as the local enactment and change of macro institutions within production networks as meso-level arenas for institutional mediation

Technology driven organizational structure of the firm

We model a corporate firm with a variable internal organizational structure that adapts to various degrees of technological cooperation. The entrepreneur determines the organizational structure that maximizes profits under participation constraints. Wages are determined by an internal cooperative pay-system, constrained by external reservation wages. We show that closer cooperation between production-workers results in a shorter organization with enhanced positional wages relative to the external benchmarks. The corporate firm is embedded in a competitive market economy that determines reservation wages and market prices. We also allow for more general technologies and provide conditions guaranteeing a finite optimal size of the firm. © Springer-Verlag 2007

Bridging the divide: firms and institutional variety in Italy

The underperformance of Italy’s macroeconomy is common knowledge, yet empirical evidence has shown that a high quality segment of Italian export oriented firms has outperformed international competitors although the country lacks practically all attributes of a coordinated market economy. This thesis shows that the ability of firms to produce high quality goods in Italy is linked to the practice of "capital skill asset pooling" within a novel model of production organisation, "disintegrated hierarchy". "Capital-skill asset pooling" follows from the vertical disintegration of production functions across firms and entails the sharing of production assets between firms governed by heterogeneous institutional frameworks. Through the comparisons of firm-level case studies across three industries, the thesis shows that two simultaneous conditions are necessary for "capitalskill asset pooling" to develop: 1) the presence of lead firms endowed with patient capital, and 2) the presence small suppliers endowed with firm-, industry- and product-specific skills. This finding complements the Varieties of Capitalism literature by showing that firms can produce high or diversified quality goods in the absence of the necessary institutional preconditions by developing functional substitutes to coordinated market economy assets through "capital-skill asset pooling"

Failure and Strategic Projects: Australias Asia-Pacific Vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimension

Gender-Specific Occupational Segregation, Glass Ceiling Effects, and Earnings in Managerial Positions: Results of a Fixed Effects Model

The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions in Germany based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses in particular on gender segregation in the labor market, that is, on the unequal distribution of women and men across different occupations and on the effects of this inequality on earnings levels and gender wage differentials in management positions. Our paper is, to our knowledge, the first in Germany to use time-constant unobserved heterogeneity and gender-specific promotion probabilities to estimate wages and wage differentials for persons in managerial positions. The results of the fixed effects model show that working in a more "female" job, as opposed to a more "male" job, affects only women's wages negatively. This result remains stable after controlling for human capital endowments and other effects. Mechanisms of the devaluation of jobs not primarily held by men also negatively affect pay in management positions (evaluative discrimination) and are even more severe for women (allocative discrimination). However, the effect is notlinear; the wage penalties for women occur only in "integrated" (more equally male/female) jobs as opposed to typicallymale jobs, and not in typically female jobs. Thedevaluation of occupations that are not primarily held by men becomes even more evident when promotion probabilities are taken into account. An Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition of the wage differential between men and women in management positions shows that the full model explains 65 percent of the gender pay gap. In other words: Thirty-five percent remain unexplained; this portion reflects, for example, time-varying social and cultural conditions, such as discriminatory policies and practices in the labor market.Gender pay gap, managerial positions, gender segregation, glass-ceiling effects, Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition, fixed effects, selection bias

Gender-Specific Occupational Segregation, Glass Ceiling Effects, and Earnings in Managerial Positions: Results of a Fixed Effects Model

The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions in Germany based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses in particular on gender segregation in the labor market, that is, on the unequal distribution of women and men across different occupations and on the effects of this inequality on earnings levels and gender wage differentials in management positions. Our paper is, to our knowledge, the first in Germany to use time-constant unobserved heterogeneity and gender-specific promotion probabilities to estimate wages and wage differentials for persons in managerial positions. The results of the fixed effects model show that working in a more "female" job, as opposed to a more "male" job, affects only women's wages negatively. This result remains stable after controlling for human capital endowments and other effects. Mechanisms of the devaluation of jobs not primarily held by men also negatively affect pay in management positions (evaluative discrimination) and are even more severe for women (allocative discrimination). However, the effect is not linear; the wage penalties for women occur only in "integrated" (more equally male/female) jobs as opposed to typically male jobs, and not in typically female jobs. The devaluation of occupations that are not primarily held by men becomes even more evident when promotion probabilities are taken into account. An Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition of the wage differential between men and women in management positions shows that the full model explains 65 percent of the gender pay gap. In other words: Thirty-five percent remain unexplained; this portion reflects, for example, time-varying social and cultural conditions, such as discriminatory policies and practices in the labor market.Gender pay gap, managerial positions, gender segregation, glass-ceiling effects, Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition, fixed effects, selection bias

Gender-Specific Occupational Segregation, Glass Ceiling Effects, and Earnings in Managerial Positions: Results of a Fixed Effects Model

The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions based on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses on occupational gender segregation, and on the effects of this inequality on earnings levels and gender wage differentials in management positions. Our paper is, to our knowledge, the first in Germany to use time-constant unobserved heterogeneity and gender-specific promotion probabilities to estimate wages and wage differentials for persons in managerial positions. The results of the fixed-effects model show that working in a more "female" job, as opposed to a more "male" job, affects only women's wages negatively. This result remains stable after controlling for human capital endowments and other effects. Mechanisms of the devaluation of jobs not primarily held by men also negatively affect pay in management positions (evaluative discrimination) and are even more severe for women (allocative discrimination). However, the effect is non-linear; the wage penalties for women occur only in "integrated" (more equally male/female) jobs as opposed to typically male jobs, and not in typically female jobs. The devaluation of occupations that are not primarily held by men becomes even more evident when promotion probabilities are taken into account. An Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition of the wage differential between men and women in management positions shows that the full model explains 65 percent of the gender pay gap. In other words: Thirty-five percent remain unexplained; this portion reflects, for example, time-varying social and cultural conditions, such as discriminatory policies and practices in the labor market.gender pay gap, managerial positions, gender segregation, glass-ceiling effects, Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition, fixed effects, selection bias