Electronic submission and the movement towards a paperless law office in a modern university

The Government’s target of 50% of all under 30 year olds studying at higher education institutions by 2010, coupled with the National Committee Inquiry into Higher Education’ (1997) concluding that further expansion of higher education could not be afforded under the existing funding arrangements, may have serious ramifications for higher education in the UK. Alongside this increase in numbers, students are increasingly seen as educational consumers with increased choice in a demand-led market which universities must recognise. To compete in this academic environment these institutions are having to be ever more consumer aware in the services they offer and are having to increase choice to attract customers from rival enterprises. Information technology is playing an increasing role in the learning experience as noted by institutional commentators such as the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Electronic Books ON-screen Interface group and Lord Dearing’s Report. Technology’s use is further evidenced through institutions’ employment of the internet, e-mail and web-based learning to harness the power of this medium. This paper focuses on the concept of commercialism in the university sector and how a movement to a paperless office may be one way in which a university could gain an early competitive advantage over its rivals. The paper takes a student perspective to demonstrate whether students would wish to move towards electronic methods of submission of assessed work and considers the current problems that are encountered in physical submission of documents. This is the first paper in an on-going research project investigating the benefits and viability of a paperless law office, and the results demonstrate both that the students desire more flexibility in submission of university work and that their acceptance may be the easy first step on the road to the paperless law school

The Human Side of Skills and Knowledge

YesThe goal of decent work is best expressed through the eyes of people. It is about your job and future prospects; about your working conditions; about balancing work and family life, putting your kids through school or getting them out of child labour. It is about gender equality, equal recognition, and enabling women to make choices and take control of their lives. It is about personal abilities to compete in the market place, keep up with new technological skills and remain healthy. It is about developing your entrepreneurial skills, about receiving a fair share of wealth that you have helped to create and not being discriminated against; it is about having a voice in your workplace and your community . . . . For everybody, decent work is about securing human dignity (ILO 2001:7 - 8 cited in Green 2006:19 - 20)

Missing Links: Referrer Behavior and Job Segregation

How does referral recruitment contribute to job segregation, and what can organizations do about it? Current theory on network effects in the labor market emphasizes the job-seeker perspective, focusing on the segregated nature of job-seekers’ information and contact networks, and leaves little role for organizational influence. But employee referrals are necessarily initiated from within a firm by referrers. We argue that referrer behavior is the missing link that can help organizations manage the segregating effects of referring. Adopting the referrer’s perspective of the process, we develop a computational model which integrates a set of empirically documented referrer behavior mechanisms gleaned from extant organizational case studies. Using this model, we compare the segregating effects of referring when these behaviors are inactive to the effects when the behaviors are active. We show that referrer behaviors substantially boost the segregating effects of referring. This impact of referrer behavior presents an opportunity for organizations. Contrary to popular wisdom, we show that organizational policies designed to influence referrer behaviors can mitigate most if not all of the segregating effects of referring

Everyday-Life Business Deviance Among Chinese SME Owners

Despite its prevalence in emerging economies, everyday-life business deviance (EBD) and its antecedents have received surprisingly little research attention. Drawing on strain theory and the business-ethics literature, we develop a socio-psychological explanation for this deviance. Our analysis of 741 owners of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suggests that materialism and trust in institutional justice affect EBD both directly and indirectly in a relationship mediated by the ethical standards of SME owners. These findings have important implications for researching deviant business behavior within SMEs

Flexible working and unpaid overtime in the UK: The role of gender, parental and occupational status

Recent studies have shown that flexible boundaries between work and family may make employees work harder and longer. Yet most studies were not able to show whether there are differences across different types of flexible working arrangements, and whether this relationship may only hold for certain groups of workers. We examine how three different types of flexible working arrangements, that is schedule control, flexitime, and teleworking, are associated with an increase in unpaid overtime hours of workers in the UK using the Understanding Society data from 2010-2015 and fixed effects panel regression models. Results show that the flexible arrangements that were introduced primarily for work-life balance purposes, i.e., flexitime and teleworking, do not necessarily increase unpaid overtime hours significantly. On the other hand, workers’ control over their schedule, mainly introduced as a part of high-performance strategies, leads to increased unpaid overtime hours. This is especially true for professional men, and women without children, especially those working full-time, and surprisingly part-time working mothers. The results of this study point to the importance of distinguishing between different groups of workers as well as between different types of arrangements when examining outcomes of flexible working. Furthermore, the results of the study contribute to the argument that performance enhancing flexible working arrangements can potentially exacerbate gender inequalities in the labour market by enabling men to commit more time to their jobs, while for women, especially full-time working mothers, this may be less possible