Leeway for the loyal: a model of employee discretion

This article examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist's perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer-employee data, it is shown that discretion is strongly affected by the level of employee commitment. In addition, discretion is generally greater in high-skilled jobs, although not without exceptions, and lower where employees are under-skilled. Homeworking and flexitime policies raise employee discretion. The impact of teamworking is mixed. In about half of cases team members do not jointly decide about work matters, and the net effect of teams on task discretion in these cases is negative. In other cases, where team members do decide matters jointly, the impact is found to be neutral according to employees' perceptions, or positive according to managers' perceptions. There are also significant and substantial unobserved establishment-level factors which affect task discretion

A question of quality: do children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive lower quality early childhood education and care?

This paper examines how the quality of early childhood education and care accessed by three and four year olds in England varies by children’s background. Focusing on the free entitlement to early education, the analysis combines information from three administrative datasets for 2010-11, the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Ofsted inspections dataset, to obtain two main indicators of quality: staff qualification levels and Ofsted ratings. These data are combined with child-level indicators of area deprivation (IDACI scores) as a proxy measure of children’s background. The paper finds that children from more disadvantaged areas have access to better qualified staff, largely because they are more likely than children from richer areas to attend maintained nursery classes staffed by teachers, and less likely to attend services in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sectors. However, within both maintained and PVI sectors, services catering for more disadvantaged children receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, with a higher concentration of children from disadvantaged areas itself appearing to reduce the likelihood of top Ofsted grades. This may be in part because Ofsted ratings reflect levels of child development, and therefore reward settings where children enter at a more advanced starting point, but it may also be that it is genuinely harder to deliver an outstanding service to a more disadvantaged intake. The result point to the need for funding to support better qualified staff in PVI settings in disadvantaged areas

Identity, Collaboration and Radical Innovation: The Role of Dual Organisation Identification

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between identity and the radical innovation process in the case of the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster (SSPC). Antecedents and consequences of identification with the SSPC and the transitioning of identify from an organizational orientation to a dual organisation identity are discussed. We demonstrate that organizational identity can represent a substantial barrier to collaborating for radical innovation, and explicate how identity shifts can smooth the transition from competitor to collaborator. This study illustrates that opportunities were created through leveraging affinity to provide an environment conducive to radical innovation where members could interact, explore and collaborate

Responding effectively to new challenges Strategy statement, 2001-2003

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:8474.04145(2001-2003) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

National Minimum Wage Act, 2000 Detailed guide to the National Minimum Wage Act, 2000

Revised ed. after the hourly rate change in July 2001SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m01/31016 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Strategy for skills and enterprise Guidance from the Secretary of State for Employment and the President of the Board of Trade

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:MFE 1169(CH--92.4182)(microfiche) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Moving forward

URN 02/1091SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m02/33957 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

National minimum wage

URN 00/951SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m00/37710 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo