Skill shortages, recruitment and retention in the housebuilding sector

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to show how internal and external labour markets operate in the construction sector, associated with different strategies taken by firms in recruiting and retaining particular groups of employees. It draws on research of the house building sector which aims to discover how far firms develop human resource policies, recruitment and retention strategies, and training and development activities in response to skill shortages. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is based on a questionnaire survey of skills shortages, recruitment and retention in house building firms, drawn from databases of social and private housebuilders and a detailed investigation of firms. Findings - The results show worsening skill shortages and hard-to-fill vacancies, particularly for site managers and tradespersons. These shortages are especially bad for house building firms, above all those with higher levels of direct employment in the social housing sector. Despite this, firms rely for operative recruitment on traditional and informal methods and procedures, on experience - not qualifications - as the main criterion, and on "poaching" - all symptomatic of a craft labour market. For managers, there is some evidence of retention measures, in particular through training and promotion, implying the development of internal labour markets. And for professionals there are indications of occupational labour markets with their dependence on institutionalised systems of training and qualifications. Originality/value - The paper shows that firms take little responsibility themselves for resolving skill shortages and establishing training needs, though national training policy is reactive and driven by employer demand. Obligatory skills certification and an institutionalised industrial training system would facilitate a move from this deadlocked situation, from craft to occupational labour markets

Cost vs. production: labour deployment and productivity in social housing construction in England, Scotland, Denmark and Germany

Labour deployment on representative large-scale housing projects is analysed to reveal distinct differences between England, Germany, Scotland and Denmark. In the light of the debates on convergence/divergence of HRM systems and generally different production systems, the paper is apposite in demonstrating structural differences in the organisation of the construction process, their implications for efficiency and productivity, and their impact on employment and contract relations, innovation and skills. The effects of the overriding cost rationale of the British system are illustrated in terms of labour deployment and the efficiency and productivity of the site construction process. Labour deployment is based on the rationale of extensive subcontracting, with main contractors providing the management and cost function whilst their productive capacity rests on subcontracting supply chains. The main contractor has come to specialise in two areas, costing and the management of the process. Subcontractors provide all production personnel and thus the production knowledge for carrying out the work packages and stages. On the continent, in contrast, the economic rationale is different, as main contractors do not depend nearly as much on the production capacity of subcontracting

Cost vs. production: disparities in social housing construction in Britain and Germany

This paper is about the qualitatively different nature of the labour process in the British construction industry compared with that in Germany. The rationale of the British system is based on controlling costs through overseeing contract relations, themselves circumscribing a range of narrow, clearly defined and priced tasks. The production process has become secondary and production expertise restricted. In contrast, in Germany cost aspects are incorporated into, rather than separated from, the production system, built on the interaction of capital and labour and on a high level of production expertise. Employment relations rather than contract relations predominate and circumscribe a set of skills drawn from the potential of the labour force and dependent on broad-based vocational education. The paper is based on a detailed investigation of social housebuilding projects in Britain and Germany. It is the first of two papers concerned with the overriding cost rationale of the British construction process at the expense of considerations of production. The effects of this is examined here in terms of the structure of expertise and skills within firms, the nature of the subcontracting and the composition of the construction team. The paper shows the need for more and a qualitatively different constellation of skills, professional and operative, in Britain. It thus contributes to the debate on achieving a higher skills equilibrium (Crouch et al. 1999; Brown et al. 2001), expands transnational sector comparisons (Stewart 1994) and identifies areas at which change should be directed in the UK construction industry, as promoted through the Latham, Egan and subsequent reports (Latham 1994; Construction Task Force 1998; Strategic Forum for Construction 2002)

Action minimizing fronts in general FPU-type chains

We study atomic chains with nonlinear nearest neighbour interactions and prove the existence of fronts (heteroclinic travelling waves with constant asymptotic states). Generalizing recent results of Herrmann and Rademacher we allow for non-convex interaction potentials and find fronts with non-monotone profile. These fronts minimize an action integral and can only exists if the asymptotic states fulfil the macroscopic constraints and if the interaction potential satisfies a geometric graph condition. Finally, we illustrate our findings by numerical simulations.Comment: 19 pages, several figure

Seeking for toroidal event horizons from initially stationary BH configurations

We construct and evolve non-rotating vacuum initial data with a ring singularity, based on a simple extension of the standard Brill-Lindquist multiple black-hole initial data, and search for event horizons with spatial slices that are toroidal when the ring radius is sufficiently large. While evolutions of the ring singularity are not numerically feasible for large radii, we find some evidence, based on configurations of multiple BHs arranged in a ring, that this configuration leads to singular limit where the horizon width has zero size, possibly indicating the presence of a naked singularity, when the radius of the ring is sufficiently large. This is in agreement with previous studies that have found that there is no apparent horizon surrounding the ring singularity when the ring's radius is larger than about twice its mass.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figure

Shot noise in carbon nanotube based Fabry-Perot interferometers

We report on shot noise measurements in carbon nanotube based Fabry-Perot electronic interferometers. As a consequence of quantum interferences, the noise power spectral density oscillates as a function of the voltage applied to the gate electrode. The quantum shot noise theory accounts for the data quantitatively. It allows to confirm the existence of two nearly degenerate orbitals. At resonance, the transmission of the nanotube approaches unity, and the nanotube becomes noiseless, as observed in quantum point contacts. In this weak backscattering regime, the dependence of the noise on the backscattering current is found weaker than expected, pointing either to electron-electron interactions or to weak decoherence

Stationary Regime of Random Resistor Networks Under Biased Percolation

The state of a 2-D random resistor network, resulting from the simultaneous evolutions of two competing biased percolations, is studied in a wide range of bias values. Monte Carlo simulations show that when the external current $I$ is below the threshold value for electrical breakdown, the network reaches a steady state with a nonlinear current-voltage characteristic. The properties of this nonlinear regime are investigated as a function of different model parameters. A scaling relation is found between $/_0$ and $I/I_0$, where $$ is the average resistance, $_0$ the linear regime resistance and $I_0$ the threshold value for the onset of nonlinearity. The scaling exponent is found to be independent of the model parameters. A similar scaling behavior is also found for the relative variance of resistance fluctuations. These results compare well with resistance measurements in composite materials performed in the Joule regime up to breakdown.Comment: 9 pages, revtex, proceedings of the Merida Satellite Conference STATPHYS2