Globalization and labour relations in Indonesia

There are alternative conceptualizations of the phenomenon of globalization which as yet remain theoretically weak. Further, whether globalization is a tendency towards one global economy or whether it is just another stage in the internationalization of capital remains contested. This paper overviews the context of globalization and labor relations in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of globalization and labor relationss in Indonesia. One reason for attention to the Asia-pacific countries is that the the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (ASEAN and APEC) have become highly significant regional and supra-regional forces in world trade in the 1990s. The rapid industrialization of many Asia-Pacific countries has sensitised them to the global effects of their economies and to their need to be responsive to global and regional developments in trading relationships. Not least in importance here is the determination of the character of labor relations in each of the countries. In particular, labor relations in Indonesia are of global interest because of a number of factors: the stage of Indonesia’s industrialization; the linking of trade preferences with the reform of human and worker rights; the role of labour in the socio-political control of the country; the need for Indonesia to decide where to position itself viz-a-viz globalization; the link between the struggle for independent trade unionism and democratization. Emphasizing the regional dimension, the paper concludes that it might be suggested that the future of labor relations in Indonesia may be looked for more in the agendas of ASEAN and APEC than in the historical stages of any one of the Asian industrialized countries

Book Review of "The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: global, comparative and theoretical perspectives" by David Farnham. London, UK, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-02712-2

[Extract] Studies of employment relations and its antecedent industrial relations have depended on metaphor for their explanatory models, although not without contention — as to whether or not their seductiveness detracts from the strength of the idea (Dunn 1990). David Farnham's The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: Global, Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives offers the reader changing 'faces' for the intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics of employment relations and 'players' for the tripartite participants in those dynamics, once, to the irritation of trade union leaders, who did not believe they were acting, 'actors' in a 'system' by Dunlop (1960). It is unlikely that today's trade union leaders would regard themselves as 'players' in a 'game' of industrial relations. Changing 'faces', in Farnham's book replaces the morphological 'transformation' used to explain the emergence of new forms of industrial relations by the 1980s by Kochan et al. (1986) and the mutational 'global evolution' of industrial relations by Kaufman (2004). Your reviewer notes that The Changing Face [singular] of Employment Relations was the title and theme of a UK Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) conference in 2013

Book Review of "The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: global, comparative and theoretical perspectives" by David Farnham. London, UK, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-02712-2

[Extract] Studies of employment relations and its antecedent industrial relations have depended on metaphor for their explanatory models, although not without contention — as to whether or not their seductiveness detracts from the strength of the idea (Dunn 1990). David Farnham's The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: Global, Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives offers the reader changing 'faces' for the intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics of employment relations and 'players' for the tripartite participants in those dynamics, once, to the irritation of trade union leaders, who did not believe they were acting, 'actors' in a 'system' by Dunlop (1960). It is unlikely that today's trade union leaders would regard themselves as 'players' in a 'game' of industrial relations. Changing 'faces', in Farnham's book replaces the morphological 'transformation' used to explain the emergence of new forms of industrial relations by the 1980s by Kochan et al. (1986) and the mutational 'global evolution' of industrial relations by Kaufman (2004). Your reviewer notes that The Changing Face [singular] of Employment Relations was the title and theme of a UK Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) conference in 2013

Introduction

[Extract] The late Craig Littler died on 8 September last year in Townsville, Queensland where, for less than two years, he had been the Head of School of Business at James Cook University, after having returned to Australia from appointments at the Universities of London and St Andrews. To honour the important contribution he made to the study of the social and economic relations of work, this issue of Labour and Industry has been dedicated to him. Craig Littler's career spanned 40 years, with academic appointments in both Australia and the United Kingdom. In Australia he is best remembered as the founding editor of Labour and Industry and for his work on the phenomenon of corporate downsizing. His publications on downsizing include the co-authored (with Richard Dunford, Tom Bramble and Andrew Hede) 'The Dynamics of Downsizing in Australia and New Zealand', published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources (Littler et al., 1997) in which opposing trends were discovered between downsizing in the two countries. A subsequent publication (Littler et al., 2003) added author Retha Weisner and country South Africa to the comparative study

Current Research in Industrial Relations: proceedings of the 13th AIRAANZ conference, volume 1: refereed papers

The Proceedings contain the papers presented to the first two streams of the conference. The first stream [this volume] is the fully published, refereed stream

Singapore

[Extract] The city-state of Singapore covers a mere 622 square kilometres. It consists of a main island plus a few islets at the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula and it is separated from the peninsula by a causeway carrying road and rail traffic to and from Malaysia. Its equatorial and maritime climate is benign, but other than a deep natural harbour and a strategic location at the southern end of the Straits of Malacca, the country has scant natural resources. In 1989 Singapore's population stood at 2.7 million. Ethnically, the population is composed of 76 per cent Chinese, 15 per cent Malays, 6 per cent Indians and a small percentage of Europeans, Arabs and mixed races. While the government has decided that Mandarin should be the official Chinese language, English remains the language of administration, and Malay and Tamil have official status. Overall literacy was estimated to be 86 per cent in 1986 (Ministry of Communications and Information, 1988: 3)

A matter of (good) faith?:Understanding the interplay of power and the moral agency of managers in healthcare service reconfiguration

Previous studies of service reconfiguration in healthcare have explored the influence of power on processes and outcomes. However, in these accounts the moral agency of managers is often underemphasised. This paper draws on the theoretical tools provided by the sociology of morality to help deepen understanding of the interaction between power and moral agency in service reconfiguration in healthcare. It presents results from a qualitative study of a pan-organisational service reconfiguration in the NHS in England, involving nineteen in-depth interviews with those leading the change and the analysis of twelve programme documents. We combine concepts of the moral background and epistemic governance to interpret participants' conviction that the service change was 'the right thing to do'. The paper shows how epistemic work carried out by service change regulations shaped the moral background within which participants worked. This, in turn, channelled their moral agency - specifically their commitment to patient care - in a way that also reflected central priorities. The paper adds to sociological understandings of service reconfiguration through considering the interaction of structure, agency and power, while also developing the concept of the moral background to show how power relations can influence moral beliefs.</p

A theoretical model to solve cost shifting problem

Cost shifting strategy in service organizations causes difficulties between co-existing internal business units each competing for scarce resources. Within regulatory and legal constraints, cost shifting between business units instigates concomitant changes to each unit's profitability/budget-surpluses. For internal monopoly and competitive units, this strategy has shortcomings. Through management sponsored training programs, employee learning and productivity improvements offer a long-term approach to better address this short-term cost shifting problem. We mathematically model this solution, and outline further research that builds on this long-term cost shifting approach

Current Research in Industrial Relations: proceedings of the 13th AIRAANZ conference, volume 2: non-refereed papers

The second volume [this volume] contains papers that were submitted to the second stream [of the conference]: fully published but not-refereed papers

BEC-BCS Crossover of a Trapped Two-Component Fermi Gas with Unequal Masses

We determine the energetically lowest lying states in the BEC-BCS crossover regime of s-wave interacting two-component Fermi gases under harmonic confinement by solving the many-body Schrodinger equation using two distinct approaches. Essentially exact basis set expansion techniques are applied to determine the energy spectrum of systems with N=4 fermions. Fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo methods are applied to systems with up to N=20 fermions, and a discussion of different guiding functions used in the Monte Carlo approach to impose the proper symmetry of the fermionic system is presented. The energies are calculated as a function of the s-wave scattering length a_s for N=2-20 fermions and different mass ratios \kappa of the two species. On the BEC and BCS sides, our energies agree with analytically-determined first-order correction terms. We extract the scattering length and the effective range of the dimer-dimer system up to \kappa = 20. Our energies for the strongly-interacting trapped system in the unitarity regime show no shell structure, and are well described by a simple expression, whose functional form can be derived using the local density approximation, with one or two parameters. The universal parameter \xi for the trapped system for various \kappa is determined, and comparisons with results for the homogeneous system are presented.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, extended versio