Organizationally Sensible vs. Legal-Centric Approaches to Employment Decisions With Legal Implications

This article is intended to: 1) alert human resource (HR) professionals to the risk that they, and the managers they serve, are unnecessarily contributing to the impact of legal considerations on the management of employees as a result of “legal-centric decision making”; and 2) provide information and guidance that will assist HR professionals in promoting better informed, more organizationally sensible responses to employment issues that have potential legal implications. The “legal-centric decision making” construct is introduced and illustrated, a model of the primary factors contributing to legal-centric decision making is presented, and keys to avoiding legal-centric decision making are identified and discussed

Legally Defensible vs. Organizationally Sensible: Avoiding Legal-Centric Employment Decision Making

Managers and human resource professionals express grave concern about the increasing influence that the law and lawyers are having on their ability to manage employees effectively. Blame is typically placed on growing governmental regulation of the employment relationship, a “litigation mentality” among workers, and overly aggressive lawyers pursuing selfish interests. Much less common, however, is attention focused on the role that organizational decision makers play in contributing to the perceived problem. This article is intended to help address that limitation by alerting managers to the likelihood that they are unnecessarily contributing to the impact of legal considerations on the management of employees as a result of “legal-centric decision making”, and by providing information and guidance that will assist them in formulating better informed, more strategic responses to employment issues that have potential legal implications. Keys to implementing the strategic approach are identified and discussed, and the approach is illustrated by applying it to a decision that American employers continue to confront: how to respond to the eroding employment at-will doctrine. The analysis strongly suggests that the extent of the law’s negative influence on the management of employees can be moderated significantly if organizational decision makers recognize their contribution to “the problem”, focus on what is organizationally sensible rather than what is perceived to be legally defensible, and adopt a more strategic (less legal-centric) approach to the challenges posed by employment decisions that raise legal concerns

A Perspective on Hadron Physics

The phenomena of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking are basic to understanding hadron observables. They can be explored using Dyson-Schwinger equations. The existence of a systematic, nonperturbative and symmetry preserving truncation of these equations enables the proof of exact results in QCD, and their illustration using simple but accurate models. We provide a sketch of the material qualitative and quantitative success that has been achieved in the study of pseudoscalar and vector mesons. Efforts are now turning to the study of baryons, which we exemplify via a calculation of nucleon weak and pionic form factors.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the "Xth Mexican Workshop on Particles and Fields," Morelia, Mexico, 6-12 Nov. 200

The Sigma Commutator from Lattice QCD

As a direct source of information on chiral symmetry breaking within QCD, the sigma commutator is of considerable importance. Since hadron structure is a non-perturbative problem, numerical calculations on a space-time lattice are currently the only rigorous approach. With recent advances in the calculation of hadron masses within full QCD, it is of interest to see whether the sigma commutator can be calculated directly from the dependence of the nucleon mass on the input quark mass. We show that, provided the correct chiral behaviour of QCD is respected in the extrapolation to realistic quark masses, one can indeed obtain a fairly reliable determination of the sigma commutator using present lattice data. For two-flavour dynamical fermion QCD the sigma commutator lies between 45 and 55 MeV based on recent data from CP-PACS and UKQCD.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, uses espcrc1.sty and epsfig.sty. Contribution to the proceedings of the International Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics held in Adelaide Feb. 200