Search results

Concern over the shortage of managerial talent in New Zealand led a privately owned company in the capital goods market to establish its own management development programme in‐house, custom‐built on assessment centre principles. The programme recognises that training needs of supervisors and managers fall into three main categories: technical skills, people skills and conceptual and administrative skills. Experience with the programme shows that it is possible and worthwhile for small‐to‐medium sized companies to establish such programmes. The involvement of managers as counsellors is significant in their success. Such a programme must be easy to administer and should keep concurrent assessment to the minimum. Reasons for the failure of previous management training and specific features of the programme are outlined.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

Successful businesses today are attending to internal and external changes. Their leaders value diversity and seek a heterogeneous workforce, recognising that effective work teams are essential in the process. In the shaping and managing of new organisational cultures, consultants can provide assistance. This article describes a Fortune 50 company client where a particular method of team‐building was used that involved the results of a five‐month consultation which included 20 subgroups in eight cities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in gender‐biased employment practices that it is perceived have occurred in New Zealand accountancy workplaces over the last 30 years, using Oliver's model of deinstitutionalization.

Sequential interviewing was carried out with 69 experienced chartered accountants and three human resource managers, and at a later date with nine young female accountants.

Evidence is presented of perceived political, functional and social pressures cumulatively contributing to deinstitutionalization of overt gender‐biased employment practices, with social and legislative changes being the most influential. Deinstitutionalization appears incomplete as some more subtle gender‐biased practices still remain in New Zealand's accountancy workplaces, relating particularly to senior‐level positions.

This study adds to understanding of how professions evolve. The purposeful bias in the sample selection, the small size of two of the interviewee groups, and the diversity in the interviewees' workplaces are recognized limitations.

Identification of further cultural change is required to deinstitutionalize the more subtle gender‐biased practices in accountancy organizations. This could help to avoid a serious deficiency of senior chartered accountants in practice in the future.

This paper represents one of a limited number of empirical applications of the deinstitutionalization model to organizational change and is the first to address the issue of gender‐biased practices in a profession. The use of sequential interviewing of different age groups, in order to identify and corroborate perceptions of organizational change is a novel approach.

The purpose of this paper is to use the theoretical and empirical pension literatures to question whether employers are likely to gain any competitive advantage from degrading or eliminating their employees’ defined benefit (DB) pensions.

Critical literature review, bringing together and synthesizing the industrial relations, economics, social policy, and applied pensions literature.

DB pension plans do deliver a number of potential performance benefits, most notably a decrease in turnover and establishment of longer-term employment relationships. However, benefits are more pronounced in some conditions than others, which are identified.

Most of the analysis of pension effects to date focuses primarily on DB plans. Yet, these are declining in significance. In the years ahead, more attention needs to be paid to the potential consequences of defined contribution plans and other types of pension.

In re-evaluating DB pensions, firms have tended to focus on savings made through cost cutting. Yet, this approach tends to view a firm's people as an expense rather a potential asset. Attempts to abandon, modify, or otherwise reduce such schemes has the potential to save money in the short term, but the negative long-term consequences may be considerable, even if they are not yet obvious.

This paper is topical in that it consolidates existing research evidence from a number of different bodies of literature to make a case for the retention of DB pension plans, when, in many contexts, they are being scaled back or discarded. It raises a number of important issues for reflection by practitioners, and highlights key agendas for future scholarly research.

It was not until the late 1960s that housing attracted much attention from academic social scientists. Since that time the literature has expanded widely and diversified, establishing housing with a specialised status in economics, sociology, politics, and in related subjects. As we would expect, the new literature covers a technical, statistical, theoretical, ideological, and historical range. Housing studies have not been conceived and interpreted in a monolithic way, with generally accepted concepts and principles, or with uniformly fixed and precise methodological approaches. Instead, some studies have been derived selectively from diverse bases in conventional theories in economics or sociology, or politics. Others have their origins in less conventional social theory, including neo‐Marxist theory which has had a wider intellectual following in the modern democracies since the mid‐1970s. With all this diversity, and in a context where ideological positions compete, housing studies have consequently left in their wake some significant controversies and some gaps in evaluative perspective. In short, the new housing intellectuals have written from personal commitments to particular cognitive, theoretical, ideological, and national positions and experiences. This present piece of writing takes up the two main themes which have emerged in the recent literature. These themes are first, questions relating to building and developing housing theory, and, second, the issue of how we are to conceptualise housing and relate it to policy studies. We shall be arguing that the two themes are closely related: in order to create a useful housing theory we must have awareness and understanding of housing practice and the nature of housing.

This chapter contends that to meet the needs of refugees, we must go beyond addressing only safety and security by including education as well, specifically, literacy development. The authors suggest that in order to support refugee education, generally, we need to identify best practices for supporting reading programs in refugee settings. The authors discuss basic design and assessment of literacy education programming in refugee settings that parallels the designs for traditional school-wide literacy programs, which we have in place in more stable regions of the world. The authors attempt to converge the fields of literacy education with refugee studies to make recommendations for supporting refugees’ literacy education with the goal of preserving their native language and literacy while preparing them for the future.