Larry W. Hunter

It's not just the ATMs: Technology, Firm Strategies, Jobs, and Earnings in Retail Banking

Using data from extensive on-site interviews conducted in 1997, 1998, and 1999, the authors examine trends in job content and earnings in selected jobs in two American banks. Firm restructuring and technological changes resulted in higher earnings for college-educated workers. The banks followed different strategies in implementing these changes for lower-skill jobs, with different effects on bank tellers in particular. The authors conclude that technological change can provide opportunities for workplace reform but does not determine its effects on jobs and earnings; these effects are contingent on managerial strategies. This focus on organizational processes and managerial strategy provides a complement to accounts of growing inequality that center solely on the role of individual skills and technological change.

What Determines Job Quality in Nursing Homes

Using data from interviews and a 1991 survey of Massachusetts nursing homes, the author examines employment practices across establishments for the entry-level job of nursing assistant. Practices characteristic of good jobs came in bundles: wages, benefits, employer-provided training, and opportunities for advancement were correlated. High-quality jobs were more likely in nursing homes serving differentiated customer markets and in nursing homes with professionalized management. Unions and chain ownership were also associated with higher-quality jobs.

What Makes Teams Take? Employee Reactions to Work Reforms

This paper examines employee reactions to the introduction of work teams, reduced job classifications, and skill-based pay as established through the Modern Operating Agreement (MOA) between Chrysler Corporation and the United Auto Workers. Survey data suggest that workers responded favorably to the MOA across six diverse manufacturing plants, despite variation in founding conditions. The authors draw on field research to assess differences in effects across individual plants. Individual attitudes were more negative in plants facing the threat of sell-off, although individuals in those plants also reported engaging in more of the team-based behaviors required by the MOA. Individual responses to the MOA also varied by demographic characteristics, and by perceptions of the MOAs impact on various individual, group, and organization-level outcomes.

Opening the Box: Information Technology, Work Practices, and Wages

Using 1994–95 survey data on customer service representatives in 303 U.S. bank branches, the authors investigate the effects on wages of information technology (IT), of work practices, and of those two factors in combination. Offline high-involvement practices (measured by the presence of quality circles) were related positively to wages, as was more extensive use of IT that supports sales efforts. Where IT was used more extensively to automate routine processes, wages were lower in branches that did not have high-involvement work practices. The effects are partially explained by higher education requirements and more extensive introductory training in higher-wage jobs.

The adoption of innovative work practices in service establishments

Using data from the 1994 US National Establishment Survey, the author investigates differences between manufacturing and service establishments in the use of five innovative work practices: total quality management, self-managed teams, job rotation, job sharing and flextime. Service establishments are more likely to use job sharing and flextime. Manufacturing establishments are more likely to use total quality management and self-managed teams. These results hold when controlling for establishments’ business strategies, worker demographics, institutional connections and use of technology. Determinants of adoption of total quality management, self-managed teams and flextime also varied by sector.

ANALYTICAL MODELING IN COMPLEX SURVEYS OF WORK PRACTICES

Quantitative industrial relations research frequently relies on data collected from large surveys of establishments that use complex sampling designs, such as stratified and unequal probability sampling. The authors analyze two complex surveys of establishments, the National Organizations Survey and the National Survey of Establishments. They discuss design-based (survey-weighted) and model-based (unweighted) strategies for analyzing these data. They show that the choice of strategy can affect inferences about parameters, and hence conclusions drawn from analyses. They discuss the advantages of model-based approaches that include independent variables corresponding to design features, such as functions of size measures or indicator variables for strata or clusters, relative to purely design-based approaches.

The impact of globalization on human resource management and employment relations in the US automobile and banking industries

Globalization clearly affects employment relations, and we expect that it has a differential impact across ‘varieties of capitalism’. In addition, the way globalization influences employment relations is industry specific. In this article, we examine recent changes to four employment relations practices – remuneration systems, job security, work organization and enterprise governance – in the US automotive and banking industries. We compare the changes in these two key industries and consider whether they correspond to the categorization of the US as a liberal market economy (LME). We find evidence of diverse employment relations practices, many of which are not at all typical of LMEs.

Union-Management conflict: Historical trends and new directions

R. Pritchard, Foreword. Part 1. Introduction: Setting the Stage. C.K.W. De Dreu, M.J. Gelfand, Conflict in the Workplace: Sources, Functions, and Dynamics Across Multiple Levels of Analysis. D. Jaffee, Conflict at Work Throughout the History of Organizations. Part 2. Interpersonal and Group Levels of Analysis. M. Olekalns, L.L. Putnam, L.R. Weingart, L. Metcalf, Communication Processes and Conflict Management. B. Beersma, D.E. Conlon, J.R. Hollenbeck, Conflict and Group Decision Making: The Role of Social Motivation. S. Schulz-Hardt, A. Mojzisch, F. Vogelgesang, Dissent as a Facilitator: Individual and Group-Level Effects on Creativity and Performance. K.A. Jehn, K. Bezrukova, S. Thatcher, Conflict, Diversity, and Faultlines in Workgroups. J.L. Raver, J. Barling, Workplace Aggression and Conflict: Constructs, Commonalities, and Challenges for Future Inquiry. D.G. Pruitt, Conflict Escalation in Organizations. P.E. Spector, V. Bruk-Lee, Conflict, Health, and Well-Being. Part 3. Organizational Levels of Analysis. B.M. Goldman, R. Cropanzano, J. Stein, L. Benson, The Role of Third Parties/Mediation in Managing Conflict in Organizations. J. Olson-Buchanan, W.R. Boswell, Organizational Dispute Resolution Systems. R. Friedman, L. Hunter, Y. Chen, Union-Management Conflict: Historical Trends and New Directions. D.J. Terry, C.E. Amiot, Social Identification Processes, Conflict, and Fairness Concerns in Intergroup Mergers. Part 4. Commentaries. K. Smith-Crowe, A.P. Brief, E.E. Umpress, On the Outside Looking in: Window Shopping for Insights into Diversity-driven Conflict. D.M. Kolb, Making Sense of an Elusive Phenomenon. P.J. Carnevale, Theory of Conflict in the Workplace: Whence and Whither. D. Tjosvold, Conflicts in the Study of Conflict in Organizations.

Ariel Ducey: Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training.DuceyAriel. Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 300 pp.

Never Good Enough , a new and provocative volume in Cornell University Press’s invaluable series on the culture and politics of health care work, addresses the recent history of job training initiatives in New York City’s health care sector. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, Ariel Ducey provides a compelling account of the way training programs look to workers themselves and embeds these workers’ accounts in a much broader social, economic, and political analysis of the health care sector, particularly as the sector evolved in New York over the late 1990s and early 2000s. The book is especially relevant to current debates over the shape and scope of health care reform, providing the perspective of the front-line workforce that is too often neglected. Using training as an entry point, Ducey analyzes the relationship between the structure of the health care system and the experiences of workers, particularly those at the lower end of the income distribution who make a living by caring directly for the sick and aged.

59.95, cloth;

Overall Contracting for Change is nonetheless a valuable contribution because it steps back from the hype of the reinventing-government type of success story (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) to inject some systematic research evidence into the debate on the potential for market mechanisms to improve the performance of public sector organizations. It also takes a dynamic perspective, showing how change penetrates existing organizational arrangements over time to produce results that were not imagined by its designers. We need more work like this, and work that extends over even longer time periods, to enable policy makers, managers, and scholars to learn from these radical, innovative, but somewhat uncertain organizational experiments.Acknowledgments 1The Coming of Welfare Capitalism 2Modernizing Welfare Capitalism 3Preserving the Past: Eastman Kodak 4Changing Styles: Sears Roebuck 5Recasting Company Unions: Thompson Products 6Beyond the Manor: Politics and Public Opinion 7The Cold War of Industrial Relations: Welfare Capitalism and Unionism in the 1950s and After Postscript Notes Index