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This article examines two commonly adopted trade union strategies to increase the representation of under-represented groups – first, reserved seats on union decision-making bodies and second, self-organisation, involving separate structures. It does so through the case of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), whose equality reforms were considered remarkable within the union movement and fire service due to the union's small size and highly male-dominated, white membership. However, reserved seats at senior levels were later removed following objection on the grounds of democratic legitimacy. The article examines this decision using original data comparing UK union rules for additional representation. It exposes the tensions for small, male-dominated unions of reconciling Young's theoretical principles of 'group-differentiated democracy' with the realities of perceived democratic legitimacy, and argues that progress on union equality is contingent on both the particular forms of democratic representation and the political and industrial context.

Can a union be both democratic and administratively efficient, or are these goals always at odds? Building on the Webbs' focus on this critical question, this article analyses and compares the changing administrative policies and practices of US, UK and Australian trade unions over a 25-year period. We conducted surveys of unions in all three countries to gather information on union policies and practices involving the unions' human resources, hiring, budgeting and strategic planning. Using these novel longitudinal data, we contribute to industrial relations scholarship by showing that unions have increasingly adopted formal, systematic practices in these areas. The article is grounded in theory and also has practical relevance given the important implications that our findings may have for the revitalization of unions in the three countries and beyond.

Drawing on a study of a Scottish government initiative to ensure the provision of a living wage to social care workers, the paper sheds new light on the value of regulating domestic supply chains to enhance labour standards in supplier organisations, and the factors that facilitate and hinder such regulation. The study confirms that supply chains driven by monopsonistic purchasers tend to drive down employment conditions, while indicating that the studied initiative met with a good deal of success due to a combination of the government generated 'soft' regulation and support from care providers that reflected both value and pragmatic considerations. It also highlights the contradictory tensions that can arise between policy aspirations and business objectives and suggests that to be effective, initiatives to enhance labour standards in supply chains need to address adverse market dynamics.

Group Decision and Negotiation methods can help identify optimal, or efficient, solutions to complex problems and so aid decision-makers. However, recommendations depend for their success, in part, on their political feasibility within, usually, complex organisational settings. A part of the complexity of effective implementation derives from understanding the responses of stakeholders to the proposed decisions. The responses of stakeholders can be complex because stakeholders respond not just to the decision but also to the responses of other stakeholders. When the recommendations are very important, and when the possible stakeholder responses are likely to be complex, then the use of some form of modelling of stakeholder dynamics is likely to be helpful. This paper proposes such a modelling process designed to aid the thinking of a decision-making team as they seek to ensure their decision is politically feasible. The modelling process is designed to facilitate effective negotiation in groups about the potential impact of stakeholder responses. The modelling process is illustrated through a real case.

The legacy of classical American Pragmatism – Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett and others – in organization theory is significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance as an alternative to the prevailing metaphysical stance in organizational research, we reread Pragmatism as a process philosophy that can profoundly inform process views of organization and organizing. Our particular reading highlights Pragmatism's emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilizing seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issue that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.

Our article epitomizes systems thinking not only to identify possible unintended consequences of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), but also to offer suggestions mitigating their impact. Employing two-loop, generic system archetypes, our intent is to help stakeholders in intellectual property (IP) understand some of the nuances influencing the patent lifecycle linked to AIA. Building on the lingua franca used in patent law, our article highlights four important changes: being the first-to-file for protection; eliminating best mode disclosure; expanding the definition of prior art; and expanding post-grant review. Armed with a better understanding of the system issues imbedded in the legislation, innovators and entrepreneurs can develop strategies to deal with the attendant issues. For example, the tragedy of the commons associated with first-to-file highlights the need to increase R&D resources; else, over time incremental innovation will inevitably dominate efforts to modify the patent portfolio. Overall, AIA represents a step forward in harmonizing the US with the rest of the world while it increases the transparency of the legal maze that remains patent law; however, the changes bring allocation issues, secrecy, and time pressure to the forefront of the conversation about new product development. Recognition of these impacts is relevant worldwide for anyone contemplating a US patent or any entity attempting to maintain a viable portfolio of intellectual property.

Manufacturing competitiveness is on many policy agendas, born out of a concern for firms in high-cost economies finding themselves outcompeted by low-cost rivals. Government policy makers and manufacturing firm strategists have put their faith in what we label as high value manufacturing (HVM). We see HVM as an incipient phenomenon currently in a situation of prescience, as something that is still "in-the-making," with manufacturing firms trying to find ways to be able to step away from having to compete on price. This paper consults relevant strategy theories with the purpose to pinpoint the issues and problems that need to be accommodated for bringing HVM into being and for creating the effects that are anticipated. We found that HVM must be seen as a distributed activity, thus realizing complex functionality for a system-of-use, while being subjected to path constitution. For HVM to function, the firms involved need to find solutions to the capability problem, the appropriation problem, and the governance problem. We suggest that further research needs to involve itself in problem-solving activity to assist in bringing HVM about while simultaneously further developing strategy theory geared toward firms that are involved in a distributed activity like HVM.

Due to the stricter government regulations on end-of-life product treatment and the increasing public awareness towards environmental issues, remanufacturing has been a significantly growing industry over the last decades, offering many potential business opportunities. In this paper, we investigate a crucial problem apparent in this industry, the remanufacturing lot-sizing problem with separate setups. We first discuss two reformulations of this problem, and remark an important property with regards to their equivalence. Then, we present a theoretical investigation of a related subproblem, where our analysis indicates that a number of flow cover inequalities are strong for this subproblem under some general conditions. We then investigate the computational effectiveness of the alternative methods discussed for the original problem. Detailed numerical results are insightful for the practitioner, indicating that in particular when the return variability increases or when the remanufacturing setup costs decrease relevant to manufacturing setup costs, the flow covers can be very effective.

This paper compares the influence of national institutional environments on the internationalisation of SME exporters from two countries, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which followed divergent paths in the transition process. It contributes in several ways, notably by extending scholarly debate on divergent paths of transition to the IB literature, and enriching the institution-based view of IB with perspectives from the new institutional economics and comparative institutionalism and offering fresh evidence of how formal and informal institutions and the enforcement mechanism interact to create specific incentives and barriers for internationalising SMEs. The study, one of the first to examine SME exporters from the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, cautions against the tendency to attribute countries in the transitional periphery with homogenous institutional environments. Analysis of case study evidence suggests appreciable differences in the institutional environments facing SME exporters in the comparator countries. More specifically, SME exporters in Tajikistan seem to experience tougher institutional constraints relative to their Kyrgyzstan counterparts, and this divergence in institutional environments appears to affect the internationalisation prospects and competitiveness of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan SME exporters adversely and favourably respectively. The above findings are richly illustrated in the paper, which also discusses implications for theory, managerial and policy decision making and future research.

Der Autor analysiert die gängigen und als Grundlagen der Betriebswirtschaftslehre bekannten Standardwerke im Hinblick auf ihre Lehrmeinungen über Personalpolitik. In bildhafter Form kritisiert er ironisch ihr idyllisches realitätsfremdes Bild einer personalbereitstellenden, entwickelnden und für den Menschen arbeitenden Personalplanung, wobei, wie er nachweist, teilweise schon vor 1970 das Personalwesen als Stabseinteilung der Betriebe als Instrument des Personalabbaus und der personalwirtschaftlichen Rationalisierung eine zunehmend bedeutungsvollere Rolle gespielt hat. Er vergleicht die Lehrbücher mit praxisnahen empirischen Untersuchungen und Fallstudien und offenbart so die "Einäugigkeit" der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur. (KHS2)