Suchergebnisse

Globalization has hastened the growth of buyer-driven commodity chains that connect advanced country marketing or retail companies with contractors manufaturing in low-cost, developing countries. Allegations of labour exploitation have been levelled at the global firms for turning a blind eye to their contractors' labour practices. In response, some firms have implemented codes of practice. This paper focuses on the operation of these codes in two leading athletic shoe buyer-driven chains and their contractor plants in Southern China. The codes are administered differently by the two firms, encouraging a less authoritarian, more human-resource-oriented approach at the two plants associated with the larger and more successful global firm. Nevertheless, employment conditions at all four plants meet the requirements of the corporate codes of practice. The one major exception relates to worker representation and collective bargaining. While the current international context is conducive to upholding labour standards and improving employment relations, Chinese national and local institutional contexts limit this tendency. Consequently, workers remain in a vulnerable position. The paper concludes by arguing that although present structural tendencies favour increases in worker stability and power, institutional supports are needed to continuously improve employment relations and labour standards.

This article uses union survey data to examine the incidence and work- related consequences of technical change in the Australian printing industry during the mid-1980s. It attempts to explain inter-plant variations in the incidence of technical change and differences in union influence on technical-change issues. The finding that the union has not given technical change a great deal of attention is explained by the incremental and mainly benign effects that new technology has had on existing printing industry employees. However, this approach is questionable and is changing in the light of strategies developed by the Australian union movement in response to emerging problems.

Relationships outside of work impact employee effectiveness at work. But how do we explain this? Our study focuses on the guanxi relationship in China. This is based on close personal ties between supervisors and subordinates initiated outside the workplace. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we develop a model that explains how supervisor–subordinate guanxi constitutes a social resource that spills over into the workplace and impacts subordinates' job resources (including autonomy, support and development at work), job crafting (proactive behaviors aimed at increasing resources and reducing demands) and job performance (task performance and organizational citizenship behavior). Our model was tested on a sample of 406 subordinates and their supervisors from seven manufacturing organizations in China. The results of a multilevel path analysis indicate that high-quality guanxi relations with supervisors facilitate subordinates' job resources, job crafting behaviors and organizational citizenship behavior at work. In addition, job resources mediate the relationship between supervisor–subordinate guanxi and job crafting, and job crafting mediates the relationship between supervisor–subordinate guanxi and subordinate task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Overall, our research highlights the importance of externally-generated guanxi between subordinates and supervisors and the mechanisms that contribute to improving employee performance in the workplace.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how part-time waiters perceive and respond to abusive supervision by the owner-manager of a small restaurant.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnographic approach was used to collect data. One of the authors worked as a participant observer for three months. In addition, 13 interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted.FindingsData analysis showed how neutral identification based on a primary identity—liu xu sheng(overseas student)—overshadows employees' occupational identity (waiter), which helps waiters to cope with abusive supervision.Originality/valueDevelopment and application of the concept of neutral organizational identification orientation encourages emotional suppression and reframing, leading to waiters' indifference and acquiescence in abusive supervision. Implications are drawn for theory and the practice of managing part-time and temporary workers.

Are internal migrant workers who have contributed so much to contemporary Chinese economic growth forming a distinct, impoverished underclass (Chan, 2010; Solinger, 2006) or are they slowly merging into the Chinese working class? In this article sociological theory is employed to develop the distinction between underclass and working class, including the conditions and criteria that enable these social categories to be distinguished theoretically and empirically. Drawing on a large range of survey data, including our own analysis of a recent Chinese migrant worker survey, we examine relevant aspects of work and city experience in order to assess the underclass thesis. In addition, we evaluate the argument that younger migrant workers are significantly different in work orientation and strategies for work-life improvement compared with their more experienced counterparts. We conclude that evidence for the underclass thesis is less compelling than an interpretation that views most migrant workers as transitioning into the working class. In addition, although younger workers are more intrinsically oriented than older migrants, both groups concur that labor law enforcement is critical for work-life improvement while simultaneously developing their own collective capacity to influence labor relations outcomes.

In an age of flattened hierarchies and networked organizations, lateral processes in organizations take on added significance. Co-worker assistance refers to a key aspect of lateral relations: workers' helping behaviour in relation to their immediate colleagues. Using data from a Dutch survey of public sector and related service employees, we develop and test a model of co-worker assistance. We argue that reciprocity facilitates management-induced co-worker assistance and that this depends on the extent of workers' organizational commitment. This in turn is influenced by the manner in which management exercises control over employees. We find evidence for organizational commitment acting as a partial mediator between co-worker assistance and bureaucratic control, co-worker control, and facilitative supervision respectively. Group cohesion, forged by workers independent of management, has a strong direct effect on co-worker assistance and a particularly strong effect when interacting with co-worker control. We also find that co-worker control is more strongly related to co-worker assistance where tasks are more interdependent.