Workplace familism and psychological contract breach in the Philippines

The present study addresses the call for theory-based investigations on workplace familism. It contributes to the literature by proposing and testing the moderating role of workplace familism between psychological contract breach and civic virtue behaviour. We surveyed 267 full-time employees and found main effects of both types of workplace familism (i.e. workplace organisational and workplace supervisor familism) and breach of relational obligations on civic virtue behaviour. Workplace supervisor familism also moderated the relationship between breach and civic virtue behaviour, with the negative relationship between breach and civic virtue behaviour stronger when workplace supervisor familism was high. This suggests that employees with a high level of workplace supervisor familism may feel a sense of betrayal and, therefore, respond more negatively to contract breach. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.

Towards a methodology for deriving contract-compliant business processes

This paper presents a methodology for deriving business process descriptions based on terms in business contract. The aim is to assist process modellers in structuring collaborative interactions between parties, including their internal processes, to ensure contract-compliant behaviour. The methodology requires a formal model of contracts to facilitate process derivations and to form a basis for contract analysis tools and run-time process execution.

Translating business contract constraints into compliant business processes

This paper presents an approach for translating legalese expression of business contracts into candidate business activities and processes while ensuring their compliance with contract. This is a progressive refinement using logic-based formalism to capture contract semantics and to serve as an intermediate step for transformation. Particular value of this approach is for those organisations that consider moving towards new approaches to enterprise contract management and applying them to their future contracts.

On compliance of business processes with business contracts

This paper addresses the problem of ensuring compliance of business processes, implemented within and across organisational boundaries, with the constraints stated in related business contracts. In order to deal with the complexity of this problem we propose two solutions that allow for a systematic and increasingly automated support for addressing two specific compliance issues. One solution provides a set of guidelines for progressively transforming contract conditions into business processes that are consistent with contract conditions thus avoiding violation of the rules in contract. Another solution compares rules in business contracts and rules in business processes to check for possible inconsistencies. Both approaches rely on a computer interpretable representation of contract conditions that embodies contract semantics. This semantics is described in terms of a logic based formalism allowing for the description of obligations, prohibitions, permissions and violations conditions in contracts. This semantics was based on an analysis of typical building blocks of many commercial, financial and government contracts. The study proved that our contract formalism provides a good foundation for describing key types of conditions in contracts, and has also given several insights into valuable transformation techniques and formalisms needed to establish better alignment between these two, traditionally separate areas of research and endeavour. The study also revealed a number of new areas of research, some of which we intend to address in near future.

Both beta(2)- and beta(1)-adrenergic receptors mediate hastened relaxation and phosphorylation of phospholamban and troponin I in ventricular myocardium of fallot infants, consistent with selective coupling of beta(2)-adrenergic receptors to G(s)-protein

Background-In adult human heart, both beta(1)- and beta(2)-adrenergic receptors mediate hastening of relaxation; however, it is unknown whether this also occurs in infant heart. We compared the effects of stimulation of beta(1)- and beta(2)-adrenergic receptors on relaxation and phosphorylation of phospholamban and troponin I in ventricle obtained from infants with tetralogy of Fallot. Methods and Results-Myocardium dissected from the right ventricular outflow tract of 27 infants (age range 2-1/2 to 35 months) with tetralogy of Fallot was set up to contract 60 times per minute. Selective stimulation of beta(1)-adrenergic receptors with (-)-norepinephrine (NE) and beta(2)-adrenergic receptors with (-)-epinephrine (EPI) evoked phosphorylation of phospholamban (at serine-16 and threonine-17) and troponin I and caused concentration-dependent increases in contractile force (-log EC50 [mol/L] NE 5.5+/-0.1, n=12; -EPI 5.6+/-0.1, n=13 patients), hastening of the time to reach peak force (-log EC50 [mol/L] NE 5.8+/--0.2; EPI 5.8+/-0.2) and 50% relaxation (-log EC50 [mol/L] NE 5.7+/-0.2: EPI 5.8+/-0.1), Ventricular membranes from Fallot infants, labeled with (-)-[I-125]-cyanopindolol, revealed a greater percentage of beta(1)- (71%) than beta(2)-adrenergic receptors (29%). Binding of (-)-epinephrine to beta(2)-receptors underwent greater GTP shifts than binding of (-)-norepinephrine to beta(1)-receptors. Conclusions-Despite their low density, beta(2)-adrenergic receptors are nearly as effective as beta(1)-adrenergic receptors of infant Fallot ventricle in enhancing contraction, relaxation, and phosphorylation of phospholamban and troponin I, consistent with selective coupling to G(s)-protein.

Potential demand for hedging by Australian wheat producers

The potential for hedging Australian wheat with the new Sydney Futures Exchange wheat contract is examined using a theoretical hedging model parametised from previous studies. The optimal hedging ratio for an 'average' wheat farmer was found to be zero under reasonable assumptions about transaction costs and based on previously published measures of risk aversion. The estimated optimal hedging ratios were found by simulation to be quite sensitive to assumptions about the degree of risk aversion. If farmers are significantly more risk averse than is currently believed, then there is likely to be an active interest in the new futures market.