Do human resource practices enhance organizational commitment in SMEs with low employee satisfaction?

This paper considers a large matched employee–employer data set to estimate a model of organizational commitment. In particular, it focuses on the role of firm size and management formality to explain organizational commitment in British small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with high and low levels of employee satisfaction. It is shown that size ‘in itself’ can explain differences in organizational commitment, and that organizational commitment tends to be higher in organizations with high employee satisfaction compared with organizations of similar size with low employee satisfaction. Crucially, the results suggest that formal human resource (HR) practices can be used as important tools to increase commitment and thus, potentially, effort and performance within underperforming SMEs with low employee satisfaction. However, formal HR practices commonly used by large firms may be unnecessary in SMEs which benefit from high employee satisfaction and positive employment relations within a context of informality.

High Formalism: The aerial view and the colour field

Laura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004), first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consists of four oblong Cibachrome prints derived from digital files sourced from the commercial Ikonos and QuickBird satellites. The prints are ostensibly flat, depthless fields of white, green, blue, and yellow, yet the captions provided explain that the sites represented are related to contested military, industrial, and cartographic practices. In Kurgan’s account of Monochrome Landscapes she explains that it is in dialogue with another work from the Whitney by abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly. This article pursues the relationship between formalist abstraction and satellite imaging in order to demonstrate how formalist strategies aimed at producing an immediate retinal response are bound up with contemporary uses of digital information and the truth claims such information can be made to substantiate.