Who creates the jobs?

Small business start-ups create most of the new jobs in our economy. It is an attractive argument to those who want governments to support small businesses. But is it true? Or are large firms the ones that generate most jobs? Michael Anyadike-Danes, Mark Hart and Karen Bonner examine a long-running and acrimonious dispute.

Who creates the jobs?

Addresses Birch's hypothesis, made in 1979 and the subject of much debate since, that small businesses create the most new jobs, using the Office of National Statistics' new Business Structure Database and focusing on the 1998 cohort of new firms and their evolution up to 2008. Assesses: the size of the firms in the cohort; the distribution of jobs as firms moved between size bands; job creation trends in firms that survived with 20+ employees; and job creation by size band. Argues that the answer to the question of 'who creates the jobs?' depends on exactly how the question is framed.

New career models in UK professional service firms:from up-or-out to up-and-going-nowhere?

In this paper, we empirically examine how professional service firms are adapting their promotion and career models to new market and institutional pressures, without losing the benefits of the traditional up-or-out tournament. Based on an in-depth qualitative study of 10 large UK based law firms we find that most of these firms do not have a formal up-or-out policy but that the up-or-out rule operates in practice. We also find that most firms have introduced alternative roles and a novel career policy that offers a holistic learning and development deal to associates without any expectation that unsuccessful candidates for promotion to partner should quit the firm. While this policy and the new roles formally contradict the principle of up-or-out by creating permanent non-partner positions, in practice they coexist. We conclude that the motivational power of the up-or-out tournament remains intact, notwithstanding the changes to the internal labour market structure of these professional service firms.

Changing career models and capacity for innovation in professional services

A number of professional sectors have recently moved away from their longstanding career model of up-or-out promotion and embraced innovative alternatives. Professional labor is a critical resource in professional service firms. Therefore, changes to these internal labor markets are likely to trigger other innovations, for example in knowledge management, incentive schemes and team composition. In this chapter we look at how new career models affect the core organizing model of professional firms and, in turn, their capacity for and processes of innovation. We consider how professional firms link the development of human capital and the division of professional labor to distinctive demands for innovation and how novel career systems help them respond to these demands.

The career of councillors:gender, party and politics. By Catherine Bochel and Hugh M. Bochel, 2000. Pp.143. £37.50 hb.

Book review

Opportunity, fair process and relationship value:career development as a driver of proactive work behaviour

In line with recent findings from organisational justice theory, we hypothesised that employee proactive behaviour and careerist orientation is predicted by the interplay of perceived favourability of career development opportunities, the perceived fairness of the procedures used to decide them, and employee organisational commitment. Employees (N = 325) of a large financial services organisation responded to a self-completion questionnaire. As predicted, when career development opportunities were viewed unfavourably, perceived procedural justice was significantly and positively related to individual proactive behaviour and significantly and negatively related to careerist orientation but only when organisational commitment was high. It appears that high procedural justice may only 'offset' the negative effects of unfavourable career development opportunities when employees identify with, and are committed to, their organisation. Further support is presented for a relational, rather than instrumental, model of procedural justice when reflecting on employee reactions to their employers' policies and decision-making. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Career development and careerist orientation to work:it's a question of trust, isn't it?

Presentation

Attentional demand and cost responsibility as stressors in shopfloor jobs

Two studies were conducted to test for the effects of attentional demand and cost responsibility on psychological strain. One was a field experiment involving operators of computer-based manufacturing equipment, and the other was a cross-sectional investigation of employees in a wide range of jobs. The results showed increased strain only for those in jobs high on both attentional demand and cost responsibility. Implications for job design for new manufacturing technologies are discussed.

Design of a genetic algorithm for bi-objective flow shop scheduling problems with re-entrant jobs

This paper presents a simulated genetic algorithm (GA) model of scheduling the flow shop problem with re-entrant jobs. The objective of this research is to minimize the weighted tardiness and makespan. The proposed model considers that the jobs with non-identical due dates are processed on the machines in the same order. Furthermore, the re-entrant jobs are stochastic as only some jobs are required to reenter to the flow shop. The tardiness weight is adjusted once the jobs reenter to the shop. The performance of the proposed GA model is verified by a number of numerical experiments where the data come from the case company. The results show the proposed method has a higher order satisfaction rate than the current industrial practices.