Your search

Reviews the book "Santé et sécurité et transformation du travail: réflexions et recherches sur le risque professionnel," by Denis Harrisson and Camille Legendre.

For more than ten years, much published material has argued that human resource management (HRM) can play a major role in improving organizational performance. Several researchers claim that to exert a significant impact on organizational performance, HR practices need to be integrated or complementary with each other. However, the concept of complementarity suffers from a lack of operational clarity and has been essentially approached from a statistical standpoint that has limited our understanding of the architecture of the overall system of HR practices. On the other hand, several authors assert that the complementarity of HR practices cannot be studied outside its organizational context, especially in the industrial sector. They argue that differences in the nature of activity between service organizations and manufacturing companies are likely to have implications on which practices are adopted and how these practices impact the human and corporate performance of the organizations in question. In its first phase, this study proposes an operational definition of the concept of complementarity that can be used to select which practices to include in an organization's HRM system. This complementarity has been defined as "the set of practices originating from various areas of HRM activity whose combined application can be rationally justified and empirically demonstrated to have a synergistic effect on organizational performance in a given sector." Thus, on the basis of this definition, the authors developed a number of "complex items," incorporating HRM practices from four major operational areas : staffing, remuneration, training and performance assessment. Each of these combinations embodies a link of complementarity between practices, and the additional impact of each combination is our way of measuring its complementarity. This study has the dual purpose of first verifying the hypothesis that "the more practices from different areas of HRM are complementary, the more they will improve organizational performance" (H. 1) and, second, that "it is likely that the impact of complementary practices will vary depending on whether the organizations concerned belong to the manufacturing or service sector" (H. 2). The items to measure organizational performance come from a previous study. These data were derived from questionnaires completed by 177 Canadian firms and the internal reliability varies from .77 to .90. To measure the degree of complementarity between HRM practices, 22 items were developed with an internal reliability of .84. The data were obtained from 238 manufacturing companies and 325 service organizations. The results corroborated Hypothesis 1, indicating that the complementarity of HR practices was responsible for a significant increase in productivity/ efficiency, competitive positioning and client acquisition/growth. The results also corroborated Hypothesis 2, showing that, when the two different economic sectors are compared in terms of dependant variables, a higher degree of complementarity is particularly associated in service companies with increased productivity and efficiency, better competitive positioning and a greater number of clients and increased market share. In the case of manufacturing companies, the results indicate that the higher degree of complementarity has particular impact on the first two factors. The results are discussed in the light of current research and the limitations of the research are presented.

The article reviews the book, Dignity at Work," by Randy Hodson.

The small explosion of interest in the history of Canadian consumption [over the past decade] has generated important insights into the material, cultural, and political histories of North America. It also illustrates that a vast potential for more research into Canadian consumption exists. Arguing that a rigorous theorization of the field of Canadian consumer history would now be timely and beneficial, this essay highlights themes emerging in Canadian and international consumer historiography and suggests areas of further inquiry. Its comments are not meant to be definitive, but are rather intended to spark discussion on consumer history's past, present, and future. --From authors' introduction

The article reviews the book "Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organization Power," by C. Fred Alford.

Reviews the book "Negotiation: Theory and Practice," by Alvin L. Goldman and Jacques Rojot.

The article reviews the book "Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980," by Venus Green.

This paper presents a reinterpretation of the causes for the US Patriot movement of 1837-38, which rose up in support of the Canadian rebellion in Upper Canada (UC) initiated by William Lyon Mackenzie (the companion rebellion in Lower Canada is not considered in this paper since its causation was arguably considerably different). Most traditional treatments of this event, by US historians in particular, are stuck in narrative mode and lack convincing interpretation and analysis. The US Patriot war is usually quickly dismissed as the work of a few Anglophobes and adventurers seeking land and coin. The hypothesis advanced here suggests that the US Patriot movement and its progenitor rebellion in UC may be seen as an expression of the social class tensions growing out of the transition from a subsistence-barter/household economy and culture to the more impersonal commodity market economy - a transition that was proceeding in an uneven and combined manner on both sides of the nominal Canada/US border. Mackenzie's UC rebellion was both motivated by and encouragement to radical Democratic anti-bank forces in the US. Historians are urged to consider the Patriot movement in the larger context of class conflict and accommodation then being played out on a shared Canadian/American stage.

The article reviews and comments on several books including "The Policy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study," edited by Christiaan Grootaert and Harry Anthony Patrinos, "Child Labor: An American History," by Hugh D. Hindman, and "Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace," by Jackie Krasas Rogers.

Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail, by Deborah Barndt, is reviewed.

Working-class Hamiltonians responded to s local housing crisis by creating a boathouse community along the shoreline of Burlington Bay and Dundas Marsh. Leasing or simply squatting the land, they enjoyed access to good fishing and hunting, a clean place to live, and seclusion from the gaze of best police. The notorious reputation of a nearby hotel, the presence of transients in the area, and rough elements of working-class recreation, however, made the community a prime target for urban reformers. They saw it as an unsightly problem, standing in the way of their plans to create an aesthetically-pleasing, moral, and orderly city. The "war on the squatters" shows the ways in which urban planners, conservationists, and moral reformers sought to reshape the human and natural environment of the bay, often at the expense of working people. Residents who had enjoyed resource and recreational advantages of living on the margins of Hamilton society paid the price politically when reformers contested their use of the area's natural resources. Although they won limited sympathy, they did not have the economic, legal, or political resources to fight those who saw their community as an aesthetic and moral blot on Hamilton's waterfront.

The article reviews the books, "Les syndicats en miettes," by Jean-François Amadieu, and "Sociologie des syndicats" by Dominique Andolfatto and Dominique Labbé.

The article reviews the book, "Gender in the Legal Profession: Fitting or Breaking the Mould," by Joan Broekman.

The article reviews the book "A Square Deal for All and No Railroading: Historial Essays on Labour in Brandon," by Errol Black and Tom Mitchell.

Discusses employer tactics - notably the threat of plant closure - to prevent US workers from organizing. Concludes there will be a worldwide race to the bottom in the absence of the collective voice and power that unions bring.

The article reviews the book, "In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America," by Alice Kessler-Harris.

The article reviews the book, "Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners' Struggle of '31," by Stephen L. Endicott.

The past decade has been marked by increased awareness concerning employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. Yet, to the author's knowledge, there has been limited research regarding the response of Canadian labour organizations to the workplace needs of gay and lesbian members. Limitations of these previous studies include small sample size, lack of theoretical framework, and the absence of empirical testing of hypotheses. The present study builds on these works through the use of Craig's model, the inclusion of multi-disciplinary research, and the empirical testing of data collected from more than 240 Canadian collective agreements. Key findings include that larger, public sector bargaining units with equality clauses in their collective agreements were most likely also to contain clauses that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

The article reviews the book, "How New is the "New Employment Contract"? Evidence from North American Pay Practices," by David I. Levine, Dale Belman, Gary Charness, Erica L. Groshen and K.C. O'Shaughnessy.

This paper analyses the travel writings composed by the oil drillers from Enniskillen township, in southwestern Ontario, to explain how they went about re-inforcing the project of European capitalist imperialism while simultaneously disavowing the agency of native "Others." As British subjects and Anglo-Canadians, travel and travel writing helped to define Enniskillen's "foreign drillers" as both colonizers and colonized. As agents of imperialism Enniskillen drillers became part of an imperial overclass by virtue of their "whiteness," "Britishness," and technical expertise in the mining and refining of petroleum. The colonial oil fields also became a space for the re-invention of Victorian ideals of domesticity. The wives and children of foreign drillers also travelled abroad with their husbands. In their role as homemakers, women also reinforced imperialism and its hierarchies of race and class.