1,721,059 research outputs found
The recruitment and selection of young managers by British business 1930-2000
Get PDFA pervasive critique argues that the educational and social background of senior managers, determined largely by recruitment policies and practices, was an important contributor to the relative economic decline of Britain. The current thesis argues that this critique, even in nuanced form, suffers from serious flaws. For example, long term results of recruitment are confused with information on recruitment processes. In fact, corporate performance can only be judged by understanding the challenges that faced companies, and the limits of the options available to them. The objective of the work, then, is to outline the steps sensible recruiters should have taken to secure their needs for bright young entrants, and to describe and measure what in fact happened. Key findings are that: the criteria used by companies to define high-flier entrants – intelligence, certain personal skills, and signs of character - have remained fundamentally unchanged even if emphasis has moved. Business pursued these attributes through proxies, the most important of which was that of educational qualifications. Business was rightly slow, until the 1950s, to recruit graduate entrants because most bright young people did not attend university. Although British peculiarity in terms of non-vocationalism has been exaggerated, a lesser focus on ‘relevant’ qualifications for non-technical positions was not an economic disadvantage. Proxies for personal qualities were less robust but, over time, were replaced by better direct measurement of individual qualities. The solution found in Britain to bring educated young people together with employers through regional and national recruitment institutions, including the graduate milkround, has proven highly successful. The selection of entrants has been approached at least as well as abroad, and notably unreliable tools were avoided. Business obtained an ever growing proportion of young talent, and did so by integrating educated young people from new social strata to an extent unmatched abroad
Understanding financial wrongdoing, c.1970-2010
No full textSince the 1970s, evidence has mounted of wrongdoing in U.S. financial markets.
This study, which consists of a series of cases of financial wrongdoing, argues that
such wrongdoing is systemic – the cases discussed are merely the tip of the iceberg –
and reflects a normative failure.
The chapters focus on particular processes which occurred within or particular
phenomena which characterised the relevant period. From the mid-1970s, insider
trading cases show the authorities shifting emphasis from the spirit to the letter of the
law. From the late 1970s, the process of banking deregulation shows large banks
aggressively exploiting loopholes and accomplishing their mission to tear down the
law. From the 1980s, in the face of escalating crises, collapses, bankruptcies, and
scandals, regulators pushed for further deregulation and instituted a ‘too big to fail’
policy. From the 1990s, company cases show companies repeatedly engaging in
wrongdoing and prioritising growth and profitability over control and compliance. In
the 2000s alone, there was a long list of scandals that involved large-scale and
widespread wrongdoing and that implicated numerous leading and prestigious firms.
Systemic regulatory failure is suggested. Central are the Securities and Exchange
Commission’s longstanding policies of privately negotiating settlements, imposing
relatively modest penalties, and allowing wrongdoers to avoid admitting any
culpability. Moreover, there are indications that the SEC has paid undue deference to
industry leaders, punished whistleblowers, and destroyed evidence. There are also
indications that SEC officials see the Commission as a step towards a job with a highpaying private firm. One consequence of a rapidly spinning revolving door is that the
regulators and the regulated begin to share worldviews.
Essentially, this study argues that the asymmetric and imperfect information
that characterises financial relationships enables wrongdoing. The integrity of the
system depends on the integrity of market officials and/or participants. But, the
system has de-stigmatised, legitimised, and encouraged self-serving norms, oblivious
to the social harm they create. The implication is that financial wrongdoing can only
be remedied by normative reorientation – especially by legislators, regulators, and
judges. This will entail cultivating and protecting a public sphere which is governed
by norms and ideals distinct from those governing the private sphere
The social and legal process of bankruptcy in Germany, 1815-1870
Get PDFThe regulation of bankruptcy poses a dilemma to societies. It needs to address two problems at once: the first concerns the balance between debtor and creditor interests; the second pertains to the question between deterrence and continuity. Up to the present day there is much disagreement about the appropriate design of bankruptcy procedures. German states in the nineteenth-century found it impossible to agree on a common insolvency regime until the 1870s. This thesis investigates the legal as well as the social process of bankruptcy in a sample of towns and states in Germany between 1815 and 1870. It focused on non-Prussian legal systems in order to shed light on those alternative solutions to bankruptcy that were not ultimately adopted in the national bankruptcy code.
Bankruptcy was a social process that could take place in court as well as out of court. Creditors and debtors had strong incentives to turn to extrajudicial settlement mechanisms. Where strong local corporate organisations for merchants existed, they facilitated settlements and rule-enforcement among its members out of the official court system. Those local clubs often played the role of an arbitrator. For long, bankruptcy regulation had been part of the mercantile self-administration. Legal harmonization and processes of state formation put an end to these practises. Simultaneously, an industrializing economy devised new organisational forms that were alien to the old legal framework. Toward the second half of the century, legal harmonization gained momentum; creditor protection became the focus of lawmakers while local communities and their interests no longer played a role. As German legislators built a national and universally shared legal framework, bankruptcy regulation ceased to be local and communal. This was to the liking of businessmen, who had long complained about legal fragmentation when trying to conduct business across different German regions.</p
A problem of industries and regions: unemployment and structural change in Britain during the interwar years and 1980s
Get PDFThe most serious employment crises in twentieth-century Britain occurred during the interwar years and the early 1980s, when, in both cases, the unemployment rate climbed to over 10% in aggregate and remained high for many years. Both downturns also coincided with periods of structural change in the economy: in the interwar years, export-oriented heavy industries lost out to expanding light manufacturing industries, and, during the early 1980s, the decline of manufacturing accelerated as the economy pivoted toward service industries and finance. A large literature on these recessions has dealt with aggregate demand fluctuations and supply factors, but this mainly macroeconomic focus has limited our understanding of the impacts of structural change. This thesis investigates the interaction of structural change and the business cycle in both the crises using newly-digitized industry microdata and econometric methods. How did structural change affect these employment downturns, and what were the consequences for workers and the labor market? I find that in both periods, secular structural change contributed significantly to, and was amplified by, the cyclical downturn. This interaction caused the im- pact of the interwar and early 1980s recessions to vary across industries, regions, gender, and demographic groups, with some workers experiencing persistent disadvantage.
Chapter I reviews how structural and cyclical unemployment were understood by economists in a pre-Keynesian setting. Chapter II analyzes interwar unemployment with novel data, finding that structurally-disadvantaged industries had higher unemployment and that the labor market was more flexible for some workers than others. On the early 1980s, Chapter III argues that structural change caused a jobless recovery from the 1980-1981 recession. Finally, Chapter IV uses individual-level data to demonstrate that this recession disproportionately affected workers from particular industries, regions, and demographic groups
The rise of the leisure painter: artistic creativity within the experience of ordinary life in postwar Britain, c. 1945-2000
Get PDFSince John Ruskin and William Morris's protestations against mass production in the nineteenth century, critics of mass consumption thought that it not only reduced the necessity, but also the desire, to make things for personal use and enjoyment. The history of leisure painting in art societies and adult education, and of the amateur artist’s consumption of art materials and self-help literature, shows that, on the contrary, affluence both inspired and facilitated a quest for self-actualisation amongst the rank and file. Creative activities such as drawing and painting served this quest at little financial cost to the individual. Following the Second World War, a significant increase in the take-up of leisure painting was encouraged by the state as part of the broader postwar settlement. The pursuit of personal wellbeing through creative activity was regarded as a public good, of benefit not only to individuals but also to the communities of which they were a part. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, state support for recreational pursuits such as leisure painting was pared back: in the shift from collectivist social democracy towards individualist market liberalism, personal enjoyment was recast as a private affair for which the consumer must pay. Painting continued to grow in popularity, supported by expanding consumer markets in self-help literature and affordable art materials. Yet while consumerism sustained the popularity of amateur art-making, the ways in which amateur artists participated in the arts changed. Personal creativity emerges here as an inherently social activity: the private experience of creativity is mediated and structured by society. Consumerism was not bad for personal creativity per se, but the replacement of a communitarian approach with a consumerist model restricted the breadth and reach of creative aspiration nurtured as part of the postwar settlement. By the end of the century, most amateurs were painting alone
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