Broad Autonomy Research Articles

Are new work practices and new technologies biased against immigrant workers?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse if introduction of new technologies and work practices are negatively related to the employment opportunities of immigrants. Design/methodology/approach – A representative plant-level panel survey merged with register data is used. Random effect regression Tobit models are estimated. The dependent variable is wage costs share of immigrants at the plant. The important explanatory variables are measures of new technologies and work practices. Findings – The results show that workplaces where employees use personal computers intensively and have broad autonomy hire fewer non-western immigrants who have not been raised in Norway. The negative relationship is especially strong for low-skilled non-western immigrants. Originality/value – The estimation framework for studying this topic is new. The paper also presents original evidence on the relationship between characteristics of the “new” economy and demand for immigrant workers.

Church Autonomy is not a Better Path to “Truth”

Kathleen Brady's article, Religious Group Autonomy: Further Reflections About What Is At Stake, is intended to shore up her position that religious organizations deserve extremely broad autonomy from the law. Her thesis is two-fold. First, she believes that the law should not interfere with the internal operations of religious organizations, which is the position she has taken before. Second, she backs off the position apparent in her earlier work that religious organizations do great good, and, therefore, deserve autonomy. Now she posits a new thesis that religious organizations need to be protected from regulation, because they are working out the truth, and society needs the truth. This latter principle rests on the empirical claim that no one can fully know the truth (or even relative harm and benefit), and, therefore, when the law limits religious organizations, it halts the development of truth.There was a time when I would have agreed with her, but I was then taught that my views were not based in reality. The problem posed by religious entities, even when they intend to seek the truth, is that they are run by humans, with the full spectrum of human fallibility. On this score, religious organizations really are no different than large corporations. The whole range of destructive behavior can be seen in both: fraud, extortion, misappropriation of funds, lying, deceit, covering up scandals like child abuse or doctoring financial records for the sake of the organization's image, and the list goes on. If religious actors are not deterred and punished for bad acts, they wreak great wrongs. This inescapable empirical reality plainly undermines Brady's earlier claims that seemed to imply that religious organizations deserve autonomy for the good they do.

Are New Work Practices and New Technologies Biased Against Immigrant Workers?

New technologies and new work practices have been introduced and implemented over a broad range in the production process in most advanced industrialised countries during the last two decades. New work organisation practices like team organisation and job rotation require interpersonal communication to a larger extent compared to the traditional assembly line types of production. In addition to handling the formal language, communication in this respect includes country-specific skills related to understanding social and cultural codes, unwritten rules, implicit communication, norms etc. In this paper we analyse whether these developments - by increasing the importance of communication and informal human capital - have had a negative effect on employment opportunities of immigrants. The results show that firms that use PCs intensively and firms that give their employees broad autonomy employ fewer non-Western immigrants who have not been raised in Norway (i.e. arrived as adults). Furthermore, the negative relationships are especially strong for low-skilled non-Western immigrants. These results may add support to the hypothesis stating that new technologies and (some) new work practices are biased against non-Western immigrant workers, and especially those with low formal skills.

La tournée des facteurs Normes gestionnaires, régulation collective et stratégies d’activité

The work of mailmen is mainly defined by the delivery routes to which they are assigned. Since this special organization of work grants them broad autonomy, the processes for delimiting, defining, and conducting routes must be analyzed by taking into account observations from three levels. The first one focuses on the French Post Office’s managerial standards, which, though increasingly determined by objectives for making a profit, have little impact on mail deliverers’ activities. The second centers around this occupational group’s own regulations, which stem from a hierarchy based on seniority and control over mail delivery and routes. The third level of observation takes into view the strategies for delivering mail that postmen adopt on their routes. These strategies reflect different relations to managerial objectives and to customers; and they reveal contrasting conceptions of the job of delivering mail. Emphasis is laid on the fact that the situations for working at lower levels in the service sector cannot be separated from the factors defining and organizing these situations.

Le fédéralisme russe, un nouveau jeu de bascule

Relations between centre and periphery in Russia can be understood in terms of a pendular movement. Under Yeltsin, many of the eight-nine federal units of the country enjoyed broad autonomy, both politically and economically. Under Putin, the centre is prevailing. Putin has abrogated existing bilateral agreements between Moscow and the federal subjects and he has emasculated the Russian Upper House, the Council of the Federation. Putin has thus shown that Russian federalism, founded on the combination of territorial and ethnic principles introduced in Soviet times, allows great – perhaps excessive – leeway of application. Putin’s success has also demonstrated that federalism, in any conventionally understood sense, rests on weak foundations in Russia.

The Ideology of Jury Autonomy in the Early Common Law

This article looks closely at the substantial discretion exercised by the premodern English jury. Through the sixteenth century, jurors enjoyed broad autonomy with respect to fact-finding. For much of the medieval period they came to court already knowledgeable about the facts of a case and rendered their verdicts on that basis. Even after they ceased to be self-informed and had to rely instead on evidence presented in court, jurors continued to exercise their fact-finding authority with substantial independence from judicial control and review. The premodern jury also had significant autonomy regarding what we would call questions of law, an aspect of jury discretion that has received little attention from historians. In this article I look closely at the evidence bearing on both facets of jury autonomy, including trial records, accounts of trial proceedings, and legislation relating to the jury. In addition, I attempt to shed some light on the ideological assumptions that justified the early common law's commitment to jury autonomy, a commitment that is hard to understand in light of the modern rule of law idea.

The View From Taiwan

Despite periodic peace gestures from Peking, the attitude of officials in toward the Communist-ruled China mainland remains broadly negative and offers no prospect of any predictable end to the 30-year-old confrontation between the little China on and the big China of the Chinese Communists. It irritates Chinese Nationalist officials that many observers in the outside world, seemingly motivated by wishful thinking and influenced by sundry Communist gestures, insist on believing there is a slow but steady inclination toward accommodation with the mainland. Statements in Peking that talks between Communist and officials would be wlecomed, Communist professions that could keep its economic system under a regimen of broad autonomy if Peking's sovereignty is accepted (just lower your flag, they say), and offers of postal, transportation, telecommunications, and direct trade links with the mainland all have been noted by the Taipei government --and either flatly rejected or ignored. Neither have officials been impressed by such Communist moves as allowing American correspondents to go to Amoy and Foochow, across the strait from Taiwan, to report a relaxed, unmilitary attitude toward the island and to quote Fukien officials as welcoming trade and other relations with the stronghold of the Chinese Nationalists. Reports from Peking that there were Taiwan at the just-concluded National People's Congress drew the scornful clarification from that the delegates were Taiwanese stooges long resident in the Chinese Communist capital. The matter of trade has been especially irksome to Nationalist officials. Made-in-Taiwan electrical appliances and electronic products,