Highland haberdashery: Scottish kiltmaking in the twenty-first century

The Scottish kilt is one of the world’s most renowned cultural garments, and the Highland dress industry contributes £350 million annually to the Scottish apparel industry. However, outsourcing and deceptive marketing tactics have negatively impacted the kiltmaking industry. The purpose of this study was to investigate Scottish kiltmakers’ knowledge and experiences as a basis for industry protection. A qualitative, phenomenological method employed interviews, observations, video and artefact analysis and prototyping to understand participant’s (n=17) experiences with learning and practising kiltmaking. Findings indicated that: (1) kiltmakers’ experience life-long learning through scaffolding, (2) kilt customers are not well informed of quality differences between genuine Scottish kilts and imports, (3) gender plays a role in pay inequality, lack of respect and quality of life issues for female kiltmakers and (4) kiltmakers agree that protection is necessary, however, they are unsure of how it would be realized.

Economics And Management

Employees do not just perform in accordance with their own pay but also the pay of their peers. Pay inequality can act as a disincentive, reducing employee output and attendance by a significant amount. It is irrelevant whether they have a higher or lower salary than that of their co-workers. Pay disparity also lowers the ability of employees to work in their own interests and cooperate with other workers effectively. Pay inequality may have no discernible effect if an employee is aware that a peer with a higher salary produces a greater output than them.

How Do I Compare? The Effect of Work-Unit Demographics on Reactions to Pay Inequality

Prior research suggests that individuals react negatively when they perceive they are underpaid. Moreover, individuals frequently select pay referents who share their race and gender, suggesting that demographic similarity affects one’s knowledge of pay differences. Leveraging these insights, the authors examine whether the gender and racial composition of a work unit shapes individuals’ reactions to pay deprivation. Using field data from a large health care organization, they find that pay deprivation resulting from workers receiving less pay than their same-sex and same-race coworkers prompts a significantly stronger response than does pay deprivation arising from workers receiving less pay than their demographically dissimilar colleagues. A supplemental experiment reveals that this relationship likely results from individuals’ propensity to select same-category others as pay referents, shaping workers’ information about their colleagues’ pay. The study’s findings underscore the need to theoretically and empirically account for how demographically driven social comparison processes affect reactions to pay inequality.

The effect of intra-workplace pay inequality on employee trust in managers: Assessing a multilevel moderated mediation effect model

High levels of economic inequality are widely viewed as a key challenge facing both advanced industrial and developing economies. Country-level studies have consistently shown a negative link between income inequality and trust in others. This is typically attributed to greater social distance within unequal societies. Do we observe similar relationships within organisations? This is an important question because employee trust is associated with important outcomes for workers and organisations. We answer it by investigating the relationship between pay inequality and employee trust in managers at the workplace level using large-scale nationally representative matched employer–employee data from Britain. The article uses innovative machine learning methods to demonstrate a curvilinear relationship between pay inequality and trust. When pay inequality is at low to moderate levels, increasing inequality is associated with increasing employee trust but when pay inequality passes a certain threshold the relationship turns negative. The relationship is mediated by employees’ perceptions of manager fairness and moderated by employee collective voice. The implications of these findings for theory, research methodology, practice and future studies are discussed.

Gender pay gap in Vietnam: a propensity score matching analysis

PurposeThis paper investigates the extent, the determinants and the change in the gender pay gap in Vietnam in the period 2010–2016 in order to provide suggestions for policy adjustment to narrow gender pay inequality more effectively.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs the propensity score matching (PSM) method to examine inequality in pay between female and male earners sharing identical characteristics. The analysis is conducted for both the full sample and various characteristic-based subsamples. This procedure is conducted for 2010 and 2016 separately to discover the change in gap and inequality during this period.FindingsThe matching results based on the data sets taken from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) 2010 and 2016 affirm that gender income inequality in Vietnam, though persisted, decreased significantly in 2016 compared to 2010, and was insignificant in many subsamples in 2016. In addition to the observable determinants including educational level, occupation, economic sector and industry, unobservable factors are proved to also play an important role in creating the gender pay gap in Vietnam.Practical implicationsThe research findings suggest that policies aimed at mitigating gender pay inequality should take into account both observable characteristics and unobservable factors such as unobservable gender differences that affect wages and gender discrimination in pay.Originality/valueThis is the first study using a matching technique to investigate gender wage gap in Vietnam. With up-to-date data, longer research period and the superiority of the method used in dealing with sample selection bias, the results obtained are more robust, more detailed and reliable.