Breaching a Contract Versus Searching for a Job While Employed: Ethical Dilemmas Faced by Coaches and Administrators When Deciding About a Mid-Season Change in Leadership

The Pointers are a soccer team that play in Division A of the Demolition League. The president of the Pointers is Fernando Garcia, and the head coach is Guille Muller. The league has a poor culture of firing coaches throughout the season. With only a couple of games left in the season, the Pointers are going through a losing streak, and there are rumors Muller may be fired if the team does not win their next game. Simultaneously, Muller is receiving coaching offers from other teams within the league. The ethical dilemma surrounding this case refers to two scenarios (a) whether it is ethical for the president to negotiate with another coach while there is still one employed and (b) whether it is ethical for a coach to negotiate with another club while employed. Drawing from research in sport management, this case focuses on three ethical theories to create discussion surrounding the scenario: Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics. Undergraduate and graduate students in sport management, human resources, and those who seek to be in a leadership position will have the opportunity to understand, analyze, and discuss these three theories and apply them to real-life scenarios, such as hiring and firing employees.

Unemployment

This chapter offers a wide-ranging review of the macroeconomics of unemployment and related issues. Setting the scene with definitions, motivation, and facts, the discussion proceeds to a baseline wage and price setting model, which offers some first key insights. Formal models of trade unions and efficiency wages, and of the less standard, but topical, dual labour markets, are developed next. Dynamic issues, such as hysteresis and its underpinning factors, are also discussed. A major subsequent theme is the flows and search-based recent theory, emphasizing job creation and destruction, hiring and firing costs, and the Beveridge Curve. Additionally, the effects of technical progress on unemployment, wage inequality, and job polarization are discussed. The chapter concludes with a review of the high European unemployment of the 1980s and 1990s and the ‘shocks versus institutions’ debates on its causes.

Conclusion: Fanboy Backlash and the Futures of Fan Auteurs

The conclusion contrasts two cases of fangirl auteurs—the Wachowski sisters and Ava DuVernay—with the rise of fan backlash. On one hand, media makers can no longer opt out of the spaces and patterns of fan engagement. This brings a great deal of risk as campaigns for hiring and firing—sincere or otherwise—are an increasingly widely used tactic in fandoms and the culture wars alike. On the other hand, DuVernay and the Wachowski sisters are interesting cases whose established auteur status enabled them to move into fandom. The Wachowskis have historically avoided the spotlight and have embraced outsiderhood only recently. DuVernay takes an overtly political approach to being a public figure, directly naming systems of inequality. Proliferating fannish media can allow a wider variety of auteurs, but tentpole properties continue to be haunted by the specter of mainstream fan rage.

Male and female entrepreneurs’ employment growth ambitions: the contingent role of regulatory efficiency

Entrepreneurs start and grow their ventures in a widely varying set of institutional contexts. One differentiator is a country’s regulatory efficiency which encompasses the freedom to start and to run a business without excessive government interventions around registering, hiring, and firing employees, and price controls on currency. The efficiency of regulations varies substantially among countries and imposes additional costs and risks on entrepreneurs’ activities. We integrate insights from institutional theory and recent literature on gender and entrepreneurship to better understand how a country’s regulatory efficiency affects male and female entrepreneurs’ employment growth ambitions. We explore three aspects of regulatory efficiency: business freedom (e.g., to start, operate, and close a venture), labor freedom (e.g., laws around minimum wage, layoffs, severance), and monetary freedom (e.g., price stability) using data from over 47,000 entrepreneurs in 68 countries. We find that entrepreneurs’ growth ambitions are higher in countries with more efficient regulations, particularly those countries characterized by fewer labor law restrictions and greater monetary freedoms. These findings are further exacerbated by gender by such that, relative to their female counterparts, male entrepreneurs have significantly greater venture growth ambitions. Our paper contributes to the discussion on how formal institutions influence women and men entrepreneurs in distinct ways.

Disability and the Quest for Flexibility

This chapter analyzes the quest for flexibility among personal support recipients, considering their experiences of impairment and aging and how these bodily realities clash with the value that North American culture places on independence and youth. Recipients sought flexibility in the labor market, which was a continuum ranging from hiring and firing power to a degree of say on who came into one's home to provide intimate support. Recipients also sought flexibility at the intimate level along two dimensions. The first was their ability to use their own knowledge to direct how their bodies were handled and their homes managed. The second dimension was their ability to influence and change which service tasks were provided, when, and where. This deep understanding of recipients' quest for flexibility, together with the account of workers' long-standing pursuit of security in the previous chapter, begins to reveal tensions between the two groups. Recipients' desire for flexibility in service tasks can be in tension with workers' efforts to gain security by defining the parameters of their job. At the labor market level, recipient flexibility to choose the worker can be in tension with worker's employment and income security.