New Under the Sun? Reframing the Gray Zone in International Security

Interstate war has been on the decline since the end of the Second World War. After the Cold War ended without a grand conflagration, civil conflicts and the war on terrorism have appeared to displace interstate war as the most pressing loci of security studies. Interstate aggression has become untenable, some have argued. Cooperative grievance resolution and the powerful incentives of economic interdependence have produced a decline in the outbreak of war. Revered scholars of international security have even asked whether we should bother studying the phenomenon anymore. Intrastate conflicts, it seems, are the order of the day. We argue that the contraction of interstate war is more a function of the weight we have accorded 20th century warfare in our conceptualization of interstate war than a real decrease in states’ willingness to employ force to achieve foreign policy ends. A broader approach to interstate war is needed to capture a more consistent conceptualization of the phenomenon. We suggest a framework under which gray zone strategies represent not an emergent phenomenon but a longstanding set of tools within the broader phenomenon of interstate conflict.

Employee Relations Strategies and Performance of Water and Sewerage Service Provider in Nairobi City County, Kenya

Employee relations is one of the key fundamental elements of organizational performance, prosperity and sustainability. Since good employee relations results in a highly committed, motivated and loyal employees there is need for organizations to develop strategies that will improve performance. Employee relations strategy involves decisions and actions made by the management affecting the way in which the organization relates with its employees. The general objective of this study was to establish the effect of employee relations strategies on the performance of Water and Sewerage service providers in Nairobi Kenya. The Water and Sewerage service provider under study was Nairobi City Water & Sewerage Company, Kenya owing to the fact that it is the largest service provider both in Nairobi and Kenya based on customer base and revenue turnover hence the findings were generalized to the entire population. The study was guided by the following specific objectives; to examine the effect of employee welfare, communication, employee participation and grievance resolution mechanism on the performance of Nairobi City Water & Sewerage Company, Kenya. The study was anchored on four theories; unitarist, pluralist, system and process theories. The study employed a descriptive design. The target respondents were 3534 staff cutting across all cadres. Stratified random sampling was applied to select 10% of respondent from each stratum of; senior managers, middle level managers, supervisors and support staff thus sample population was 354.Primary data was collected using structured questionnaires and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and the results presented in tables. The study found that employee welfare, communication, employee participation and grievance resolution as components of employee relations strategies significantly influence organizational performance at Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, Kenya and therefore various strategies to strengthen these components of employee relations strategies should be explored and put in place. The multiple regression analysis results indicated that variations in employee relations strategies discussed that is; employee welfare, communication, employee participation and grievance resolution explains 54.8% of the variations on organization performance at Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company Kenya meaning the other employee relations strategies for training, recruitment among others that influence performance of Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company. The study recommended that a similar study should be carried out in various organizations in other sectors of the economy to complement the findings. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Access, citation and distribution of this article is allowed with full recognition of the authors and the source.

The Effectiveness of Grievance Processes in New Zealand: A Fair Way to Go?

Grievances are a contentious facet of contemporary employment relations and yet the amount of in-depth research evidence is limited. This study uses a real-time approach, following a set of New Zealand grievance cases as they proceeded through mediation. The public debate has focused on allegations of opportunist employees exploiting the system. Our findings, however, identify a group of employees who were seeking to remain with their employer, but who lacked influence and lost their jobs. In these situations the law was unable to provide employment protection, while employers had the dominant influence on these outcomes. These findings contribute to the international debate regarding the justice offered through newer grievance resolution systems.

Mobilizing Restraint: Economic Reform and the Politics of Industrial Protest in South Asia

The study draws on evidence from South Asia to explore how union partisan ties condition industrial protest in the context of rapid economic change. It argues that unions controlled by major political parties respond to the economic challenges of the postreform period by facilitating institutionalized grievance resolution and encouraging restraint in the collective bargaining arena. By contrast, politically independent unions and those controlled by small parties are more likely to ratchet up militancy and engage in extreme or violent forms of protest. The difference between the protest behavior of major party unions and other types of unions is explained by the fact that major political parties are encompassing organizations that internalize the externalities associated with the protest of their affiliated unions. Using original survey data from four regions in South Asia, the study shows that party encompassment is a better predictor of worker protest than other features of the affiliated party or the union, including whether the party is in or out of power, the ideological orientation of the party, or the degree of union encompassment. The analysis has implications for the policy debate over whether successful economic reform is contingent upon the political exclusion or repression of organized labor.