Most Popular Books by Peter Boxall

If Trollope, Cooper and Christie could ever have collaborated on a novel they would probably come up with something very similar to ''Stumped Identity''. Rory Embers, a teenager in long term foster care along with his four younger siblings in urban North London, wants to find his real father and seeks retribution for the life he has given them. To find his father he gains the help of Sophie Anderson, a young Social worker who, unbeknown to Rory, has an agenda of her own. Their investigations lead them to the seemingly idyllic West Country village, Craig Dell, where the cricket club is the hub of the village. Here in the heart of middle England, villagers go about their business and pleasure. Behind the net curtains all is not quite so straight forward and an unconventional lifestyle and seedy underbelly is slowly uncovered. But which of the residents is Rory''s father? Two fit the bill precisely; Phil ''Popeye'' Embers, the village butcher and Miles Harrington, the recently arrived, secretive peddler of pornography. Not until the final pages is the ''who done it'' revealed. ''Stumped Identity'' is a fast paced yarn that has humour threaded throughout whilst addressing a serious social issue.

Water management can generate valuable ecosystem services but can be costly to implement. We examine this issue using irrigation water storage infrastructure which has the potential to provide desirable services to residential properties affected by the condition of the storage structure. We examine a particular prairie setting where concerns regarding fluctuations in water levels of an irrigation storage lake led to an agreement between the irrigation agency and the owners of properties around the lake to stabilize water levels. Using quasi-experimental hedonic property approaches with two different control groups we estimate the subsequent impact of this agreement on shoreline property values using a time series of sales data. The methods utilized in this article represent an effective approach to produce plausible estimates of some of the economic values captured by the infrastructure generating ecosystem services. We find that property values increased as a result of the agreement and that the additional property tax revenues arising from these values can be used to some extent to offset the annual service fees paid to the irrigation agency to provide the stabilized lake levels. This article illustrates the potential for irrigation infrastructure management to provide increases in ecosystem service values beyond irrigation, and also that these values can be captured to pay for the costs of providing these increased values.

We examine the propensity of respondents to choose the status quo (SQ) or current situation alternative as a function of complexity in two separate state-of-the-world choice experiments. Complexity in each choice set was characterized as the number of single and multiple changes in levels of attributes from the current situation and the order of the choice task in the sequence of multiple tasks provided to respondents. We show that increasing complexity leads to increased choice of the SQ and that a respondent''s age and level of education also influenced this choice. We outline the effects of the alternate approaches for incorporating the SQ into welfare measurement. These findings have implications for the design of stated preference experiments, examining passive use values and for empirical analysis leading to welfare measurement.

This article uses national-level data to examine the benefits for workers of better skill utilisation and the question of how opportunities to use skills in the workplace can be enhanced. Analysis of the New Zealand data in the 2005 and 2015 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme confirms that better skill utilisation is generally associated with a broad range of beneficial outcomes, including higher employee income, better opportunities for career advancement, higher job satisfaction, greater organisational commitment and lower turnover intentions. In addition, skill utilisation serves as a significant mediator between work autonomy and employee outcomes, particularly in the 2015 survey. As a general rule, better utilisation of employee skills will occur in organisational climates in which employee autonomy is encouraged. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022185618819169.

An adult mystery yarn...Stephanie Howe is out of prison after a ten stretch for GBH and more, enjoying a celebratory drink at the local hostelry for dodgy guys and gals, The Bootmakers Arms, a.k.a. The Cobblers. The notorious lady gangster has business to clear up from before her holiday at her Majesty''s request.Much has changed in her leafy suburb, north east of London, during the interruption in her life. The pub has new owners; guys who have made their millions in The City of London. Managed by the mercurial Veronica, a mystery herself. A landlady who has calmed the pub from being a scene from the Wild West to simply a den of thieves. They are desperate to redevelop the pub and shed it of its sleazy image. Next door to the pub the once defunct and discredited Prep School, now the magnificent Blue Skies House Retirement Home. Owned by Benny ''BJ'' Johnson, a larger than life character of Nigerian origin with an overdraft to match his ego.There is a relatively new Detective Inspector on the block, Mike Griffin. He has a long-term case to solve. The disappearance of sixteen gold bars after a raid on a Spanish Bank in The City of London a decade earlier. Word is that it is in his patch and he has been deployed to solve this, together with an unhealthy spike in crime figures in the area.An area where many know plenty but divulge little. Dodgy pasts are more than the norm. Who really knows what though? Fake news and misinformation are D.I. Griffin''s bug bear. An intriguing pool of characters for him and his tenacious team of two to unravel. One of the pub''s most frequent visitors is a peddler of goods illegally acquired in London''s West End, who certainly, doesn''t stand out as being anything other than a punter; but has he a secret to be told? Cobblers is an entertaining, page turning, adult mystery yarn that looks at everyday life of everyday folk in a not necessarily normal society. Much illicit shagging seems to be excepted, or even expected. With the local Constabulary more than contributing to the shenanigans, as well as appearing to carry a stash of nine-bob notes. Or is this more reality than the lives many of us lead?The gold though? The tale attempts to untangle the mystery whereabouts of the bullion.Character and dialogue driven, explosive at times, with many a twist, Cobblers will absorb you into a world that we all live very close to.Prepare to be entertained and if you can second guess the outcome you are one ahead of the author.

The management of managers is an important contemporary concern, but the literature on the issue is not well integrated. This paper reviews key sources on the topic across organizational economics, human resource development and strategic human resource management. It presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for analyzing how firms manage senior managers and for guiding future research, arguing that firms adopt different styles to attract-defend, develop-renew and motivate-harvest their senior managerial resource, depending on their contexts and choices that are made in the firm over time. The notion that some styles draw on early identification of élites while others treat management identification as more of an emergent problem is central to the typology. Within each of the styles identified, effectiveness in the management of managers hinges on recognizing and handling certain strategic tensions and problems.

PurposeThis study aims to explore the implementation of data analytics in the Big-Four accounting firms, including the extent to which a digital transformation is changing the work of financial auditors, why it is doing so and how these firms are managing the transformation process.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 23 interviews with 20 participants across four hierarchical levels from three of the Big-Four accounting firms in New Zealand.FindingsThe firms have entered the era of “smart audit systems”, in which auditors provide deep business insights that are communicated more effectively through data visualisation. The full potential, however, of data analytics depends not only on the transformation process within accounting firms but also on improvement in the quality of IT systems in client companies. The appointment of transformation managers, the recruitment of technology-savvy graduates and the provision of extensive training are helping to embed data analytics in the Big-Four firms. Accounting graduates in financial audit now need to show that they have the aptitude to become “citizen data scientists”.Practical implicationsThe findings explain how data analytics is being embraced in the Big-Four auditing firms and underline the implications for those who work in them.Originality/valueThe findings challenge the “technological reluctance” thesis. In contrast, the authors observe a climate of positive attitudes towards new technology and accompanying actions in the Big-Four firms. The authors show how branches of the Big-Four firms operating distantly from their global headquarters, and with smaller economies of scale, are implementing the new technologies that characterise their global firms.Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1108/PAR-06-2021-0105.

This study examines two sources of workplace learning (via supervisors and via colleagues) as potential mediators accounting for the effects of social support and training on employee wellbeing. Analysis of survey data from 279 Chinese workers reveals that they react to the two sources of learning differently, possibly as a consequence of a high-power-distance culture. Learning from supervisors is the only significant mediator in the relationships between social support and training, on the one hand, and employee wellbeing (physical health, work engagement and job satisfaction), on the other. This demonstrates that different forms of workplace learning can have different antecedents and consequences, and suggests that the supervisor-employee dyad is particularly important for work-related learning in China. The study shows that a learning-based mediation process contributes to job-resources-to-wellbeing relationships, and should be factored into future theorization in the job demands-resources (JD-R).

Situated within a societal perspective on human resource management (HRM), this paper asks how HRM academics can make a better contribution to understanding the impacts of HRM on societal well-being. It argues that we should target the ''so what?'' questions that matter to society, including important issues of employer-employee misalignment and of perverse alignment (''perverse-performance work systems''). It calls for an approach to societal issues in HRM that is problem-focused and theory-informed. While recognising some validity to the criticisms of academic HRM raised in the ''psychologisation'' debate, the article argues that the critique is over-generalised and contests the idea that the concern of HRM academics with enhancing workplace mutuality is an expression of a unitarist ideology. Mutuality and unitarism should not be conflated. In advancing a pluralist agenda, it argues that we must become better at theoretical integration, at synergising our research methods and at engaging constructively with practitioners and policy makers.

This study is concerned with the debate around employee well-being in the environment of lean production. It applies the job demands-resources model to examine the effects of problem-solving demands and job resources (training, participation in decision-making, and line manager support) on employee engagement and exhaustion in a Chinese manufacturer. It examines previously untested interactions and shows that these job resources created a “buffering effect” in the relationship between problem-solving demands and exhaustion. It also shows a “coping effect” because the relationship between resources and engagement was strengthened as problem-solving demands increased. Rather than being uniformly positive or negative, the results suggest that the overall impact of lean production on worker well-being is likely to depend on the ways in which managers create scope for worker involvement in decision-making, target resources to the specific job demands, and adjust resource levels to the degree of these demands. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12204.

This study interrogates the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Pro-gramme (ISSP) across three waves (1997, 2005 and 2015) to understand the job values of New Zealanders. It finds that men and women are more similar than different in their job values, that full-timers are more concerned with income and career prospects than part-timers, and that higher education tends to raise expectations of having an interesting job and a high level of pay. New Zealanders have become somewhat more altruistic at work, confirming the image of the ''helpful Kiwi'', but their job values have not shifted much across these surveys and are similar to those of employees in other developed countries. The broad pattern is that a vital extrinsic factor, job security, and the intrinsic quality of work out-rank the value of the extrinsic factors of high income and career prospects for New Zealanders.

We extend count data travel cost modeling by developing a utility theoretic system of semilogarithmic recreation demand equations. The restrictions required to make the system utility theoretic are applied during estimation. The model is applied to individual wilderness recreation trips in a system of four Canadian wilderness parks. The resulting demand system is used to examine the impacts of changing U.S.-Canadian currency exchange rates on participation and welfare of U.S. recreationists.