Six years after Congress began reducing defense outlays, small California machine shops and aircraft parts suppliers remain highly dependent on the aerospace industry. Many firms in these two segments of the state's small defense aerospace supplier base have not branched into production of cutting-edge products for commercial customers. And other firms in these segments also may face shortages ...

The new century has been marked by an unprecedented number of layoffs of IT personnel. But despite the increasing industry concerns over IT worker downsizing, the knowledge base and scholarly literature on IT personnel layoffs has been sparse. This paper suggests some exploratory, descriptive insights into such downsizing efforts. Data on 569 layoff events in the US for years 2000 and 2001 were...

We examine change in government employment among OECD countries between 1980 and 1997, with particular attention to the international spread of ideas about organizational downsizing. Network models of diffusion show linked annual rates of employment change among nations that are geographically close to each other and which trade extensively. Sub-analyses demonstrate that downsizers but not upsi...

The COVID-19 crisis has caused a wave of redundancies globally. This brought the organisational practice downsizing into sharp relief. Responsible is broadly understood as actions, practices and strategies adopted by organisations to ameliorate negative effects redundancy. paper draws on HR theories best fit explore phenomenon responsible downsizing, dominant focus in extant literature identifi...

Older adults face a daunting task: while continuing engagements in multiple relationships, investment in their own and others' futures, and developing life interests and capacities, they also reexamine and sometimes reconfigure the place where their social lives and objects are housed. Some relocate, downsize, to a new smaller place and reducing possessions to ensure an environment supportive o...

Most downsizing operations exhibit high financial returns, but their economic returns crucially depend on their design. After briefly comparing public sector employment across countries, this paper analyzes the optimal design of downsizing operations from a microeconomic perspective. It first discusses how to identify redundant workers when individual productivity is observable, as is often the...

We study the impact of outflows driven by active galactic nuclei (AGN) on galaxy formation. Outflows move into the surrounding intergalactic medium (IGM) and heat it sufficiently to prevent it from condensing onto galaxies. In the dense, high-redshift IGM, such feedback requires highly energetic outflows, driven by a large AGN. However, in the more tenuous low-redshift IGM, equivalently strong ...

Corporate executives and shareholders seem to take it as an article of faith that reductions in force and the savings they generate are a necessary evil when earnings numbers are declining. Others start a priori with the fact that downsizing is wrong because of the damage inflicted on individuals, communities, and society. In their ardor to take action before year-end or to demonstrate that the...