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In this paper, we survey the underpinnings of the trend towards employment arbitration in the United States, and its implications for the broader industrial relations system. Specifically, we address the question of whether or not employment arbitrators have been substituted for collective bargaining by the government to an extent that warrants their inclusion as an actor in the industrial relations system. We review developments in workplace dispute resolution in the United States, the literature that attempts to explain these developments and posit an assessment of the stability of employment arbitration, and employment arbitrators, as a central feature of the US industrial relations system. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.

Abstract.We consider planning problems on a punctured Euclidean spaces, R D − O, where O is a collection of obstacles. Such spaces are of frequent occurrence as configuration spaces of robots, where O represent either physical obstacles that the robots need to avoid (e.g., walls, other robots, etc.) or illegal states (e.g., all legs off-the-ground). As state-planning is translated to path-planning on a configuration space, we collate equivalent plannings via topologically-equivalent paths. This prompts finding or exploring the different homology classes in such environments and finding representative optimal trajectories in each such class.In this paper we start by considering the problem of finding a complete set of easily computable homology class invariants for (N − 1)-cycles in (R D − O). We achieve this by finding explicit generators of the (N − 1) st de Rham cohomology group of this punctured Euclidean space, and using their integrals to define cocycles. The action of those dual cocycles on (N − 1)-cycles gives the desired complete set of invariants. We illustrate the computation through examples.We further show that, due to the integral approach, this complete set of invariants is well-suited for efficient searchbased planning of optimal robot trajectories with topological constraints. Finally we extend this approach to computation of invariants in spaces derived from (R D − O) by collapsing subspace, thereby permitting application to a wider class of non-Euclidean ambient spaces.

This article examines the strategic underpinnings of firms’ use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices. The authors argue that a firm’s strategic orientation and commitment to ADR shape its adoption of dispute resolution techniques—such as mediation and arbitration. Firms vary in the benefits they seek to gain from adopting ADR practices, and firm-level use is affected by these anticipated benefits. The authors also propose a link between a firm’s commitment to the diffusion, access, and their use of ADR, on the one hand, and employee usage on the other. They test their theory using survey data from Fortune 1000 corporations and identify four distinct strategic orientations toward ADR, which in turn help to explain use of ADR within firms. Finally, they also find that a firm’s commitment to ADR is also shown to affect the firm’s use of mediation and arbitration.