Human menopause is remarkable in that reproductive senescence is markedly accelerated relative to somatic aging, leaving an extended postreproductive period for a large proportion of women. Functional explanations for this are debated, in part because comparative data from closely related species are inadequate. Existing studies of chimpanzees are based on very small samples and have not provided clear conclusions about the reproductive function of aging females. These studies have not examined whether reproductive senescence in chimpanzees exceeds the pace of general aging, as in humans, or occurs in parallel with declines in overall health, as in many other animals. In order to remedy these problems, we examined fertility and mortality patterns in six free-living chimpanzee populations. Chimpanzee and human birth rates show similar patterns of decline beginning in the fourth decade, suggesting that the physiology of reproductive senescence was relatively conserved in human evolution. However, in contrast to humans, chimpanzee fertility declines are consistent with declines in survivorship, and healthy females maintain high birth rates late into life. Thus, in contrast to recent claims, we find no evidence that menopause is a typical characteristic of chimpanzee life histories.

Original citation:Marsden, David and Richardson, Ray (1994) Performing for pay? The effects of 'merit pay' on motivation in a public service. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 32 (2). pp. 243-261. ISSN 1467-8543 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.1994.tb01043.x © 1994 This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/4030/ Available in LSE Research Online: January 2016 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. 1Performing for pay? The effects of 'merit pay' on motivation in a public service. David Marsden and Ray RichardsonLondon School of Economics and Centre for Economic Performance 1 Introduction.Performance related pay has been very strongly on the increase in the UK, in both the private and public sectors. In the private sector, where it has long been a feature of managerial pay, it is being extended to a much wider range of occupations. In the public sector too, a large variety of performance related pay systems can be discerned and, over the last few years, they have been extended to practically the whole of the Civil Service.There also seems to be no prospect that the present Government will back-off from performance related pay. Although the extension of the new arrangements may have been somewhat retarded by the 1.5% public sector pay limit in the 1992/3 pay round and the prospective wage bill freeze in 1993/4, the Government has given no public indication of any shift in its view that extending performance related pay is an integral part of its policy of improving public services.Given this, it is only natural to ask whether the recent experiments in performance related pay in the public sector have been successful. This, surprisingly, seems to be a question which has rarely been addressed with any seriousness, whether in the UK (Cannell and Wood 1992, Thompson, 1992), or even in the US, where performance related pay in the Federal civil service has been in use for much longer (Milkovitch and Wigdor, 1991). In particular, although there exist a small number of evaluations of schemes for managerial staff, 2 we know of no evaluation study of PRP for public service non-managerial staff, for whom PRP is a relatively new practice.Despite the growing use made of a whole range of performance related schemes, their true impact remains large...

‘A theory of Employment Systems’ explains why there are such great international differences in the way employment relations are organized within the firm. It takes account of the growing evidence of international diversity. It sets out from the theory of the firm first developed by Coase and Simon, and explains why firms and workers should use the employment relationship as the basis for their economic cooperation. The originality of the employment relationship lies in its flexibility. It gives managers the authority to organize work, but it also establishes limits on employees’ obligations. Neither Coase nor Simon dealt with these limits, yet without them, no one would be prepared to work as an ‘employee’, and so there would be no employment relationship, and firms would not exist as employing organizations. The book argues that these limits are provided by four basic types of employment rule. Which one predominates in a given environment is the source of societal diversity in employment relations. The theory is extended to show why such diversity extends deep into key areas of human resource management, such as performance management, incentive pay, and skill development. It also explains why the open‐ended employment relationship continues to dominate work despite the growth of market‐mediated work relations. The book covers evidence from the US, Japan, France, Germany, and Britain.

No abstract

The 'Network economy' and models of the employment contract. Abstract:The development of the 'network economy' and project-based work challenge established methods of regulating employment relationships. There appears to be an unsatisfied demand for its greater use, especially among employers, and this may be blocked by the lack of suitable contractual forms.. Project-based work seeks to retainsome of the open-ended flexibility of the standard employment relationship in relation to its task content but not its duration. The paper argues the success of the standard employment relationship stems from articulation of its psychological, economic/incentive, and legal aspects. As yet, this appears to be lacking for more transient forms of relationship.