On the fiddle

What would a LP approach have to say about the incident covered in the following newspaper articles?

Scottish Gas fires 50 over Winnie scam (Alan McEwen, The Evening News).

SCOTTISH Gas has sacked more than 50 staff after workers were accused of stealing £27,000 by exploiting a glitch in the company's reward scheme.

The firm held dozens of disciplinary hearings after it discovered staff had been repeatedly buying Winnie the Pooh bracelets using the scheme...

City gas bash explodes into mass brawl (Alan McEwen, The Evening News).

MORE than 20 staff from Scottish Gas' Edinburgh call centre were involved in a mass brawl during an X-Factor office party. The fighting erupted during the private function at the Corn Exchange, which was organised as a "morale boosting exercise".

Some staff started hurling glass bottles at each other amid apparent recriminations following mass sackings earlier this year...

When academics misbehave

Academics are no saints when it comes to misbehaving at work.

Quite what misbehaviour can entail is varied as you should know by now.

Read the following article in today's Guardian (Education) and consider how many of the themes from the module can be related to some forms of academic plagiarism - When plagiarism is academic (Jessica Shepherd).

This week at Durham University, professors are investigating whether a former dean of the business school is guilty of plagiarism.

Professor Tony Antoniou resigned this month over allegations he copied the work of his peers for his DPhil thesis and a later journal article. He remains a professor of finance at the university...

'Lost' office hours

What would a labour process approach have to say on the misbehaviour contained, very briefly, in the following article in today's Guardian?

Business counts the cost in fan hours lost (by Richard Wray)

More than 120,000 office hours were lost on the eve of the football season as fans put the finishing touches to their online fantasy football teams.

Visits to fantasy football sites ballooned in the run-up to the first games on the weekend of August 11 and 12, according to figures from the internet measurement group comScore, with fans avidly watching the last movements in the transfer window before finalising their squads...

Spanish practices

If you have never heard of Spanish practices or just don't what is meant by the term see this one-sided definition first of all.

Royal Mail's view - and how the union sees it (Mark Milner, The Guardian).

Read the article and consider how it fits in the management control and consent. Do any 'Spanish practices' exist where you work?

Royal Mail said yesterday it had identified 92 so-called "Spanish practices" among its workforce, with some of them widespread. Here are some of the issues Royal Mail is concerned about, with the response from the Communication Workers Union...

Shrinkage

Retail's shrinking feeling (Jeremy Scott-Joynt, BBC News: Business).

Retailing, on the face of it, tends to be a straightforward business.

Electronic scanners open up new opportunities for insider thieves

Buy cheap. Sell dear, and plenty. Keep costs down.

Do it right, and come home with a profit.

But even the best retailers are doing well if they make a margin that goes much beyond a single-digit percentage.

Consider what they are up against. There is competition. There is the fickle taste of customers.

And then there is the steady 2% or so of sales that drips away each year through what the trade, euphemistically, calls "shrinkage" - and what the rest of us would simply call theft...