RANDALL PEERENBOOM, University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law
Email: Peerenbo@law.ucla.edu
XIN HE, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: xin.he@durham.ac.uk

Since the reform era began in China in 1978, there have been significant changes in the nature and incidence of disputes, conflicts and social disturbances, and the mechanisms for addressing them. As with economic and governance reforms, the government has adopted a pragmatic, problem-solving approach as it has attempted to meet the broad and at times conflicting goals of justice and efficiency while maintaining socio-political stability and rapid economic growth. The result has been continuous experimentation leading to the creation of new mechanisms, the reform of existing mechanisms, and the return to older mechanisms in some cases when newer ones proved disappointing. This is generally true across areas: commercial disputes, constitutional and administrative law, socio-economic issues (pension, welfare and medical claims, labor disputes, land takings and environmental issues), criminal law, and civil and political rights. However, reforms have been more active, progress has been more noticeable, and the path of reforms has been more consistent and direct in some areas than others.

We begin with a brief overview of significant developments in the handling of commercial disputes, socio-economic claims and public law (administrative and constitutional law) disputes. Three general patterns stand out: first, the much better performance of institutions for handling disputes in urban areas compared to rural areas; second, the significantly greater progress in handling commercial law disputes compared to socio-economic claims; and third, the more advanced state of development of administrative law compared to constitutional law.

We then summarize some of the key factors underlying these patterns and the dynamics of reform, providing an account of why the government has opted for a particular mix of mechanisms to handle a certain type of dispute at any given time, why that mix has changed over time, and why there has been more progress in some areas than other areas. We conclude with some thoughts on what can be expected in the future, and some policy recommendations to help overcome some of the existing problems.

DAVID A. JONES, University of Vermont - School of Business Administration
Email: dajones@bsad.uvm.edu

In this paper, I present a theoretical framework specifying how and why certain events trigger revenge motives in organizational settings. Drawing upon the multiple-needs model of justice (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, 2001) and a model delineating how perceptions of fairness can change (Jones & Skarlicki, in press), I propose that revenge motives are triggered by events that threaten or violate important psychological needs thereby arousing specific justice motives. Through revenge, individuals attempt to repair and address the affected needs and motives. In this paper, theoretical assertions are illustrated through findings from interviews conducted with individuals who engaged in revenge at work. I conclude by discussing the implications of the proposed framework for conflict management.

MARTIN GRAMATIKOV, Tilburg University - Private Law Department and Faculty of Law
Email: m.a.gramatikov@uvt.nl
LAURA KLAMING, Utrecht University
Email: L.Klaming@law.uu.nl

People who experience a legal problem and pursue its resolution by a neutral person or neutral body have to deal with the costs and quality of legal procedures. High costs of reaching justice and factors related to the quality of procedures and outcomes might be perceived as barriers to access to justice. A person could lump a problem without taking any steps or decide on a strategy taking the expected barriers of access to justice into consideration. The paper includes an overview of the results from an empirical study of consumer related disputes in The Netherlands. The perceptions and evaluations of people who referred their legal problem to the Consumer Dispute Commission were analysed. A web-based questionnaire was distributed to 152 participants who used the procedure and received an outcome in the past 12 months.

Three distinct properties of the procedures were measured. These include the costs of the procedure, the quality of the procedure and quality of the outcome. The primary aim of the study is to assess and predict the role of cost, quality of procedure and quality of outcome as barriers to access to justice for this particular path to justice. The results of the study demonstrate that the perceptions of the quality of the outcome are strongly influenced by the favourability of the outcome. Positive evaluations of the quality of the procedure also increase the satisfaction with the outcome but not as strongly as outcome favourability. Monetary and non-monetary costs only have a marginal impact on evaluations of the quality of the procedure and the quality of the outcome. After controlling for the effects of outcome favourability and quality of the procedure, a negative association between monetary costs and the perceived quality of the outcome is observed. The amount of time that users spent on the procedure and the related stress were not found to affect the evaluation of the quality of the outcome. The costs of the procedure as well as the quality of the procedure are only marginal predictors of the quality of the outcome when compared with outcome favourability. This finding has significant effects for providers of paths to justice but has to be interpreted in the light of the specific features and conditions of the dispute resolution procedure carried out by the Consumer Dispute Commission. The relevance of the research findings is discussed in the light of previous research on access to justice and procedural justice.

SERGIO SALIS, Policy Studies Institute
Email: S.Salis@psi.org.uk
ALLAN M. WILLIAMS, London Metropolitan University - Working Lives Research Institute
Email: Allan.Williams@londonmet.ac.uk

We investigate whether the adoption by workplaces of human resources management (HRM) practices that enhance face-to-face communication (FTFC) among employees is associated with productivity gains. The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of over 500 British trading establishments drawn from the linked 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey and Annual Business Inquiry, for which objective measures of labour productivity (value added per employee) are available. We find a positive association between productivity and FTFC in problem-solving groups, teams and meetings of senior or line managers and employees, provided that FTFC is adopted on a continuous basis. Our finding suggests that British workplaces could enhance their productivity by implementing HRM practices in such a way as to intensify knowledge sharing through employees' personal interactions.