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No description available.

This thesis adopts a postmodern perspective on gender, work-life balance and race equality at work in the UK. A key feature of equality at work in the UK is the persistent divide between policy rhetoric and practised reality. The line of argument in the thesis is that management orientated research on contemporary equality at work in the UK is implicitly connected to postmodernism and, by making the connections explicit, an explanation for the rhetoric-reality divide can be constructed. The postmodern motifs of language devices, power relations, multiple realities, and commodification and consumerism are used to explore the equality rhetoric-reality divide. Also, the postmodern epistemological and methodological emblems of interpretivist, qualitative research approaches and methods are used in the thesis.

This study examines ethically challenging situations in independent human resource consultancy practice in the UK. The study identifies the issues consultants face and how they are resolving them. The analysis of consultant responses in the context of the literature on ethics leads to a series of recommendations for future professional practice. Despite the experience of the practitioner researcher and the common narratives of many other consultants, no previous studies in this area were found. Whilst there is a vast amount of writing on business ethics generally, there exists a gap, recognised in the literature, between ethical theory and practice. This research builds upon previous conceptual and empirical studies which are starting to address this and makes a contribution to new knowledge. As a qualitative study, the research focuses on semi-structured interviews with twenty human '\ resource consultants and the critical reflections of the practitioner researcher. There is a detailed analysis of the data leading to the identification of themes in the range of responses given. The key contribution to knowledge includes a categorisation of situations and resolutions using a three-fold framework highlighting problems arising from the specific nature of the work. Common examples of problems and best practice solutions in current literature are examined, with this study extending to examine what happens in practice when these are inadequate. The study finds that dilemmas and decision making can centre on the balance between "human" and "resources", the ambiguous nature of the consultancy relationship, managing at times when trust has yet to be established or when there is confusion related to personal and professional identity. Finally, independent consultants acknowledge the part that the need to earn income plays and how they manage decision making in their role outside of a corporate organisation. Philosophical theories are helpful in drawing attention to the agentic character of consultants who use practical wisdom based on common sense reasoning when facing dilemmas. Theories are potentially unhelpful when there is too narrow a focus on either deontological or teleological perspectives. Consultants look at decision making from both perspectives; frequently referring to rules to guide practice before determining action based on an assessment as to the overall "good". Recommendations for future practice are made specific to the nature of the role and include highlighting industry codes, the need for personal codes of ethics, the need for critical reflection and the formalisation of support from trusted relationships.

In spite of its rapid economic development there has been little research on human resource practices in Oman. This study aims to fill this gap. It examines the human resource management (HRM) and human resource development (HRD) practices; explores their implementation; and identifies obstacles that affect such practice. Specifically, it focuses on an attempt to introduce a generic model of HRM - IIP - and attempts to determine whether this model can succeed in a context very different from its origins in the UK.

Studies of managerial work span more than half a century, nevertheless there is no clear account of the managerial work context and content. The dominance of the North American school of thought in management and the rapid global expansion of American multinational companies, was based on the creation of common (standard) managerial practices in their global operations. Since the early 1980s universality on management practices has been challenged from cross-cultural and HRM studies, that emphasised the influence of national culture on managerial work. In addition, organisational studies have focused on the influence of organisational context since the early 1960s, but only recently has this been directly linked with managerial work. This study explores managerial work roles and competencies in a country study. Greece was selected because it encompasses ‘cultural compatibility’ with the West, while simultaneously maintains a strong national character. The research focuses on the Greek luxury hotel sector in order to investigate the effects of national and organisational culture on managerial work. Secondary data on the Greek luxury hotel sub-sector was used to identify a sample of sixteen hotels, with 32 participant senior managers (hotel unit GMs and assistants). A qualitative approach was employed, using several methods of data collection (in-depth interviews, questionnaires, non-participant observations and company documents). The large amount of primary and secondary data collected was triangulated in order to enhance validity of the findings. Based on the work of Johns (2006) and Dierdorff et al. (2009) this research unearths the importance of contextual variables in managerial work, and demonstrates that there are alternatives to the use of universal (standard) management practices. The wider theoretical contributions include insights on managerial work, and the interplay between managerial work and context. More specifically, the contributions of this research are: a) the acknowledgement that contextual factors such as the organisational and national culture affect managerial work to a great extent; b) managerial work roles and competencies are shaped and exercised according to the dominant organisational and cultural context; and c) the set of roles performed and competencies exercised is unique and inimitable for every manager.

Between 1981 and 1991 manufacturing employment in London declined by just under 50%, a loss of over 325,000 jobs. Relative to Great Britain, the employment performance of London's industry has been poor in the extreme. Much previous research has addressed the issue of urban manufacturing decline, and a variety of competing explanations have been put forward to explain the general observation that cities have been losing manufacturing at an extremely fast rate relative to small towns and rural areas. Despite the wealth of literature that exists, much remains unknown about what is actually happening to London's manufacturing and also why London's industrial jobs are being lost in such a severe and consistent manner. This thesis explores the dimensions of manufacturing employment change in London over the 1980s, highlighting some important processes which have characterised and underpinned industrial change. It does so in relation to a set of local authority land use planning policies which have attempted to protect manufacturing jobs. Using survey based methods, the thesis shows that while many borough planning authorities have explicitly pursued these policies over the 1980s, the majority believe that they have not been successful in protecting manufacturing jobs. Through an examination of a variety of different indicators of change, the thesis uncovers the empirical context within which planning policies have operated over the 1980s. It shows that the experience of manufacturing change in the capital is not only one of decline and that contradictory and inconsistent trends appear to have taken place. The thesis demonstrates that many of these inconsistent trends may be reconciled with respect to changing labour productivity, which provides a useful perspective on the nature of manufacturing change in the capital. Through the use of econometric techniques and data analysis, the thesis shows that labour productivity in London is characterised by a highly waged, and highly skilled manufacturing sector, with an overall low ratio of labour to capital. The thesis argues that labour productivity growth encapsulates a variety of processes which offer sound reasons for the lack of success of employment protection policies.

Employee performance appraisal systems are widely regarded as fundamental for evaluating employees’ performance and enhancing organisations’ success. Yet, there is evidence that employees doubt their benefits and fairness, organisations find them difficult to implement and their value is questioned. Although commercial systems that support appraisals have been developed, their focus remains on recording and tracking information, thereby not providing the kind of meaningful and deeper support for appraisals and the goal setting process such as ensuring that the objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-related) and providing feedback on these objectives. Developing a supportive employee appraisal system for setting objectives represents a major challenge for computer science since the objectives are unstructured, assessing objectives is a subjective process, and there is no known system for writing effective objectives, providing feedback and supporting the decision making process. Thus, helping employees to write SMART objectives requires finding the rules of writing these objectives. As the objective sentences are expressed in natural language, natural language processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning may have the potential for supporting the process of setting objectives by first analysing the objectives text and then identifying the rules for writing SMART objectives. More specifically, machine learning methods such as inductive logic programming (ILP), which investigates the inductive acquisition of first-order theories from background knowledge and examples, could be applied to automatically learn the rules. The process of setting objectives also requires assessing whether the objectives can be met given the available resources and time. Data mining techniques may have the potential to be used for assessing the objectives. This thesis develops a new framework for employee appraisals. The developed framework supports the process of setting SMART objectives and providing feedback. The framework utilises ILP to learn the grammar rules for writing SMART objectives and applies data mining techniques for assessing the objectives. The framework has been implemented using the ILP system ALEPH as well as prediction and classification rule induction algorithms in the WEKA data mining software. A novel system has been developed based on the proposed framework to show the feasibility of the framework. An empirical evaluation of the developed system has been conducted using a corpus of 300 objective examples and achieved promising results with an overall accuracy of 83%. The thesis also includes the limitations of the developed framework and proposes the potential for further research.