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The nature of human resource development (HRD) has been, and remains, a contested topic – the debate was sparked in part by Monica Lee’s seminal 2001 paper which refused to define the discipline of HRD, but has been accentuated by increasing globalization, political unrest, inequality and the erosion of boundaries. Should HRD now be seen as more than ‘training,’ or a sub-function of large western bureaucracy? This book represents a very wide view of HRD: that it is at the core of our ‘selves’ and our relationships, and that we continually co-create ourselves, our organisations and societies. These ideas are hung upon a model of Holistic Agency, and supported from sources as diverse as evolutionary psychology, science fiction, the challenges of transitional economies, and the structural uncertainties of contemporary society. Examining the tensions between self and other, agency and structure, the book draws inspiration from an almost-autoethnographic approach. This yields a text that is personal, entertaining, and easier to read than many academic tomes – yet considers the depth and development of the human condition, and locates HRD within that.
Socializing Security examines the early movement for worker-security legislation in the U.S. The author focuses on a group of academic economists who became leading proponents of social insurance and protective labor legislation during the first decades of the 20th century and founded the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).
The papers in this volume demonstrate that it can be fruitful to apply institutional theory to business history. In addition, the volume shows that the wider study of the institutional environment is inseparable from the study of business. It is clear, however, that although 'institutionalism' in business history has a long pedigree, many areas of research and potential interaction with theory remain to be explored. The extent to which this will occur inevitably depends upon the degree to which the interests of theoreticians serve the needs of historians and vice versa.
What explains the growth of a business, and more broadly the development or decline of a whole economy? What role does a particular entrepreneur or indeed a culture of entrepreneurship play? Does the evidence suggest that a particular structure or organizational form was or should be adopted to ensure best practice and commercial success? These fundamental questions have long preoccupied business and economic historians. With the current expansion of business and management education and training, the investigations and findings of the historian may have wider significance and relevance. This volume has been stimulated by the work of Peter Mathias, one of the leading figures in this field in the post-war period. Here a number of his former students--many now internationally distinguished historians--pay tribute in a book that explores the move from family firms to corporate capitalism. The contributors argue that sustained growth has never been a matter of a few spectacular technical breakthroughs, but instead rests on subtle economic and social transformations--in cultures, in economic organizations, and in the roles of science and technology.
Merchants to Multinationals examines the evolution of multinational trading companies from the eighteenth century to the present day. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants established overseas branches which became major trade intermediaries and subsequently engaged in foreign direct investment. Complex multinational business groups emerged controlling large investments in natural resources, processing, and services in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While theories of the firm predict the demise over time of merchant firms, this book identifies the continued resilience of British trading companies despite the changing political and business environments of the twentieth century. Like Japanese trading companies, they 're-invented' themselves in successive generations. The competences of the trading companies resided in their information-gathering, relationship-building, human resource, and corporate governance systems. This book provides a new dimension to the literature on international business through the focus on multinational service firms and its evolutionary approach based on confidential business records.
A collection of papers based upon a joint symposium of business historians from the universities of Lancaster and Reading. Each paper addresses some aspect of entrepreneurship and topics under that heading range from business culture and family firms to cartels and the British arms industry.
In her study of the opening of the English Lake District to mass tourism, Saeko Yoshikawa examines William Wordsworth’s role in the rise and development of the region as a popular destination. For the middle classes on holiday, guidebooks not only offered practical information, but they also provided a fresh motive and a new model of appreciation by associating writers with places. The nineteenth century saw the invention of Robert Burns’s and Walter Scott’s Borders, Shakespeare’s Stratford, and the Brontë Country as holiday locales for the middle classes. Investigating the international cult of Wordsworthian tourism, Yoshikawa shows both how Wordsworth’s public celebrity was constructed through the tourist industry and how the cultural identity of the Lake District was influenced by the poet’s presence and works. Informed by extensive archival work, her book provides an original case study of the contributions of Romantic writers to the invention of middle-class tourism and the part guidebooks played in promoting the popular reputations of authors.
This 1986 book examines why old-age saving became rooted in the employment contract.
In his study of Romantic naturalists and early environmentalists, Dewey W. Hall asserts that William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson were transatlantic literary figures who were both influenced by the English naturalist Gilbert White. In Part 1, Hall examines evidence that as Romantic naturalists interested in meteorology, Wordsworth and Emerson engaged in proto-environmental activity that drew attention to the potential consequences of the locomotive's incursion into Windermere and Concord. In Part 2, Hall suggests that Wordsworth and Emerson shaped the early environmental movement through their work as poets-turned-naturalists, arguing that Wordsworth influenced Octavia Hill’s contrib...
This book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to prote...