This article reports on a recent study of personnel management in the life insurance industry. Until recently the industry has enjoyed a comparatively untroubled expansion largely because of the investment‐seeking surplus incomes of an increasingly affluent population and the market protection...

A “critical case” approach is used to examine whether the recruitment practices and procedures advocated by social scientists within the personnel field are realised in practice. The “critical case” selected is the graduate recruitment known as the “milkround”, where “scientific...

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) has been widely promoted as a technique for organisational survival in an increasingly competitive environment. The initial message and language of BPR was radical, calling for the obliteration of traditional methods of processing business. Organisations...

Reviews the business process re‐engineering (BPR) vision of radical business process change, focusing on the use of information technology to facilitate a shift away from linear/sequential work organization towards parallel processing and multidisciplinary teamworking. Highlights BPR′s...

Examines recent developments in organization theory and considers their relevance for personnel practitioners. Suggests that an important contribution of these developments has been their challenge to the authority of established analyses in which there has been a tendency to overlook the...