Labour ‘flexibility’ is often portrayed as important to competitive success. Using evidence from an original survey of UK firms, this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of, on the one hand, various flexible work practices, human resource management techniques, and...

Nationally representative data on family businesses are available in the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, alongside comparable information for other types of firms. We use these data to compare differences in the use of different consultation and communication procedures. We cover such...

The casual nature of employment in the construction industry makes planning human asset requirements a vague exercise. Human resource information systems (HRISs) offer a means of coping with these problems through improvements in the reliability, accuracy and accessibility of the human resources...

Human Resource Management (HRM) research, theory and practice overwhelming views the staffing of firms as a series of discrete functional activities, such as recruitment, selection and training. In this study, we investigate how organisation theory, specifically transaction cost economics (TCE),...

A criticism often levelled at poor HR practice is that practitioners "don’t know the business" or are "isolated in their ivory towers". However the diverse nature of the roles played by HR practitioners naturally leads to the development of networks not only within the organisation, but...

This paper suggests a linkage between work-life balance culture and competitive advantage through commitment and firm-specific human resources. The paper argues that a workplace culture supportive of employees balancing their work and non-work lives leads to their commitment to their...

There is little research on HRM practices in knowledge-intensive firms (KIFs), especially in comparison to that conducted in traditional production environments. Whether such HRM practices are appropriate for KIFs, particularly ones that differentiate themselves on their ability to innovate, is...

This paper introduces the concept of workplace mobbing as a destructive organizational behaviour of psychological assaults perpetrated against the target causing them harm and loss of employment. The discussion is drawn from a three year Australian study of 212 self identified targets of...

The focus of this paper is on foreign direct investment (FDI) and 'human capital enhancement' in developing countries. While there are of course vast literatures on both FDI and human capital enhancement, the specific issue of how, if at all, the behaviour of multinational enterprises (MNEs)...

Labour market flexibility is often portrayed as a key to the competitive success of the UK and US economies. We surveyed several hundred firms in the UK, and using the resulting data (on over 200 manufacturing firms) this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of flexible work...