Back to the future: implications for the field of HRM of the multistakeholder perspective proposed 30 years ago

Thirty years on from the seminal works on human resource management (HRM) by Beer et al., we examine how the subject has developed. We offer a normative review, based on that model and critique the assumption that the business of HRM is solely to improve returns to owners and shareholders. We identify the importance of a wider view of stakeholders to practitioners and how academic studies on the periphery of HRM are beginning to adopt such a view. We argue that the HRM studies so far have given us much valuable learning but that the subject has now reached a point where we need to take a wider, more contextual, more multilayered approach founded on the long-term needs of all relevant stakeholders. The original Beer et al. model remains a valuable guide to the next 30 years of HRM.

The effects of strategy instruction on writing strategy use for students of different proficiency levels

Learners’ strategy use has been widely researched over the past few decades. However, studies which focus on the impact of strategy instruction on strategy use, and how far learners of different proficiency levels are able to use the strategies taught in an effective manner, are somewhat rare. The focus of this paper is the impact of writing strategy instruction on writing strategy use of a group of 12 second language learners learning to write in English for Academic Purposes classes. Stimulated recall was used to explore whether this impact differed according to the proficiency level of the students, and revealed that for both high and low proficiency learners’ strategy use developed as a result of the instruction. The implications of these findings for strategy instruction design are discussed

Contractual restrictions on lawful use of information: sole-source databases protected by the back door?

This article is concerned with the risks associated with the monopolisation of information that is available from a single source only. Although there is a longstanding consensus that sole-source databases should not receive protection under the EU Database Directive, and there are legislative provisions to ensure that lawful users have access to a database’s contents, Ryanair v PR Aviation challenges this assumption by affirming that the use of non-protected databases can be restricted by contract. Owners of non-protected databases can contractually exclude lawful users from taking the benefit of statutorily permitted uses, because such databases are not covered from the legislation that declares this kind of contract null and void. We argue that this judgment is not consistent with the legislative history and can have a profound impact on the functioning of the digital single market, where new information services, such as meta-search engines or price-comparison websites, base their operation on the systematic extraction and re-utilisation of materials available from online sources. This is an issue that the Commission should address in a forthcoming evaluation of the Database Directive.

Looking back, moving forward: drama, disability and social justice

The aim of this chapter is to briefly outline how disability has been represented in theatre, what access disabled people have had to drama and theatre in the past, and what might be achieved in the pursuit of social justice with young people in relation to awareness of and provision for disability. It will focus in particular on how disability has been addressed in drama education and what assumptions have been made regarding drama and disability in education. In considering such issues one might perceive manifestations of what Freebody and Finneran (2013) recognise as an overlapping and ‘somewhat artificially created dichotomy between drama for social justice and drama about social justice.’ This chapter will examine some examples of how drama has been used to give students in mainstream schools insights into disability, and the philosophy that underpins the drama curriculum of one special school where the focus is on drama as social justice: the argument being that in some cases simply doing drama is, in effect, a manifestation of social justice. Finally, some of the progress made in recent years regarding access and engagement will be addressed through specific reference to the authors’ on-going work into ‘performing social research’ (Shah, 2013) and how theatres are increasingly attempting to give more access to disabled young people and their families by offering ‘relaxed performances.’

One step forward, and two steps back: women and career progression in academia during times of uncertainty

While there is an extensive and still growing body of literature on women in academia and the challenges they encounter in career progression, there is little research on their experience specifically within a business school setting. In this study, we attempt to address this gap and examine the experiences and career development of female academics in a business school and how these are impacted by downsizing programmes. To this end, an exploratory case study is conducted. The findings of this study show that female business school academics experience numerous challenges in terms of promotion and development, networking, and the multiple and conflicting demands placed upon them. As a result, the lack of visibility seems to be a pertinent issue in terms of their career progression. Our data also demonstrates that that, paradoxically, during periods of downsizing women become more visible and thus vulnerable to layoffs as a consequence of the challenges and pressures created in their environment during this process. In this paper, we argue that this heightened visibility, and being subject to possible layoffs, further reproduces inequality regimes in academia.

Argument structures in Chinese university students’ argumentative writing: a contrastive study

Situated within a Systemic Functional Linguistics genre paradigm, this study adopted a function-based linguistic approach to examine the argument structures in English writing produced by Chinese university students of English as foreign language (EFL). Their English writing was contrasted with three other sets of argumentative essays in order to explore differences and similarities in the use of argument structures. The four sets of essays were produced by three groups of university students: native English- and Chinese-speaking university students and Chinese university EFL students. Participants’ interviews and questionnaire responses were also collected. The study found that most native English-speaking participants used an analytical arguing strategy, while most Chinese-speaking university participants preferred a hortatory argument structure both in their English and Chinese writing. It was also found that Chinese participants’ English writing was influenced by both English and Chinese.

Back to basics: how measures of lexical diversity can help discriminate between CEFR levels

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on how measures of lexical diversity (LD) can help discriminate between essays from second language learners of English, whose work has been assessed as belonging to levels B1 to C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The focus is in particular on how different operationalisations of what constitutes a “different word” (type) impact on the LD measures themselves and on their ability to discriminate between CEFR levels. The results show that basic measures of LD, such as the number of different words, the TTR (Templin 1957) and the Index of Guiraud (Guiraud 1954) explain more variance in the CEFR levels than sophisticated measures, such as D (Malvern et al. 2004), HD-D (McCarthy and Jarvis 2007) and MTLD (McCarthy 2005) provided text length is kept constant across texts. A simple count of different words (defined as lemma’s and not as word families) was the best predictor of CEFR levels and explained 22 percent of the variance in overall scores on the Pearson Test of English Academic in essays written by 176 test takers.

Task design and interaction in collaborative writing: the students’ story

This article investigates student behaviour on collaborative assignments, looking at the relationship between task type and interaction, and considers the implications for task design. Students reported on interactions in a year-long workplace-focussed group communication project, comparing these with interactions on other academy based group assignments. Differences were seen in the amount of brainstorming, the criteria for dividing up work, the intensity of editing, and how conflict was managed. Contributing factors to these differences included the presence or absence of a creative element, the instrumental nature of the task, and the need for a collective approach inherent in the task design.

Internationalizing the MFA in Creative Writing

is article explores the prospects for internationalizing the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, a degree that has gained considerable popularity in the United States in the past half century but has yet to gain much of a foothold in other countries. As part of this exploration, we describe the experiences of estab- lishing the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Asia at City University of Hong Kong, explaining the justification for setting up such a program with reference to the history of teaching creative writing and the current conditions for literary writing in English in Asia and globally. We also reflect upon the processes of planning, curriculum design, and administrative negotiation and that went into setting up the program and report on feedback from the first cohort of students. e experience of setting up this program is used as the basis for raising a number of more general issues regarding the teaching of creative writing in English in interna- tional contexts.