Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 66 - May 2020): Human Resource Management

Demographic change is affecting societies and organizations alike. Although ageing is relevant to all, there is still a tendency for more negative stereotypes to be attributed to older individuals, while positive stereotypes are mainly associated with younger individuals. Further, there are indications of gendered ageism, showing that age prejudices are more likely to affect women. This book argues that, through holistic measures, human resources management is of fundamental importance to an age-friendly and non-age-discriminatory culture. It can be assumed that awareness-raising on age issues also takes into account the gender issue. Drawing on qualitative interviews with employees in the Austrian banking industry and using an analytical framework, the author provides suggestions and implications for organizations to address this situation.

This book examines the role of corporate culture in the execution of successful strategies for diversity and innovation. It explores how information is communicated across real organizations and how diversity impacts the effectiveness of the communication. As modern communication becomes more challenging within diverse groups, the varying content and contexts must be considered. Communications across a diverse organization requires thought and understanding. Further, though a workforce may be diverse, it may not properly function. Effective and creative leadership is needed to employ a diverse workforce for the greatest impact on company culture and performance. With its model and case studies illustrating how diversity helps shape corporate culture, this book serves as a valuable resource for HR researchers and scholar-practitioners.

This book addresses the contemporary aspects of employee voice through theoretical and practical analysis. In addition to case studies of employee voice in the workplace, it also looks at emerging forms of voice associated with the use of technology such as social media. Because of the breadth of the concept of employee voice, the focus of the book lends itself to an international perspective on employment relations and human resources management - analyses and experiences drawn from one country will be usefully considered or applied in relation to others.

Examining the consequences of the outsourcing of public services, this book explores the transformation of working conditions, employment relations and the role of the state under marketisation strain. It places these developments in a wider framework that incorporates the legacy of the national models of public administration and employment relations regimes in the public sector. Adopting a comparative perspective by focusing on Italy, Denmark and Britain, the author investigates and questions the influential interpretation of a spreading neo-liberal trajectory in public service working conditions and employment relations, and reveals significant diversity across countries mediated by national institutional configurations. Discussing the interplay between the austerity agenda in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the swelling of outsourcing practices in public services, this book responds to the scholarly call for an integrated approach towards institutions and actors. A valuable read for researchers examining human resource management, labour studies and public administration, this book provides a comprehensive overview of employment relations in outsourced public services.

Today, companies are more than ever dependent on a highly motivated workforce and hard-working employees. The purpose of this book is to expand the conceptual boundaries of work effort (WE) in order to gain critical insights into what makes people work hard. In spite of the acknowledged importance of WE, the concept was hitherto weakly understood, inconsistently defined, and lacked a clear conceptualization due to a lack of theoretical and empirical research. At theoretical level, this dissertation enhances the understanding of the WE concept, notably with respect to its antecedents. At practical level, the refined understanding will increase the leaders' ability to impact and manage their employees' WE levels.

Human resource (HR) governance is a relatively new construct that has recently begun attracting more and more attention in both research and practice. As a part of corporate governance, it represents the internal and external normative framework of human resource management and its supervision in organizations. This book theoretically integrates HR governance with the related domains of corporate governance, general management, HR management, and leadership. By doing so, it provides scholars and practitioners in the field with a precisely delineated system of theoretical concepts for their work and helps to translate these concepts into concrete research questions and practical guidelines. By interpreting the new ISO 30408 norm on human governance and taking into account recent developments, the book helps to comply with and anticipate current and future HR regulations.

This book examines the characteristics of sustainable remote health workforces and how management practices influence workforce sustainability in remote regions. It introduces the Integrated Human Resource Management (HRM) Framework for sustainable remote health workforces, providing a contemporary approach to remote health workforce sustainability. The book particularly focuses on the influence of localised management practices on workforce sustainability. For geographically remote managers, the book offers evidence-based information for developing effective management practices drawn from three separate, yet related research studies. This book will be of interest to managers and aspiring managers, working or planning to work in geographically remote regions across the globe. The book provides insight into the human resource management challenges for remote managers, and provides resources and practical management tools as well as suggestions about how managers can create their own localised management practices.

This book introduces a framework to assist human resource practitioners and organisations embrace strategies that will drive high engagement levels within organisations with a union presence.   The authors address established definitions of engagement and how they have been conceptualised in academic and practitioners' literature, before exploring and unpacking circumstances that influence levels of engagement amongst employees in a unionised environment. In doing so, the framework introduced elaborates on approaches and interventions with the greatest potential to create, improve, and embed high levels of engagement within the unionised work environment.

This book focuses on zero hours and on-call work as an extreme form of casual and precarious employment. It includes country studies of the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Ireland, where there has been increasing concern about the prevalence of such work, and working time uncertainty, as well as varying levels of public policy debate on regulation. The book incorporates a comparative review of zero hours work based on the findings of the country studies. This pays particular attention to state regulatory responses to zero hours work, and incorporates the sociological concepts of accumulation and legitimation functions of the state. Exploring the regulation of zero hours work beyond individual countries, the book includes an analysis of external regulation of zero hours work at the supranational level, namely the European Union and ILO. Further, it assesses the implications of zero hours for workers in new sectors of economic activity, particularly the impact of the platform or 'gig' economy on the fundamental nature of the employment relationship. It also considers the societal implications of zero hours work and the ethical responsibilities of employers and governments towards workers as citizens.