A companion to the editor's previous volume, "Communicating Employee Responsibilities and RightS," this book summarizes the current state of knowledge in the area of employee responsibilities and rights and points to future directions for research and practice. The contributors examine the theory behind employee rights and responsibilities and suggest the need for a shift from discipline-specific orientations to the development of an interdisciplinary paradigm. They emphasize the need to look at rights and responsibilities issues from a broad management context and examine the management of the various issues in modern organizations. Detailed case studies of programs that have worked well, short case examples, court decisions, and quantified data document specific ideas throughout the book.

The book is divided into four sections, beginning with two introductory essays. Three chapters follow that address legal issues such as legislation to protect against unjust discharge, the current status of wrongful dismissal legislation, and trends in Title VII discrimination legal theories. In the next seven chapters that address human resources and management education perspectives, the contributors treat topics involving positive discipline, internal mechanisms for resolving employee complaints, the ombudsman model of managing employee rights, whistleblowing, and the responsibilities of management education to help fulfill the rights of students and future business leaders. The concluding section contains two chapters and examines whether employee rights strategies are desired or required and develops a social constructionist and political economic perspective of employee rights. Taken together, these chapters offer the most comprehensive exposition of this complex subject available to date.

Understanding the array of occupational rights that give meaning to the emerging demands, expectations, and role responsibilities in the modern workplace is of critical importance. Equally important is achieving an understanding of the evolving workplace practices these rights mandate. Employer and employee understanding of these considerations offers enormous potential for avoiding situations that provoke and escalate conflicts in the contemporary workplace. At the heart of all of this is the need for clear, consistent, and effective communication in the modern organization. This book, containing contributions by outstanding scholars and practitioners in the fields of communication, organizational psychology and management, law, personnel, and industrial and labor relations, addresses the issues involved in communicating employee responsiblities and rights.