This book was originally published in 1992. The skills shortage of the late 1980s demonstrated that managers need to support their corporate strategies with coherent policies for recruiting, developing and retaining people. While the recession has slowed the job market and caused some of these pressures to abate, they will reassert themselves with a vengeance when recovery comes: the demographic time bomb continues to tick. Putting the emphasis on people should not, however, be a reactive process - a skilled and motivated workforce is one of the most important productive assets which companies possess, whether in recession or not. Companies which are prepared to adopt more imaginative approaches to managing their human resource capital can unlock a major and unexploited source of long-term competitive edge. Recognising the competitive advantage in people - their contribution to productivity, the role of skills in strategic positioning, the opportunities in effective management training - brings human resources into the ambit of strategic management. This book will help managers and students alike explore beyond the traditional methods of human resource management and focus on leading-edge techniques which successfully incorporate the management of human resources into strategic planning.

This book was originally published in 1992. The skills shortage of the late 1980s demonstrated that managers need to support their corporate strategies with coherent policies for recruiting, developing and retaining people. While the recession has slowed the job market and caused some of these pressures to abate, they will reassert themselves with a vengeance when recovery comes: the demographic time bomb continues to tick. Putting the emphasis on people should not, however, be a reactive process - a skilled and motivated workforce is one of the most important productive assets which companies possess, whether in recession or not. Companies which are prepared to adopt more imaginative approaches to managing their human resource capital can unlock a major and unexploited source of long-term competitive edge. Recognising the competitive advantage in people - their contribution to productivity, the role of skills in strategic positioning, the opportunities in effective management training - brings human resources into the ambit of strategic management. This book will help managers and students alike explore beyond the traditional methods of human resource management and focus on leading-edge techniques which successfully incorporate the management of human resources into strategic planning.

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known as the author of the 1951 novel Mémoires d’Hadrien, her recreation of the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The work can be examined from the perspective of the issues raised by writing Roman imperial biography at large and the many ways in which Mémoires has a claim to historical authenticity. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Keith Bradley explains how Mémoires d’Hadrien came to be written, gives details on Yourcenar’s own biography, and describes some of the intricate historical problems that her novel’s portrait of Hadrian presents. He draws on Yourcenar’s correspondence, her interviews with journalists, and her literary corpus as a whole, emphasizing Yourcenar’s profound knowledge of the ancient evidence on which her life of Hadrian is based and exploiting a wide range of contemporary Yourcenarian criticism. The book pays special attention to the methods by which Yourcenar believed Hadrian’s life history to be recoverable, compares examples of modern life-writing, and contrasts the procedures of conventional Roman biographers. Revealing how and why Mémoires d’Hadrien is as it is, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian illustrates how imaginative literary recreation is often little different from historical speculation.

This book explores the growing phenomenon of atypical work manifested in workforce flexibility, mobility, the feminization of professional employment, and technological changes. Albert and Bradley focus on an influential group of knowledge-based employees--experts--and show the way in which they are ushering in changes in the work environment by resorting to atypical employment arrangements that are enhanced by an agency system. Case studies are developed from companies including AT&T, the Hollywood film industry, London accounting firms, and specialized agencies such as Labforce and Knowledge Net.

The John Lewis Partnership, a major British retailing company, has been employee-owned and operated according to democratic principles since 1929. Conventional models of commercial success would predict that such an arrangement would be inefficient and that the firm would tend to underinvest. Using conventional performance criteria, the authors demonstrate that the Partnership is highly successful and that conventional methods to predict business performance are flawed. The authors feel that to understand why this firm has sustained its commercial prosperity over several decades, one must look to its distinctive emphasis on people.

This book is about the life of the slave in classical Roman society and the importance of the institution of slavery in Roman civilization generally. Its main purpose is to communicate, particularly to an undergraduate audience, the harshness of the institution, and to convey what the experience of being a slave at Rome was like from a slave's point of view. The book's importance lies in the fact that it deals with a subject of great interest and is the only comprehensive treatment of Roman slavery currently available.

Volume 1 in the new Cambridge World History of Slavery surveys the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. Although chapters are devoted to the ancient Near East and the Jews, its principal concern is with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. These are often considered as the first examples in world history of genuine slave societies because of the widespread prevalence of chattel slavery, which is argued to have been a cultural manifestation of the ubiquitous violence in societies typified by incessant warfare. There was never any sustained opposition to slavery, and the new religion of Christianity probably reinforced rather than challenged its existence. In twenty-two chapters, leading scholars explore the centrality of slavery in ancient Mediterranean life using a wide range of textual and material evidence. Non-specialist readers in particular will find the volume an accessible account of the early history of this crucial phenomenon.

Managing Knowledge reverses the status quo argument that organisational change is driven by the specific demands of large companies. Instead of viewing firms as the catalysts for gradual change, Albert and Bradley argue that expert professionals have fuelled a break away from the traditional organisational structure to an organisational structure at the heart of which is an agent and/or an agency system. The authors draw our attention to the growing phenomenon of atypical work manifested in workforce flexibility, mobility, the feminisation of professional employment, and technological changes. They focus upon a group of knowledge-based employees - experts - who increasingly have influence over work and wealth creation. Case studies are developed from companies including AT and T, the Hollywood film industry, London accounting firms, and specialised agencies such as Labforce and Knowledge Net.