The changing roles of personnel managers: old ambiguities, new uncertainties

There have been notable attempts to capture the changing nature of personnel roles in response to major transformations in the workplace and the associated rise of ‘HRM’. A decade ago Storey (1992) explored the emerging impact of workplace change on personnel practice in the UK and proposed a new fourfold typology of personnel roles: ‘advisors’, ‘handmaidens’, ‘regulators’ and ‘changemakers’. Have these four roles changed now that HRM has increasingly become part of the rhetoric and reality of organizational performance? If Storey's work provides an empirical and analytical benchmark for examining issues of ‘role change’, then Ulrich's (1997) work in the USA offers a sweeping prescriptive end-point for the transformation of personnel roles that has already been widely endorsed by UK practitioners. He argues that HR professionals must overcome the traditional marginality of the personnel function by embracing a new set of roles as champions of competitiveness in delivering value. Is this a realistic ambition? The new survey findings and interview evidence from HR managers in major UK companies presented here suggests that the role of the personnel professional has altered in a number of significant respects, and has become more multifaceted and complex, but the negative counter-images of the past still remain. To partly capture the process of role change, Storey's original fourfold typology of personnel roles is re-examined and contrasted with Ulrich's prescriptive vision for the reinvention on the HR function. It is concluded that Storey's typology has lost much of its empirical and analytical veracity, while Ulrich's model ends in prescriptive overreach by submerging issues of role conflict within a new rhetoric of professional identity. Neither model can adequately accommodate the emergent tensions between competing role demands, ever-increasing managerial expectations of performance and new challenges to professional expertise, all of which are likely to intensify in the future

The behavioural impact of a visually represented virtual assistant in a selfservice checkout context

Our research investigated whether the presence of an interface agent - or virtual assistant (VA) - in a self-service checkout context has behavioural effects on the transaction process during particular tasks. While many participants claimed to have not noticed a VA within the self-service interface, behaviour was still affected, i.e. fewer people made errors with the VA present than in the voice-only and control conditions. The results are explained as reflective of an unconscious observation of non-verbal cues exhibited by the VA. The results are discussed in relation to possible behavioural outcomes of VA presence.</p

How Must a Lawyer Be? A Response to Woolley and Wendel

In Legal Ethics and Moral Character, 23 GEO. J. LEGAL Ethics, Alice Woolley and W. Bradley Wendel argue that theories of legal ethics may be evaluated by examining the kind of person a lawyer must be to conform to the normative demands of the theory. In their words, theories of legal ethics musts answer questions not only of what a lawyer must do, but how a lawyer must be. Woolley and Wendel examine three theories of legal ethics—those of Charles Fried, William Simon, and myself—and conclude that the theories they discuss impose demands on agency that are not realistic, functional, or desirable. On behalf of Simon’s theory and my own—both of which are “high commitment” accounts of legal ethics—I respond to all three criticisms. Neither theory is unrealistic in the sense of requiring impossible things of lawyers. If the charge of unrealism means only that the theory sometimes requires lawyers to take difficult or uncomfortable stances, I argue that this counts as a legitimate criticism only if the theory’s prescriptions are doubtful on independent moral grounds. To the criticism that high-commitment ethical theories are not functional, I observe that Woolley and Wendel identify functionality with fitting comfortably into law firm culture. In response, I suggest that if ethical conduct places a lawyer at odds with law firm culture that should count as a criticism of the law firm rather than the lawyer’s theory of ethics; in any case, Woolley and Wendel have wrongly presupposed that the high-commitment lawyer is working in a setting of low-commitment lawyers rather than other high commitment lawyers. Finally, I argue that Woolley and Wendel are incorrect to believe that the character traits required for high-commitment legal practice are undesirable because they would lead lawyers to buck the system when they should not do so

Community building and virtual teamwork in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper aims to explore the issues that there was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from European students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer booked meetings and evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment. </p

Collaboration and teamwork: immersion and presence in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem-based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper describes, often in their own words, the experience of European occupational therapy students working together across national and cultural boundaries. Collaboration and teamwork were facilitated exclusively through an online environment, since the students never met each other physically during the OTIS pilot course. The aim of the paper is to explore the observations that here was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross-cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from the students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer-booked meetings and analysed using the qualitative constructs of ‘immersion’, ‘presence’ and ‘reflection in learning’. The findings indicate that ‘immersion’ was experienced only to a certain extent. However, both ‘presence’ and shared presence were found by the students, within their tutorial groups, to help collaboration and teamwork. Other evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. Further study is proposed to support group work in an online learning environment. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment.</p

A virtue epistemology of the Internet: Search engines, intellectual virtues and education

This paper applies a virtue epistemology approach to using the Internet, as to improve our information-seeking behaviours. Virtue epistemology focusses on the cognitive character of agents and is less concerned with the nature of truth and epistemic justification as compared to traditional analytic epistemology. Due to this focus on cognitive character and agency, it is a fruitful but underexplored approach to using the Internet in an epistemically desirable way. Thus, the central question in this paper is: How to use the Internet in an epistemically virtuous way? Using the work of Jason Baehr, it starts by outlining nine intellectual or epistemic virtues: curiosity, intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and intellectual tenacity. It then explores how we should deploy these virtues and avoid the corresponding vices when interacting with the Internet, particularly search engines. Whilst an epistemically virtuous use of the Internet will not guarantee that one will acquire true beliefs, understanding or even knowledge, it will strongly improve one’s information-seeking behaviours. The paper ends with arguing that teaching and assessing online intellectual virtues should be part of school and university curricula, perhaps embedded in critical thinking courses, or even better, as individual units