Strategic Human Resource Management Practices: An Exploratory Survey of French Organisations

Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) have been amply discussed in both academic circles and business press. Most of our notion of SHRM are from the work done in the US and from the body of literature known as "High Performance Work Practices". This paper tries to contribute to the debate by understanding the changes in strategic HRM practices (Role and Structure of HR Department, Recruitment, Retraining & Redeployment, Performance Appraisal, Compensation, and Rightsizing) in France in the last 5 years and try to answer specifically the question of how strategic HRM practices have changed in French organizations to enhance corporate performance. A multi-respondent survey of 28 French organizations are analyzed to find the changes in SHRM in French organizations. The responses yielded a variety of HRM variables relating to role and structure of the HRM department, recruitment, performance appraisal, retraining and redeployment and rightsizingSHRM; Performance; Change; France

Identifying some obstacles from intuition to a successful mediation process

Intuition and common beliefs can sometimes misguide the mediator and be obstacles to the success of mediation, when they are linked to behaviors which likely induce negative consequences in the process. Following four different stages of a mediation session, this paper names a series of such obstacles and explores their underlying intuitions, as well as their subsequent usual behavior and its rather negative effects. Each time, alternative strategies that increase expectations of success are suggested, with their expected outcome. This paper combines a descriptive approach of obstacles which increase the chance of a negative process and mediation failure, with a prescriptive approach of alternative behaviors that increase the chance of a positive process and mediation success.Mediation; Success; Failure; Obstacles; Process; Intuition; Mediator’s Behavior; Descriptive Approach; Prescriptive Approach

The role of Criticism in the Dynamics of Performance Evaluation Systems

Drawing on the concept of « trial », developed by French sociologists, this article analyzes the dynamics of employees’ performance evaluation systems, particularly those involving accounting performance measures. A case study is presented as an illustration of our proposal to consider these systems as one of the major trials in the business world, that is, social arrangements organizing the testing of people and resulting in ordering them, and further in consistent social goods allocation. This analysis emphasizes the role of criticism in the dynamics and evolution of performance evaluation systems and enables us to revisit concepts like controllability or objectivity which have been presented for decades as cornerstones of performance evaluation systems either in management control or in human resource management fields.Criticism; performance evaluation systems; fairness; objectivity; controllability; legitimacy; bonus

Dagstuhl Reports : Volume 1, Issue 2, February 2011

Online Privacy: Towards Informational Self-Determination on the Internet (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11061) : Simone Fischer-Hübner, Chris Hoofnagle, Kai Rannenberg, Michael Waidner, Ioannis Krontiris and Michael Marhöfer Self-Repairing Programs (Dagstuhl Seminar 11062) : Mauro Pezzé, Martin C. Rinard, Westley Weimer and Andreas Zeller Theory and Applications of Graph Searching Problems (Dagstuhl Seminar 11071) : Fedor V. Fomin, Pierre Fraigniaud, Stephan Kreutzer and Dimitrios M. Thilikos Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Sequence Processing (Dagstuhl Seminar 11081) : Maxime Crochemore, Lila Kari, Mehryar Mohri and Dirk Nowotka Packing and Scheduling Algorithms for Information and Communication Services (Dagstuhl Seminar 11091) Klaus Jansen, Claire Mathieu, Hadas Shachnai and Neal E. Youn

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

Dagstuhl News January - December 2011

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Trusted execution: applications and verification

Useful security properties arise from sealing data to specific units of code. Modern processors featuring Intel’s TXT and AMD’s SVM achieve this by a process of measured and trusted execution. Only code which has the correct measurement can access the data, and this code runs in an environment trusted from observation and interference. We discuss the history of attempts to provide security for hardware platforms, and review the literature in the field. We propose some applications which would benefit from use of trusted execution, and discuss functionality enabled by trusted execution. We present in more detail a novel variation on Diffie-Hellman key exchange which removes some reliance on random number generation. We present a modelling language with primitives for trusted execution, along with its semantics. We characterise an attacker who has access to all the capabilities of the hardware. In order to achieve automatic analysis of systems using trusted execution without attempting to search a potentially infinite state space, we define transformations that reduce the number of times the attacker needs to use trusted execution to a pre-determined bound. Given reasonable assumptions we prove the soundness of the transformation: no secrecy attacks are lost by applying it. We then describe using the StatVerif extensions to ProVerif to model the bounded invocations of trusted execution. We show the analysis of realistic systems, for which we provide case studies

Determinization and Minimization of Automata for Nested Words Revisited

International audienceWe consider the problem of determinizing and minimizing automata for nested words in practice. For this we compile the nested regular expressions ($NRE_s$) from the usual XPath benchmark to nested word automata ($NW$$A_s$). The determinization of these $NW$ $A_s$, however, fails to produce reasonably small automata. In the best case, huge deterministic $NW$$A_s$ are produced after few hours, even for relatively small $NRE_s$ of the benchmark. We propose a different approach to the determinization of automata for nested words. For this, we introduce stepwise hedge automata ($SHA_s$) that generalize naturally on both (stepwise) tree automata and on finite word automata. We then show how to determinize $SHA_s$, yielding reasonably small deterministic automata for the $NRE_s$ from the XPath benchmark. The size of deterministic $SHA_s$ automata can be reduced further by a novel minimization algorithm for a subclass of $SHA_s$. In order to understand why the new approach to determinization and minimization works so nicely, we investigate the relationship between $NWA_s$ and $SHA_s$ further. Clearly, deterministic $SHA_s$ can be compiled to deterministic NWAs in linear time, and conversely, $NW$$A_s$ can be compiled to nondeterministic $SHA_s$ in polynomial time. Therefore, we can use $SHA_s$ as intermediates for determinizing $NWA_s$, while avoiding the huge size increase with the usual determinization algorithm for $NWA_s$. Notably, the NWAs obtained from the $SHA_s$ perform bottom-up and left-to-right computations only, but no top-down computations. This $NWA$-behavior can be distinguished syntactically by the (weak) single-entry property, suggesting a close relationship between $SHA_s$ and single-entry $NWA_s$. In particular, it turns out that the usual determinization algorithm for $NWA_s$ behaves well for single-entry $NWA_s$, while it quickly explodes without the single-entry property. Furthermore, it is known that the class of deterministic multi-module single-entry $NWA_s$ enjoys unique minimization. The subclass of deterministic $SHA_s$ to which our novel minimization algorithm applies is different though, in that we do not impose multiple modules. As further optimizations for reducing the sizes of the constructed $SHA_s$, we propose schema-based cleaning and symbolic representations based on apply-else rules, that can be maintained by determinization. We implemented the optimizations and report the experimental results for the automata constructed for the XPathMark benchmark

Acceleration and semantic foundations of embedded Java platforms

Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2006-200