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

Structural Induction Principles for Functional Programmers

User defined recursive types are a fundamental feature of modern functional programming languages like Haskell, Clean, and the ML family of languages. Properties of programs defined by recursion on the structure of recursive types are generally proved by structural induction on the type. It is well known in the theorem proving community how to generate structural induction principles from data type declarations. These methods deserve to be better know in the functional programming community. Existing functional programming textbooks gloss over this material. And yet, if functional programmers do not know how to write down the structural induction principle for a new type - how are they supposed to reason about it? In this paper we describe an algorithm to generate structural induction principles from data type declarations. We also discuss how these methods are taught in the functional programming course at the University of Wyoming. A Haskell implementation of the algorithm is included in an appendix.Comment: In Proceedings TFPIE 2013, arXiv:1312.221

Understanding Kindness – A Moral Duty of Human Resource Leaders

The role of leaders in the modern organization has evolved as scholars and practitioners have recognized that a key element to long-term profitability is the creation of high trust and high commitment work systems that treat employees as valued partners (Kim & Wright, 2011; Block, 2013; Beer, 2009; Caldwell & Floyd, 2014). Effective leaders create aligned organizational cultures with systems, processes, practices, and programs reinforcing the organization’s espoused values in achieving its mission (Schein, 2010). Human resource professionals (HRPs) play a critical leadership role in ensuring that human resource management (HRM) cultural elements are properly integrated, communicated effectively to employees, and followed in a manner that builds trust and increases commitment (Lengnick-Hall, 2009; McEvoy, et al., 2005). The purpose of this paper is to identify the importance of kindness as a moral duty of HRPs in serving their organizations and the employees within them. As HRPs perform their strategic and operational roles in the modern organization, properly understanding the nature of kindness is an important factor in carrying out HRM roles. This paper begins by defining kindness and its specific application to HRPs — equating the definition of kindness as a leadership trait with six elements of kindness and seven kindness-related ethical perspectives. The paper concludes with a summary of its contribution for HRP practitioners and scholars in understanding the nuances of kindness as a morally-and ethically-related HRM leadership virtue

Better Nature by Fenn Stewart

Review of Fenn Stewart\u27s Better Nature

Tech for Understanding: An Introduction to Assistive Technology in the Classroom

Undergraduate Theoretical Proposa

Tech for Understanding: An Introduction to Assistive and Instructional Technology in the Classroom

This paper examines the different types of assistive and instructional technology available to students who are classified with one or more of the thirteen disabilities outlined in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (referred to as, IDEA). While the roles of assistive and instructional technology are different, there are many instances where their uses may overlap. Thus, while these two categories will be discussed separately, it should be noted that some information may be applied to each category and more than one piece of technology. The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the world of assistive and instructional technology for those who may be new to its concepts, particularly parents who have recently learned that their child may benefit from extra assistance and future educators who are interested in learning more about the devices they will be using to reach their students. Each of the thirteen disabilities will be discussed briefly, and then each disability will be assigned several types of assistive and instructional technology that serve it well. This will by no means be an exhaustive list of all types of technology available to teachers, parents, and students. However, it will attempt to provide a varied glimpse at some of the options that are available and how they may help children who are struggling to access the curriculum

Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra by Elena Johnson

Review of Elena Johnson\u27s poetry collection, Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra