POLICY, POLITICS AND PROJECTIONS IN MEXICAN AGRICULTURE

Agribusiness,

What does it mean to be an early years practitioner?

This paper presents data from 7 early years practitioners about what they consider to be their professional identity, and explores the agency with which they articulate this. It goes on to discuss how this reflects wider research in the early years sector about the role of the early years practitioner, and the nature of professionalism

LM landing radar test for the F mission - Project Apollo

Determining test requirements for LM landing radar for F missio

Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace and Organizational Agility with People

Driven by dynamic competitive conditions, an increasing number of firms are experimenting with new, and what they hope will be, more dynamic organizational forms. This development has opened up exciting theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like. One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is strategic human resource management (SHRM). In an effort to catch up, we here draw on the dynamic organization (DO) and human resource strategy (HRS) literatures to delineate both a process for uncovering and the key features of a carefully crafted HRS for DOs. The logic is as follows. DOs compete through marketplace agility. Marketplace agility requires that employees at all levels engage in proactive, adaptive, and generative behaviors, bolstered by a supportive mindset. Under the right conditions, the essential mindset and behaviors, although highly dynamic, are fostered by a HRS centered on a relatively small number of dialectical, yet paradoxically stable, guiding principles and anchored in a supportive organizational infrastructure. This line of reasoning, however, rests on a rather modest empirical base and, thus, is offered less as a definitive statement than as a spur for much needed additional research

Is There a New HRM? Contemporary Evidence and Future Directions

[Excerpt] Is there a new human resource management? Yo. That is, yes and no. A new perspective -- strategic human resource management -- emerged during the 80s to take its place alongside the more traditional operational and programmatic perspectives as a major influence on the field. This perspective has rapidly progressed in terms of theory and research (if not practice). But, it continues to take many shapes and forms, and even with its various permutations, is far from universally embraced by scholars or practitioners. What follows is a brief look at the strategic perspective of the field. It begins with a summary of some common themes. This is followed by an illustrative review of extant theory,which in particular distinguishes between the two dominant theoretical streams which have thus far emerged: (1) the multiple model theorists (MMTs) who are given to building typologies of human resource strategies and describing or prescribing the conditions under which the various types work or should work best and (2) the dominant model theorists (DMTs) who are rather less preoccupied with contingencies and rather more concerned with the details and promulgation of their preferred models or strategies within and across firms. Next comes a look at the extent to which these two views show up in actual practice.The evidence is sparse, but their diffusion appears to be rather limited thus far. This naturally gives rise to a discussion of the factors which seem to encourage and, especially, discourage diffusion. Particular attention is paid to the adoption of the so-called strategic business partner role by human resource executives, managers, and professionals, and to the adequacy of this role as a catalyst for the diffusion of the strategic perspective across the U. S. and Canadian economies. Finally, suggestions are made regarding future theoretical and empirical work which might help keep the strategic perspective moving ahead

A narrative approach to professional identity

The construction of identity for early years practitioners in England – the workforce who support the care, learning and development of very young children - is potentially problematic because their roles lie at the intersection of care and education, shaped by the discourse of powerlessness. Historically, such employment was largely the preserve of working class women. Recent moves to professionalize this workforce include raising their qualification levels, a stronger emphasis on multi-agency working, and the introduction of job titles and workplace terminology that steers their roles towards educational outcomes (DfE, 2013). These moves are driven by the government bodies who fund and regulate the early years sector, rather than by the workforce themselves, and have the potential to stifle the development of an individual practitioner’s understanding of their professional identity (Osgood, 2006; Moss, 2006). Our research takes a narrative approach to gathering data about how these practitioners define themselves and the nature of the professionalism they value, particularly exploring the tension between an identity as a skilled technician meeting externally set competences, and a values-based identity including reflective and critical thinking (Moss, 2006). Such an approach recognises the individual’s right to agency in defining themselves and the professional values and practices they consider central to their particular roles. However, we recognize that in gathering and interpreting such idiosyncratic data, issues of validity and reliability arise in terms of the truth of our interpretations and the generalizability of our conclusions. By using multi-layered readings and presentations of our data (Mauthner and Doucet, 1998; Lewis, 1963) to maximize transparency in our analyses, we hope to address these. Our round table discussion will centre on this aspect of our work to explore how agency and individuality can be maintained in our data gathering, without compromising the reliability of our findings

Conditional Random Field Autoencoders for Unsupervised Structured Prediction

We introduce a framework for unsupervised learning of structured predictors with overlapping, global features. Each input's latent representation is predicted conditional on the observable data using a feature-rich conditional random field. Then a reconstruction of the input is (re)generated, conditional on the latent structure, using models for which maximum likelihood estimation has a closed-form. Our autoencoder formulation enables efficient learning without making unrealistic independence assumptions or restricting the kinds of features that can be used. We illustrate insightful connections to traditional autoencoders, posterior regularization and multi-view learning. We show competitive results with instantiations of the model for two canonical NLP tasks: part-of-speech induction and bitext word alignment, and show that training our model can be substantially more efficient than comparable feature-rich baselines

International Human Resource Studies: A Framework for Future Research

[Excerpt] The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for research in a broadened and redefined field of international human resource studies. Interest in international aspects of human resource management (HRM) and policy has increased markedly in recent years\u27. This should not be surprising, given the growing importance of international economic activity in general, and, in particular, the increased mobility of technology, capital, and human resources across national boundaries. We are concerned that current research falling under this label is both too narrowly conceived and ignores important work from allied areas and disciplines. We also believe that the theoretical appeal and practical value of this work would be strengthened by includng contributions from a broader array of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners who share interests in employment and industrial relations issues