Really useful knowledge? Critical management education in the UK and the US

This article reviews the Critical Management Education (CME) literature produced since 1995 and compares its development in the United Kingdom with that of the United States. It explores the relationship between CME, as an academic field, and that of Critical Management Studies (CMS), the wider movement that deploys critiques drawn from sociology and political science perspectives. In the UK, the origins of CME are in established debates about utilitarian versus liberal education and in radical adult education theory-quite separate from the CMS movement. In the US however, the article argues that business schools and the academy are sites that the CMS is attempting to colonise and CME cannot, in that context, be separated from the CMS project. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Forgotten feminists: The Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

The research that I have been undertaking during my study leave is the start of a two-part project into women’s business networks. Recently it has become more common to hear that women’s networks – either external or internal to an organisation – are ways for women to gain ground in terms of their professional status and opportunities. There has also been a recent spate of media articles and reports on women’s networks. This is in part the result of a deliberate media presence on behalf of Catalyst, the US based women’s organisation and partly interest in women such as Glenda Stone, who has recently come to prominence by creating the Aurora Network (formerly known as Busygirls). ‘Gender capital management’, (as Aurora like to refer to strategies for being a woman in professional life) has, for the moment at least, identified women’s networks as the next big idea in achieving equality of opportunity. However, it is difficult to know how to conceptualise these networks – are they contemporary forms of women’s activism or ‘clubs’ that exist, in part, to allow women to market services and products to other women? Are they associations based on calculated self-interest or do they represent a new form of gender solidarity? Are they as forward thinking as they often claim or are they deeply conservative? In order to answer some of these questions I designed a comparative research project, looking at historical forms of women’s business networks and contemporary forms. The first stage of the research involves studying the papers of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (or ‘the Federation’, for short). The Federation was formed in 1935 and was active until the end of the 1960s, finally winding up in 1968. At its peak it represented, through its affiliated professional associations, about 100,000 working women across a number of different professional and industrial sectors

Forgotten feminists: the Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post-war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post-suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks

Forgotten feminists: The Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

The research that I have been undertaking during my study leave is the start of a two-part project into women’s business networks. Recently it has become more common to hear that women’s networks – either external or internal to an organisation – are ways for women to gain ground in terms of their professional status and opportunities. There has also been a recent spate of media articles and reports on women’s networks. This is in part the result of a deliberate media presence on behalf of Catalyst, the US based women’s organisation and partly interest in women such as Glenda Stone, who has recently come to prominence by creating the Aurora Network (formerly known as Busygirls). ‘Gender capital management’, (as Aurora like to refer to strategies for being a woman in professional life) has, for the moment at least, identified women’s networks as the next big idea in achieving equality of opportunity. However, it is difficult to know how to conceptualise these networks – are they contemporary forms of women’s activism or ‘clubs’ that exist, in part, to allow women to market services and products to other women? Are they associations based on calculated self-interest or do they represent a new form of gender solidarity? Are they as forward thinking as they often claim or are they deeply conservative? In order to answer some of these questions I designed a comparative research project, looking at historical forms of women’s business networks and contemporary forms. The first stage of the research involves studying the papers of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (or ‘the Federation’, for short). The Federation was formed in 1935 and was active until the end of the 1960s, finally winding up in 1968. At its peak it represented, through its affiliated professional associations, about 100,000 working women across a number of different professional and industrial sectors.

Does woman + a network = career progression?

Question: I am an ambitious and talented junior manager who has recently been hired by FAB plc, a large multinational company. I am also a woman and, as part of my induction pack, have received an invitation to join FABFemmes - the in-company women's network. I don't think my gender has been an obstacle to my success thus far and so I don't really feel the need to join. But on the other hand I don't want to turn my back on something that might offer me a useful source of contacts to help me advance up the career ladder. What would be the best thing to do? - Ms Ambitious, UK

The parochial realm, social enterprise and gender: The work of Catharine Cappe and Faith Gray and others in York, 1780-1820

Catharine Cappe and Faith Gray, and a wider group of women to whom they had strong network ties, founded a number of philanthropic enterprises in York, England in the 1780s. Their activities were largely focused on the provision of sickness benefits to single and married women and the management of schools for girls that had a substantial occupational training element. The social enterprises they formed or operated were long-lasting – in the case of the York Female Friendly Society operating well into the 20th century. The paper considers the role of parochial networks in creating and sustaining social enterprises in the late Georgian period and the ways in which the women’s activities were both shaped by gender, and in turn shaped gender relations

Getting together, living together, thinking together: Management Development at Tata Sons 1940-1960

This paper analyses internal management development activities at Tata Sons during the 1940s and 1950s in India. The existing literaturehas concentrated on the establishment of management education programmes at Universities, and our understanding of in-company managerial training and development activities remains very limited. The paper challenges the commonly held assumption that the American influence on Indian higher education in the post-war period was decisive in shapingmanagement education in general. After 1947, Tata Sons continued to look to Great Britain for management development models to build the internal capacities and management culture that would make governing a diversified business group practical

Guest Editorial - Historical Perspectives

First paragraph: Human Resource Development Review’s mission is no mystery. It exists to publish work that makes a theoretical contribution to the development of theory, the foundations of HRD, and reviews of the relevant literature. The journal does not, however, publish work whose central focus is empirical findings, or empirical method and design. When the journal’s Editor, Yonjoo Cho, invited me to guest edit that part of the anniversary issue that would be devoted to papers on the history of human resource development, the extent to which potential contributors found it difficult to imagine how to write history without a central focus on empirical findings was not yet obvious. There was, however, a substantial number of potential authors who were interested in how they could contribute historical articles to HRDR.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin