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To give an overview of some recent research into human resource (HR) deployment in library services in UK universities and colleges of higher education.

The aim of the research in question was to evaluate the effectiveness of HR deployment. This implied a positivistic methodological approach, maintaining that the reality under examination, HR deployment, existed objectively and independently of the researcher. However, the research aimed to discover not only what happened but also why. So there was an overlap between the positivistic and phenomenological approach. To this end, the research collected quantitative data via a survey and the present paper provides a summary of the research aim, objectives, methodology and results.

The research findings indicate that staff deployment patterns in the context investigated are suboptimal and that, in consequence, individual libraries should be open to scrutiny in comparison with others not only in terms of their quantifiable patterns of library usage but also in terms of the patterns of their staff provision and staff deployment.

The findings only relate to UK universities and colleges of higher education.

The present research suggests five actions for practitioners.

The present research highlights the lack of benchmarking facilities in UK universities and colleges of higher education relating to HR deployment in libraries, and recommends that Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) extends the existing data collection in the Annual Statistical return to include this HR area.

This paper seeks to give an overview of some ongoing research into absence management practices in a UK university library. The aim of the research in question is to evaluate the effectiveness of current management practices.

The research collected quantitative data over time and the present paper presents a summary of findings and recommendations to practitioners in the same field.

The research findings indicate that the use of return to work interviews after each absence through illness contributes to the reduction in absence levels. The research recommends that firm guidelines be used to ensure consistency in approach; that employee awareness is increased of their own responsibility to attend for work wherever possible. Where a culture of absenteeism exists, it is suggested that appropriate management strategies can produce a culture of attendance. Within academic libraries, this is possible where there is an involvement of human resource departments, with a structure for referring employees, where applicable, to occupational health. This work highlights the need for employers to get value for money from their library resources and recommends absence management as an important component in any agenda for change.

Given the potential sensitivity of the subject area, the anonymity of members of staff had to be a priority, therefore, some of the data analysis could not be carried out as in‐depth as may have been optimally desirable.

The present research provides case study experience for other practitioners, and suggests some recommendations for library managers.

The present research highlights the dearth of literature or benchmarking facilities on absence management within library and information services (LIS). The research is therefore exploratory in nature and goes some way to address the research gap.

The purpose of the paper is to present and discuss the findings of a study on flexitime as a novel people management practice emerging in Sri Lanka. Specifically, the paper presents and discusses factors that predict the level of satisfaction with flexitime, differences in attitudes towards flexitime, the effectiveness of flexitime as a strategy to attract and retain employees, and barriers that hinder its use.

A total of 108 employees involved in producing IT‐related output as their primary job function, from 30 software development companies, responded to the self‐administered survey questionnaire. In analysis, univariate, bivariate and multivariate techniques were adopted.

Flexitime allowed autonomy to employees to harmonize work and non‐work demands on their time, resulting in better workplace relations. Overall, the findings support a non‐traditional approach to people management. However, the findings also have important implications for the design or modification of flexitime arrangements.

The majority of flexitime research is criticized for its theoretical nature, a failure to include statistical treatment of the data, and failure to pay specific attention to managerial and professional employees. Further, there is a marked absence of research‐led literature in developing countries to clarify the way in which non‐traditional people management practices work in different contexts. Specifically, no such studies have been conducted in the context of Sri Lanka.

The image of the library and information professional has been a source of professional anxiety for many years. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this long‐standing issue by studying the portrayal of librarianship in UK national newspapers during a period of rapid technological change. It also proposes to examine the representation of the professional role, determined by the skills and competencies depicted and the topics associated with librarianship.

The approach takes the form of a content analysis of a sample of 264 newspaper articles taken from The Times and The Mirror between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2008.

The findings reveal a lack of representation of skills and duties performed by librarians. The usefulness and relevance of those depicted are overshadowed by the reported value of libraries. When professional duties are depicted, however, the results appear positive: librarians were seen as having an expert knowledge of content, technological competence and skills in collection development. The reporting of negative behavioural traits was infrequent and it was found that newspapers were not perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Although The Times and The Mirror are important publications in terms of circulation, their depiction of the library and information profession does not form a complete picture of the representation of librarianship in the UK press.

The paper contributes to debates about the image of the profession, and raises awareness about the skills and competencies that practitioners and professional bodies need to promote for the library and information profession to flourish.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of line managers in managing attendance at work in the lean regime of grocery retailing. The increasing competitiveness within the sector, coupled with the sophisticated control systems in place put pressure on managers to keep labour costs low. Attendance, therefore, becomes a critical factor, particularly as staffing levels become leaner. Taking this into account, it is necessary to understand the parameters of the line managers’ role in managing attendance, especially within the lean food retail market and the antagonistic terrain of the supermarket shop floor. The paper discusses the impact of lean retailing on line managers’ authority and provides a fresh sociological analysis regarding their role in managing attendance, offering insights into managerial practices on the UK supermarket shop floor.

The paper draws on qualitative research evidence from two case study grocery retail organizations in the UK. It reports on 44 semi-structured interviews and provides a multi-level analysis aiming to understand the different perspectives on the problem examined.

The paper reveals the existence of a centralized absence management policy and highlights the greater involvement of line managers in this procedure. Line managers though were subjected to forces of bureaucratic control, intensification and degradation of their work. Despite having an active role within the attendance management process and high responsibility for the implementation of rules and procedures handed down by head office, they had limited authority over the process. Line managers perceived the latter as routine and a box-ticking exercise and had developed coping tactics to deal with the control from above.

This paper provides practical and theoretical considerations over the role of line management in the labour process, investigating their role in managing attendance at work within the lean terrain of food retailing. This research contributes to the ongoing academic discussions related to the devolvement of HR responsibilities to the line, highlighting the great involvement of line managers in the absence policy. It also provides a sociological perspective over line managers’ authority and discretion in managing attendance, revealing that they were subjected to direct and bureaucratic control within their role in attendance management. However, the research reveals that line managers were not passive in the face of direct control from above and had developed tactics to cope with the monotony and the repetition of this process, attempting to somehow escape the top-down control they were subjected to.

Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power has received relatively little attention despite its novelty and theoretical potential. This paper explores the meaning and implications of the construct, and integrates it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Drawing on an extensive dataset profiling the careers of members of the French business elite, it compares and contrasts those who enter the field of power with those who fail to qualify for membership, exploring why some succeed as hyper-agents while others do not. The alliance of social origin and educational attainment, class and meritocracy, emerges as particularly compelling. The field of power is shown to be relatively variegated and fluid, connecting agents from different life worlds. Methodologically, this paper connects biographical data of top French directors with the field of power in France in a novel way, while presenting an operationalization of Bourdieu’s concept of the field of power as applied to the French elite.

A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

This chapter introduces evolutionary neuroscience and its organizational applications, especially its usefulness for motivation analysis in macrolevel disciplines such as strategic management. Macrolevel organizational disciplines have mostly lacked a theory of motivation beyond self-interest assumptions, which fail to explain many important macrolevel organizational phenomena. Evolutionary neuroscience provides an empirically grounded, parsimonious perspective on the human brain and brain evolution which helps clarify the profound complexities of motivation. Evolutionary neuroscience’s theory of the physiological causes of self- and other-interested motivation can support better macrolevel motivation analysis and unify disparate, potentially conflicting motivation theories. Examples are offered of how neuroscience-based motivation theory can support more comprehensive strategic management analysis of competences and competitive advantage.