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The digital platform economy has wide-ranging implications for the nature of work in the twenty-first century. The ease at which suppliers and demanders of labour come together across digital platforms creates a very new kind of labour market characterized by hyper-flexibility and an ambiguous employment relationship. Platform work has been hailed as providing employment opportunities for young people entering the labour market and other groups for whom access to more traditional forms of work is compromised (e.g. women with caring responsibilities or people with chronic health issues), or simply those seeking easily accessible, flexible work (e.g. students). On the other hand, unions and grassroots activist campaigners have highlighted the poor conditions that shape the experience of platform work, such as low pay, lack of choice over working time, tight control over the labour process and a dependency on platforms that belies their self-employed status. These dimensions of decent work are examined in the context of France and the United Kingdom, two countries which represent very different employment contexts (Milner, 2015), and thus provide insights into how specific country contexts may mediate the experience of platform work and the policy response.

This chapter looks at the history of work from a social, economic and political perspective. It analyzes the beginning of work and of industrial relations, on a global scale. It goes on to speculate on in what way work will evolve in the immediate future, given technological change and ecological pressures.

‘Decent work’. The very phrase conjures up a range of images and interpretations. But what does it mean for practitioners? What does it mean for academics? Much has been spoken, and even more has been written, but there is still little consensus as to how these questions can be answered. This book aims to offer some answers by exploring the increasingly relevant topic of Decent Work from a range of perspectives. This initial chapter introduces readers to the purpose, rationale and structure of the book. It offers a description of the concept of Decent Work and introduces readers to the work of the Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre of Manchester Metropolitan University.

The purpose of this research was to utilize protection motivation theory, which states that individuals will take actions to protect themselves from threats when they have both knowledge of actions that will protect them from the threat and the motivation to do so, to develop a better way of training adolescents to be safe on the Internet.

This study utilized an experimental approach in a high school environment to test its hypotheses. Participants were split into two groups: a group who received a tutorial about how to stay safe on the Internet (an enactive mastery tutorial that allowed students to actually try out the skills they were learning) and a group who did not receive the training. Participants were then asked about their intentions to engage in protective behaviors, their perceived ability to do so, and the likelihood that these protective behaviors would help them to stay safer on the Internet.

The findings indicated that an enactive mastery training program increased intentions to engage in safe online behavior in the future, offering a foundation for the development of future theory-based online safety interventions.

This study was conducted in a small geographic region in schools that agreed to utilize a class period to test the enactive mastery tutorial, which limits its external validity. Furthermore, this study only measured intentions to engage in protective behaviors, not actual behaviors.

This research provides a guideline for an effective way of increasing the likelihood that adolescents will engage in protective behaviors online, which has great practical applications for teachers, administrators, PSA advertisers, etc.

This chapter provides a framework for creating programs to help adolescents engage in safer behavior. Furthermore, it introduces the idea of involvement to the protection motivation theory literature, which is a valuable variable to consider when determining how to create an effective campaign to change behavior.

The changes in the economy along with various political reforms have resulted in an increased focus on enhancing the employability of higher education graduates and have challenged the traditional role of higher education such as creating informed citizens and improving the well-being of individuals and the larger society. In this era of globalization, employability of higher education graduates is considered imperative in strengthening economies and in increasing their competitiveness. This increased focus on employability calls for innovative methods and approaches for assessing the skills and competencies of graduates. Employability is a broad concept and should not be seen as synonymous with the actual employment of graduates. Given these changes in the larger economy and higher education systems, this chapter attempts to map the changes in the overall goals and objectives of higher education against various political and economic forces, and to discuss the implications of these changes with reference to ‘employability gain’ of graduates. In doing so, we first discuss various definitions of employability and identify commonalities and differences between them. Next, we examine the potential of two assessment approaches – self-reports and performance-based tests – for measuring employability gains based on research findings from two higher education quality management projects implemented in Germany.

Talent is a critical factor for organizational success. Multinational corporations (MNCs) face the challenge of fierce competition for talent worldwide by increasing their efforts in global talent management (GTM). To improve the strategic alignment of GTM, organizations increasingly incorporate information and communication technology (ICT) applications to support their GTM system. However, not every organization is successful at applying these new opportunities (e-GTM) and aligning them successfully with their organizational strategy. This chapter aims at conceptualizing the relationship between strategic GTM and strategic ICT in an aligned effort. It presents a conceptual framework that identifies four types of MNC approaches to e-GTM.

By means of a review of, both the GTM literature as well as the ICT literature, we connect the two concepts, GTM and ICT into e-GTM, into a framework along two axes: the extent to which MNCs apply GTM (ad hoc vs. strategic) and the scope of ICT in MNCs (operational vs. strategic).

Although the framework identifies four approaches to e-GTM in MNCs, the framework is less black and white than as presented. Companies can display e-GTM characteristics which place them in the gray areas in between each of the profiles. Additionally, we assume that achieving the alignment of strategic GTM and strategic ICT is an iterative process.

Since strategic alignment is not static but continuously changing, it requires companies to reevaluate their current GTM practices and ICT applications constantly while scanning the external market for new developments in the field of GTM and ICT to ensure the innovative state of their system. Furthermore, we assume that MNCs from high-tech sectors are more successful in supporting their strategic GTM applications with suitable ICT applications than MNCs from low-tech sectors. The study presents a first step toward researching the relationship between strategic GTM and strategic ICT in MNCs. The proposed framework might be used as a foundation for further research studies.

The framework presented in this chapter can help MNCs to address the issue of connecting GTM and ICT.

The relationship between GTM and ICT have not been conceptualized before. Furthermore, the typology presented in this chapter, with four approaches to ICT-enabled GTM, is a new way of looking at the GTM–ICT relationship.

To inform policy, curricula, and future research on cyberbullying through an exploration of the moral reasoning of digitally active 10–14-year olds (tweens) when witnesses to digital abuse.

Conducted interviews with 41 tweens, asking participants to react as witnesses to two hypothetical scenarios of digital abuse. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, I developed and applied a new typology for classifying “upstanders” and “bystanders” to cyberbullying.

Identified three types of upstander and five types of bystander, along with five thinking processes that led participants to react in those different ways. Upstanders were more likely than bystanders to think through a scenario using high-order moral reasoning processes like disinterested perspective-taking. Moral reasoning, emotions, and contextual factors, as well as participant gender and home school district, all appeared to play a role in determining how participants responded to cyberbullying scenarios.

Hypothetical scenarios posed in interviews cannot substitute for case studies of real events, but this qualitative analysis has produced a framework for classifying upstanding and bystanding behavior that can inform future studies and approaches to digital ethics education.

This study contributes to the literature on cyberbullying and moral reasoning through in-depth interviews with tweens that record the complexity and context-dependency of thinking processes like perspective-taking among an understudied but critical age group.

Children of recent refugees and immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the US public education system. Thus, it is imperative to create research-based pedagogies that value linguistic diversity, provide academic and social–emotional support and embrace life experiences that are often vastly different from those of the teachers and typical students. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional model designed to address specific academic and social–emotional competencies of linguistically and culturally diverse students on the writing of eight and nine-year-old students (n = 10) enrolled in an afterschool programme serving students from refugee families. The model of explicit writing instruction implemented in the study included culturally responsive literature, mindfulness practices, and differentiation in teaching genre-specific text structure and academic vocabulary. Pre- and post-test personal essays were scored for holistic quality of writing and use of academic vocabulary. The findings indicate that explicit and differentiated instruction in both writing organisation and vocabulary use was effective in increasing the holistic quality of students' personal writing and their ability to integrate academic vocabulary appropriately and meaningfully in independent writing. Implications for culturally responsive instruction for refugee students are discussed.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research presented in this edited volume.

This report is based on 17 chapters, which vary in terms of research approach, design, and method, yet aims to present different country perspectives on diversity within diversity management.

The chapters present new insights on how the national and macro-social environment impacts the institutional approaches to diversity management across the world. Findings indicate the need for organizations to focus on deep-level diversity, rather than choosing a tick-box policy on surface-level diversity. Empirical studies reveal that every institution can adopt a diversity-friendly approach in a way that best fits their structure, culture and the mentality of their top management team.

The report summarizes and integrates novel insights on country perspectives and approaches on diversity management.