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Reviews three books in the field of employment relations, industrial relations and human resource management: Employment Relations: Continuity and Change: Policies and Practices by E. Rose; Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice by M. Salamon; and Human Resource Management A Critical Text, edited by J. Storey. The review highlights the tension between the academic requirement for rigour in research and the publisher's requirement for a text that will have commercial value. It raises the point that textbooks often define of a research discipline for those outside academic circles. The review provides a detailed account of each book and compares their strengths and weaknesses. Concludes with a call to debate further what is required in a good textbook.

The primary objective of this paper is to understand the extent to which Australian industrial relations academics took up the different heuristic frameworks from USA and U.K. from the 1960s to the 1980s. A second objective is to begin to understand why, and in what ways ideas are transmitted in academic disciplines drawing on a “market model” for ideas. It is shown that in the years between 1960s and 1980s a modified U.S. (Dunlopian) model of interpreting industrial relations became more influential in Australia than that of U.K. scholarship, as exemplified by the British Oxford School. In part this reflects the breadth, flexibility and absence of an overt normative tenor in Dunlop’s model which thus offered lower transaction costs for scholars in an emergent discipline seeking recognition and approval from academia, practitioners and policy-makers. Despite frequent and wide-ranging criticism of Dunlop’s model, it proved a far more enduring transfer to Australian academic industrial relations than the British model, albeit in a distorted form. The market model for the diffusion of ideas illuminates the ways in which a variety of local contextual factors influenced the choices taken by Australian industrial relations academics.

Volume 13 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains eight papers that deal with a variety of industrial relations topics. The first chapter, by Stephen Hills and Teresa Schoellner, analyzes the influence of the creation in 1999 of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on the deregulation of part-time work in each of the 13 EMU member nations. The second chapter, by Cynthia Gramm and John Schnell, provides a systematic review and analysis of the effects of flexible staffing arrangements (e.g. temporary employment) on individuals working under such arrangements, regular employees in the same organizations, organizational performance, and macroeconomic outcomes. The third chapter, by Alexander Colvin, analyzes the adoption, structure, and function of peer review and arbitration type dispute resolution procedures, respectively, for nonunion employees in two different business units of the TRW company. The fourth chapter, by Sue Fernie and David Metcalf, nicely complements the Colvin paper by examining the uses and implications for employee voice, conflict resolution, and fairness at work of ombuds arrangements in four British enterprises.

Findings from a comparative qualitative study with parents in the USA and China increase the understanding of experiences of adults with autism in both countries.

Semi-Structured interviews were conducted with families in the USA and in China. In total, 18 families participated in the study – 7 in the USA, 11 in China.

Analysis of the comparative data led to the emergence of three overarching themes, expressing both similarities and differences in experiences: 1) transition to adult services plays out differently in the two nations, 2) parent advocacy and efforts in supporting and securing services for their children are strong in both countries but are also defined by the variability in access to services and 3) due to the scarcity of adult services in their country, Chinese parents express significantly more worries about their own aging and mortality as compared with USA parents.

Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

By examining the experiences of families of adults with autism in the USA and China, the research reveals themes that would not be visible in a single-nation study.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

This paper aims to investigate how and why foresight may affect individual and organizational learning.

This paper builds on prior research through a qualitative study with 13 foresight practitioners.

This paper derives four broad foresight capabilities that are underpinned by a number of interdependent factors and relates those to the wider literature on individual and organizational learning.

Practitioners may use this paper’s findings to enhance any individual and organizational learning effects of foresight activities. Deriving four broad foresight capabilities via a range of interdependent factors may assist practitioners with evaluating and/or enhancing the effectiveness of these capabilities in an organized fashion. Additionally, the findings show that foresight mode, with its strong relationship to foresight-related accountabilities and incentives, plays a central role in all four foresight capabilities. This stresses the importance of having a continuous foresight capability with strong top management commitment, effective governance and clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

This paper makes a number of theoretical contributions. First, it contributes toward further operationalizing foresight. Second, it demonstrates a substantial overlap between the concepts of foresight and absorptive capacity, which suggests that foresight scholars and practitioners may benefit from a large and mature related body of literature. Third, it identifies explicit links between specific foresight and individual/organizational learning constructs.

Researchers, subject specialists, and information professionals have long been aware of scientific and technical (sci‐tech) dictionaries available from the U.S. government. Yet these reference sources often remain invisible to the general public, especially in libraries that exclude government documents from the main catalog or that maintain separate documents collections. However, as more libraries automate their holdings and load cataloging records for government publications into their online public access catalogs (OPACs), government documents should become more visible. Until then, it may surprise some to learn that many U.S. government agencies have allocated vast resources into compiling, publishing, and updating technical dictionaries in print, microfiche, and electronic format.