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The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

The study compares the demographics and degree attainment in Washington University’s (the University) Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship Program (CGFP) in the pre- and post-Grutter era. The fellowship program’s aims included bolstering African American graduate degree completion and preparing African American faculty members. The 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action case serves as a break point to compare the 1991–2003 cohorts and the 2004–2008 cohorts. Interviews of key leaders give a historical perspective on the program’s mission. Institutional data organized to form two cohorts, pre- and post-Grutter comparison groups, provide insight into demographic trends and degree attainment. The CGFP realized its original mission to diversify the professoriate by supporting underrepresented graduate students. The vast majority of alumni in both cohorts earned a graduate degree and earned their intended degrees. The two cohorts achieved high doctoral degree attainment. Time-to-degree findings and placement within the academy demonstrated a positive outcome. However, the program post-Grutter has generated fewer African American participants. In the post-Grutter era, the University needs to develop new strategies to increase the racial diversity of graduate education. As a complementary resource, the CGFP, as part of a broader portfolio of programmatic and policy tools designed to diversify, merits continued investment. Only a fraction of programs focused on African American doctoral attainment publish evaluation data. The study captures the programmatic effects of the Grutter decision at an elite American university.

Diversity is a somewhat amorphous concept; however, it is crucial to our growth as a nation, especially the growth and personal development of college and university students. Most college and university campuses are diverse societies, composed of individuals of many ethnicities, religions, ages, sexual identities, and physical abilities. It is not hard to see the diversity on a campus; people of different backgrounds and cultures comprise the vast majority of the campus population. The University Diversity and Inclusion Office commonly has a vice president, an associate provost, or chief diversity officer for diversity who serves as the senior administrative head. This leader has the responsibility to provide educational activities and programs systematically.

This chapter discusses the role that the University Diversity and Inclusion Office plays in educating the campus about global diversity awareness and inclusivity excellence. The chapter outlines a systematic and flexible approach to addressing the demographic shift that is occurring on college and university campuses and how best to deal with campus bias incidents. The components of the University Diversity and Inclusion Office strategic direction are examined with particular attention focused on the role of the office, its leadership, and the mission of the institution. A section on proposed successful campus-wide diversity initiatives is included as examples of an essential endeavor that enhances campus diversity. This organizational structure has won a national (HEED) Higher Education Excellent in Diversity Award.

This chapter investigates March's concepts of ‘exploration’ and ‘exploitation’ in relation to the graduate labour market (Levinthal & March, 1993; March, 1991). We focus on its use of the imagery of potentiality as key criterion of employability and investigate its dimensions through March's conceptual framework. We argue that the balancing act of exploring and exploiting one's potential becomes one of the main coordinates through which contemporary organisations attempt to configure the profile of the future employee. An ambidextrous ideal employee is configured who is trapped between the continuous demands of routinised production, execution and implementation, and those of equally sustained experimentation, self-expression and creativity. We conclude by arguing that this ideal can be interpreted as another example of an unsustainable utopian image of work in the context of contemporary management. The theme of potentiality illustrates the dangers of this utopia in a specific way. On the one hand, it plays the role of an inescapable framework guiding the individual's sense of self, whilst on the other hand, it predicates the self based upon an image of limitless potential.

According to the classic text by Haberman and Post (1998), teacher leaders in urban schools must possess many characteristics, including “relationship skills… empathy…” (p. 98), skills for “coping with violence,” a capacity for “self-analysis,” and the ability to function “in chaos” (p. 99), among others. Further, they state, the process of recruitment and selection of high-quality teachers who will become teacher leaders relies upon the ability of a teacher certification program to effectively identify “those predisposed” “to perform the sophisticated expectations” (p. 96) of urban teachers. Recruiting and selecting candidates who will be effective, over the long run, in challenging environments may in fact be the most consequential phase of the entire teacher preparation process. Traditional methods of recruitment and selection vary widely and are typically less strategic (Guarino, Santibañez, & Daley, 2006) than the model described by Haberman and Post (1998). This chapter describes the recruitment and selection process employed by three CSUDH alternative routes to certification that aim to place highly effective teachers in high-needs urban secondary schools.

Over the last several decades, virtually all large U.S. law firms have adopted a human capital strategy that emphasizes academic performance and the prestige of the law school attended. Although this focus is rooted more in tradition than in hard empirical evidence that it produces a competitive advantage, the question has long been irrelevant for most law firms because of the perennial rise in profits. If the model is not broken, the adage runs, why fix it? Drawing upon extensive historical and contemporaneous evidence, this essay argues that the limitations of the traditional credentials-based model have been masked by a steady multidecade surge in the demand for corporate legal services. Further, various data and trendlines suggest that the growth in demand for corporate legal services is beginning to flatten out. In the coming years, many large corporate law firms will be in the unfamiliar position of competing over market share. Unlike the relative calm and prosperity of the prior era, their survival will likely depend upon a human capital strategy that asks and answers several basic empirical questions regarding the selection and development of lawyers.

Two primary approaches have been used to study employment brands and branding. First, there is a long history of the study of organizational attraction. Second, in the past 10–15 years, there has been growth in a hybrid stream of research combining branding concepts from the consumer psychology literature with I/O psychology frameworks of organizational attraction and applicant job search behavior. In this chapter, we take an entirely different approach and suggest that the theoretical models built around product/service brand knowledge can readily accommodate employment brands and branding without hybridizing the framework with I/O psychology. This merging of employment brand with product and service brands is accomplished simply by recognizing employment as an economic exchange between workers and employers and recognizing workers as cognitive and emotional beings that vary in their talents and have their own vectors of preferences for the employment offering. After developing a testable model of the components, antecedents, and consequences of employment brand knowledge, we review the existing employment brand and organizational attraction literature and identify multiple opportunities for additional research.

In an ever-interconnected world dominated by discourses on the internationalization and marketization of higher education, concerns related to language and employability have been the focus of recent debates. There is, however, a dearth of research investigating how these dimensions relate to one another in recent comparative and international higher education research. By focusing on how issues related to language and employability have been presented in recent higher education research worldwide, this chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of this concern. To achieve this goal, we conducted a scoping literature review using the Web of Science, Scopus, and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) databases, considering the years 2011–2020. The findings, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that language skills are perceived to be valued by both graduates and employers though the discussions predominantly focused on one language, English. The research focus on English for employability in Anglophone contexts is understandable. However, the fact that the trend is observed in contexts where the language is not the primary or official language seems to indicate the influence of internationalization of higher education and global labor markets primarily dominated by English. The literature also suggested that (English) language training in higher education programs needs to move from solely linguistic and qualification-related content areas to a broader sphere of English for communication purposes that cover both specialized disciplinary content and broader generic employability skills. Considering this finding, we suggest that higher education systems and institutions incorporate recent developments in English for occupational purposes in their curriculum. We also recommend that there needs to be a shift from the overwhelmingly English language-dominated discussions to more inclusive research that assesses the impact of other dominant languages on employability-related concerns.

The purpose of this chapter is to critically evaluate contemporary Japanese human resource management (HRM) practices in order to identify if Japanese small enterprises are employing the same or different practices that have been used in the past.

An interpretative qualitative approach is applied through the use of semi-structured interviews. Three small business owners with 30–50 years’ experience in the construction industry have been interviewed in Japanese with their subsequent responses translated, transcribed and coded.

It has been discovered that traditional HRM practices remain popular although their influence has slightly dissipated. This finding indicates an influence by western HR practices, at least to an extent. Findings include the presence of lifetime employment, seniority systems, Kaizen (quality management), the growing international workforce, unionisation, ‘nomunication’, recruitment practices, group decision-making and the lack of gender equality.

Research was only carried out with three small business owners which may reduce the transferability and generalisability of the findings. Only the construction industry was analysed. Moreover, the interviews took place on Skype rather than in a face-to-face environment which may have reduced the ability to effectively understand facial signals.

Although a native Japanese speaker carried out the translations, there may have been issues regarding selecting the most appropriate words to be used.

This study provides an original viewpoint on contemporary HR practices in Japan. It is argued that this chapter will provide a fresh understanding on HRM practices used by Japanese small business and will be useful for scholars, employees and employers alike.