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The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have increasingly come to question the role and status of human beings in the modern technological environment. In recent years concern with the nature of work, its impact upon people, and their attitudes towards it, seem to have sharpened. Investigation of, and experimentation with, the qualitative aspects of working life—its ability to confer self‐fulfilment directly, for example, as opposed to being a means of acquiring goods—has gained momentum under the influence of a unique set of economic, social, political and technological factors. The outpouring of books, reports and articles from a wide variety of sources has, not surprisingly, grown apace.

The purpose of this paper is to point to some emerging workplace issues relating to the increasing collaboration between human and robot workers. As the number of human workers shrinks and that of robots increases, how will this change the dynamics of the workplace and human worker motivation?

The approach of this paper is to examine recent academic, business and media writings on the subject of artificial intelligence and robotics in the workplace to identify gaps in our understanding of the new hybrid work environment.

What the author has found is that although there are numerous voices expressing concerns about the replacement of human workers by robots, there has not as yet been a substantive study of the impact on human workers of sharing their work life with robots in this environment.

The findings in this paper are limited by the fact that they are drawn from a review of the secondary literature rather than from primary research and are therefore speculative and anecdotal.

The practical implications of the findings are to suggest that it is time to establish a systematic and standardized method for analyzing and measuring the impact on human workers of operating in an environment increasingly populated by automated co-workers.

The author suspects that the social implications will be to suggest that as a human society we will need to establish psychologically and culturally valid means for coping with this new work environment, and the author believes some of the findings may well prove counter intuitive within the social context of work.

The author does not believe there is any substantial work addressing the social, psychological or cultural implications of humans working besides robots on a daily basis.

This paper attempts at charting out a road‐map for signifying the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a whole and in its attempts of doing so, the paper underlines the role of corporate giants operating in India by citing examples of different Indian Business Houses for providing a guidance to achieve a sacro‐civic society where the under‐ pinning lies in promoting overall human development.

This paper aims to develop a model of individual innovation based on an employee’s innate propensity to innovate and the specific costs and benefits expected to the individual from the innovation. This model is then used to study the way an employees’ age will impact innovation.

This paper proposes variables which drive an individual’s innovative behavior based on a literature review. This theoretical model is then maximized to show how age drives an employees’ innovation output in three ways. A small survey is used to substantiate the theory.

In this model, the age of the employee becomes an important independent variable with negative elements associated with both the cost and benefit the employee will receive from their innovation efforts. However, age will be positively associated with an employee’s ability to implement and capitalize on their innovation.

Firm’s must pay attention to the career life cycle of their employees. The human resource department must take on the task of focusing on delivering the programs needed to support older employees’ particular needs relative to producing innovation.

As the Western workforce ages, considerations for dealing with older workers and age diversity will become more important. Models such as the one developed in this paper will be important for understanding and managing the changing workforce.

This model develops a theory of how age can impact an employee’s innovation in three specific ways that have not previously been addressed in the literature. This model also proposes an explanation for surprising results found in several prior studies.

It is generally recognised that the United States is in the grip of a productivity crisis. What is not generally recognised is what to do about it. Do solutions lie primarily in the hands of management?

The present paper reports on the development of SITE EXPERT: a prototype knowledge‐based expert system. It is an advisory system. SITE EXPERT is intended to be used for productivity improvement in construction and provides advice on: (1) the productivity of three basic operations of construction, i.e. pouring and placing of concrete, erection and removal of formwork, and fixing reinforcement; and (2) human resources and site layout as productivity factors. The system uses information from construction experts, text books, data recorded at construction sites and the engineer's own knowledge, as well as knowledge obtained by running simulation models. In the present paper, the development, operation and evaluation of the prototype system is described. The results of this prototype system development demonstrate that artificial intelligence methodologies provide powerful facilities for capturing information about construction processes and advising the practitioners of construction on productivity improvement within a computer format close to human reasoning.

The purpose of the paper is to explore how education workers position themselves with an organisational culture and fashion a workplace identity. The research involved both professionally qualified teachers and support staff in an inclusive approach and drew theoretical concepts from Structuralist approaches such as labour process theory to Foucauldian post-structuralism and Habermasian critical theory on the nature of identity, power and control. This paper also sought to establish whether there was any difference in the positions taken by teaching and support staff.

The methodology used a mixed methods approach. Following on from a pilot questionnaire, a series of research conversations was conducted drawing on Habermas’s interpretation of phenomenology and the co-construction of knowledge.

The findings suggest that there are clear differences in the way teaching and support staff construct their workplace identity. In general, teachers were more critical of Central Government policy, as well as the practices of senior management, than was the case for support staff that tended to be more deferential.

As a case study of a single institution, there are inherent limitations in the generalisability of such research. However, as a snap shot of organisational life, the research provides a useful insight into the complexities of workplace relationships and the identities workers take.

This paper, albeit on a small scale, provides an insight into two areas not often reported on. First, on reporting on a Sixth Form College, the research aims to address the paucity of published research on this particular organisation type in the English educational system. Second, in placing teaching and support staff alongside each other, it provides a deeper insight into organisational life from differing positions.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the job satisfaction levels between International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001-certified and non-ISO 9001-certified project-based companies in Jordan, for project managers (PMs) and project team members (consultants, engineers and architects).

The study sample consists of individuals from the aforementioned four roles of ISO 9001-certified and non-ISO 9001-certified companies. A questionnaire survey was used to collect the data from 57 companies. In total, 72 valid questionnaires were returned, yielding a response rate of 92.98 percent. The data obtained were statistically analyzed, and then the independent t-test was used to test the study hypotheses.

The results revealed that ISO 9001-certified companies experience higher job satisfaction level for the four roles compared to non-ISO 9001-certified companies. Between the two samples, it was noted that there is a significant difference in the PMs’, consultants’ and engineers’ satisfaction with co-workers and without any remarkable difference in the specific satisfaction. No significant difference between the two samples in general satisfaction was found for PMs and engineers. Finally, no significant difference was found in three satisfaction elements for architects.

Understanding the linkage between being ISO 9001-certified company and project members’ job satisfaction can provide a new strategic direction for project-based companies’ performance management that can help in achieving superior work outcomes. A small sample size is considered the main limitation of this study.

This study attempts to fill the knowledge gap that is rarely investigated in the literature, i.e. the link between being ISO 9001-certified company and the level of project members’ job satisfaction.

Boredom is believed to be the common cause of workers' absenteeism, accidents, job dissatisfaction, and performance variations in manufacturing environments with repetitive jobs. Effectively measuring and possibly predicting job boredom is the key to the design and implementation of appropriate strategies to deal with such undesirable emotional state. The purpose of this paper is to present new methodologies to measure and predict human boredom at work.

Two series of mathematical formulations, linear and nonlinear, to describe the variation of human boredom at work are first presented. Given the complexity of human emotions, the authors also present a probabilistic framework based on state‐of‐the‐art Bayesian networks to model employees' boredom at work.

The proposed methods centre on the prediction and measurement of human boredom at work. They enable managers to take proactive actions to deal with human boredom at work. Examples of such actions are task rotation and job redesign.

The proposed methods are verified using a number of cases describing a set of phenomena that may occur in the real world. However, further research is required to demonstrate the validity of the models using real world data.

According to accessible literature, human boredom is being measured by self reporting scales thus far. This study describes and demonstrates analytical approaches to model human boredom at work.