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The purpose of the paper is to argue that an enriched understanding of texts would enable more informed and responsible management practice. The authors present an approach to the analysis of management texts that enjoys, rather than contests, multivocality with the aim of making our approach to defamiliarising texts an accessible change management tool.

Working with a reader‐response methodology we provide comment on, and analysis of, a popular management book, Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks. The authors context a response to this text in a discussion of commodity fetishism and deconstructed management theory texts. The interpretation of the subject text highlights its rhetorical suasion and pulls buried meaning into view.

The authors demonstrate that rhetorical analysis and satirical play, a mode of defamiliarisation that is employed in their own reading and incorporated into their classroom praxis, enables managers to better understand and control their own sense‐making. The authors argue that where their enriched understandings challenge embedded assumptions, changed management practices are enabled.

The authors offer their own construction of a Lovemark text, a satirical echo of the Roberts original, as an example of the distancing effect of humorous textual play.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevant sayings and stories of the ancient Chinese sages in relation to the style of Chinese human resource management (HRM).

Related texts generated from the quotations and stories from four Chinese sages, Guanzi, Hanfeizi, Xunzi and Yanzi, were translated and analyzed and their thinking regarding ruling the state and managing the people was discussed in line with the thoughts from the mainstream and modern Western management gurus such as Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Mary Parker Follett, Douglas McGregor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Elton Mayo and Jeffrey Pfeffer.

It was found that there were striking similarities in thoughts and call for actions to address key issues in HRM by both old and contemporary, east and west thinkers across 2,500 years. The main concerns are to select the right leaders and managers and recruit the right people; create attractive organisational culture and environments that promote a participative management approach to encourage, empower and engage employees to achieve desirable outcomes; uphold the people‐centred management principles; and focus on designing reward schemes that emphasise service and contribution instead of position and profits.

There is much to be learned from the past to address the present people management issues among modern organisations both inside China and perhaps from other parts of the world. It was as difficult to take seriously the principles‐based ruling and management approaches in ancient times as it is today. However, if these principles had been put into practice, the world would have had fewer of the corporate corruption scandals and less of the mischievous behaviour in the state that are manifested in today's society, but more productive population, effective organisations, ethical governments and harmonious environment; hence less global human suffering.

A response to Nigel Piercy’s commentary “Why it is fundamentally stupid for a business school to try to improve its RAE score”. Highlights the bureaucratic rationale and behavioural consequences of the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Asserts that the RAE distorts and controls the management, recruitment and operations of UK business schools.

One possible management response to problem drinkers is the introduction of referral and treatment policies; other possible responses would be to tolerate them, dismiss them or try and screen them out through an intensive recruitment process.

The influence of the Experiential Learning Model, and of the Learning Style Inventory, on aspects of management education and development have been substantial. But they have potentially much wider application, particularly in examining managerial decision behaviour and in the analysis of the effectiveness of groups and teams.

AT the request of the Director‐General of the International Labour Office Mr. Petre Lupu, Rumania's Minister of Labour, has described the benefits brought to his country through setting up a Management Development Centre.

The discourse of human resource management (HRM) is increasingly dominated by a normative, consensus‐oriented perspective on managing the employment relationship. This paper aims to explore the potential of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to provide new and different understandings of HRM and processes of organisational change, and which highlights the creative role of language in the shaping of organisation and management practice.

A case study analysis of managers' experiences of introducing change in a large catering firm is drawn upon to highlight the inherent tensions in people management, which stem from the need for employers to motivate and control labour in order to remain profitable. This is illustrated in a change programme aimed at increasing organisational efficiency and achieving a “results driven culture” that exhorted managers to think and behave as “entrepreneurs” and to “comply” with stringent new rules on managing their staff.

It is concluded that conflict and resistance is an inevitable feature of HRM‐based initiatives and that CDA offers a powerful lens for exploring this dynamic. Importantly, it provides a less restrictive view of management decision making than that found in conventional understandings of HRM, which tend to treat management as a more or less culturally unified body, and ignores the subjectivity of managers. In contrast, the empirical evidence presented here provides an example of how the deployment of CDA can provide rich insights into the dynamics of HRM‐based change rooted in a complex shifting network of alliances (and related discourses).

Focus is placed on how concepts, objects and subject positions are constituted through language and embedded in power relations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how occupations and the institutional setting shape the power balance (individual bargaining power) between employees and employers. It builds on theoretical approaches on knowledge work and institutional theory.

The paper uses the European Social Survey data in 2010/2011 to compare the power balance between employees and employers in three countries: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Multinomial logit regression was employed.

The results show that occupation and the institutional setting shape the power balance between employees and employers. Employees in highly skilled occupations perceive greater power vis-à-vis their employer, and employees in Denmark, characterized by greater flexibility for employers, perceive less power than in Sweden and Norway. In addition, age and gender are important demographic factors determining employees’ perceived power towards their employers.

The literature makes a number of assumptions with regard to the attitudes and behaviour of knowledge workers. However, research that compares employees in knowledge work with other occupational groups is scarce. This paper adds to the literature by comparing employees in highly skilled knowledge work with employees in lower skilled occupations. It also empirically shows how different approaches to definitions of knowledge work correspond.