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This work considers women who have left jobs within organizations to set up their own businesses. The project thus explores two worlds: the world of the organization and the world of the small business owner/manager. However, it is not sufficient to limit the scope of the research to these two contexts; equally important are the spaces in‐between. An examination of the transition from employment to self‐employment is crucial in understanding the experience as a whole. Two case studies are used to illustrate how particular women managed the transition. It is then considered how this experience can be conceptualized theoretically, assessing the extent to which existing theories offer adequate frameworks for understanding. Implications for further research and the development of a more relevant conceptual model are addressed.

This paper aims to explore how highly skilled women workers in Sri Lanka navigate organizational contexts via different modes of engagement in pursuit of hierarchical advancement. The purpose is to contribute new insights into existing understandings of women's careers in diverse socio‐cultural contexts.

This paper is based on one‐to‐one in‐depth interviews conducted with 24 Sri Lankan women in early, mid and late career.

The findings reveal how the women in this sample actively used eight modes of engagement to manage themselves in organizations and vertically advance in their careers. The implications of these modes for organizational contexts and women's careers are highlighted.

This paper contributes to the limited literature on women's careers in South Asia and develops existing understandings of modes of engagement individuals use to develop their careers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of new public management and modernization reform policies on control in the probation service.

The paper takes interpretivist, qualitative approach. It is based on ethnographic data, collected over a one‐year period in an English regional probation service. In the course of the fieldwork, 45 employees were interviewed. Data were also collected through participant observation and analysis of formal documents.

The paper suggests that new public management and modernization reform policies are interpreted by organizational actors as control mechanisms per se.

Findings can be relevant for understanding the “control” side of the reform policies in the public sector. To date those policies have been mainly considered as driven by change rather than by control.

To apply and develop Stephen Barley's model of career structuration to offer insights into the transition into portfolio working.

A qualitative case study methodology is used. Interviews were conducted with managers who had left the National Health Service to develop portfolio careers.

The adoption of the Barley model of career structuration as a sensitising device has made it possible to show how individuals have drawn from existing scripts embedded in institutional forms but have also contributed to developing new career scripts, such as portfolio working. Their enactment of career scripts is a dynamic process whereby they impact back on those scripts in both intentional and unintentional ways. Thus the transformative capacity of individual career actions is asserted but, critically, alongside awareness of constraints as bound up in structures which have salience for individuals and for collectives.

This is a study based in one large public sector organisation. Further exploration of the potential role of career as a way of understanding socially embedded action and its capacity for change is required, which takes account of different occupational settings.

The study outlines some of the frustrations experienced by portfolio workers and has practical implications for the ways in which they should be managed.

The paper contributes to the debate concerning structure and agency in career theory.

Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.

Calls for corporate social responsibility are widespread, yet there is no consensus about what it means; this may be its charm. However, it is possible to distinguish the fi duciary obligations owed to shareholders, as expressed by Milton Friedman, from all other paradigms of corporate responsibility. Friedman maintains that: “ ...there is one and only one social responsibility of business‐to‐use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.” All other paradigms argue that corporations have social responsibilities that extend beyond the pursuit of shareholder benefits to stakeholders. The list of cited stakeholders is ill‐defined and expanding, including non‐human animals and non‐sentient things. This paper defends the intellectual and ethical merits of fiduciary duties, and compares and contrasts it to the stakeholder paradigm. The fiduciary duty to firms’ owners is the bedrock of capitalism, and capitalism will wither without it.

If the past 30 years of history have taught anything, it is that white‐collar offenders often run afoul of the law by their participation in cover‐ups rather than their part in a substantive criminal offenses. In August 1974, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign as President of the United States ‐ not because of the Watergate break in itself, but his attempts to cover it up. President Clinton was impeached and narrowly avoided indictment ‐ not for his sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky, but his attempt to redefine the word “is” during his testimony at a deposition. Recently, we have seen the demise of Arthur Andersen, LLP ‐ not as the result of a securities fraud conviction, but a conviction for obstruction of justice. Frank Quattrone was indicted recently for allegedly counseling the destruction of documents, and Martha Stewart was indicted, not for insider trading or the alleged conduct that first brought her under the microscope of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and Department of Justice (“DOJ”), but allegedly for misleading federal agents. This article will review the current round of indictments against Wall Street luminaries for obstruction, as well as the new obstruction provisions of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act. It then will make some observations on how these events should impact a corporation’s document retention policy. Finally, it will discuss how compliance programs that aim to enforce the laws of this country and assist governmental inquiries may actually ensnare corporation employees in an obstruction trap.