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The manager was once depicted as the “organisation man”. Managers, it was claimed, regarded their work and careers as central life interests around which other activities and relationships were structured. If families and friends were not entirely neglected, they were nonetheless, regarded as secondary to career progress. Within organisations, managers were seen as the creators, custodians and, in career terms, the prime beneficiaries of hierarchical authority structures. If corporate expansion and economic growth during the 1950s and 60s underpinned this view, contraction and recession in the 70s and 80s have begun to undermine it.

It has been argued that gender segregation within the labour market leads to women being overrepresented in a narrow range of jobs that offer limited promotion prospects. Presents the results of a questionnaire and interview study of women working in one such occupation, secretarial work, in England, France and Germany, and in the sectors of management consultancy and publishing. The results confirmed that secretaries in all three countries experience poor and unsystematic promotion prospects, despite the fact that many secretaries aspire to leave secretarial work. Sectoral differences are not as great as had been anticipated, and barriers to promotion were found to be especially acute in France and Germany. Promotion within secretarial work itself is shown to lack real value, and the implications of this for organizations are discussed.

The international organization of which BAWE is a part is called Les Femmes Chefs d'Entreprises Mondiales, and the membership reflects the word ‘enterprise’ in their national titles. To be an executive does not necessarily imply entrepreneurship, but the common denominator of BAWE members is that they all have money at risk in their businesses. British President Eugenie Maxwell commented recently: ‘Now is a particularly exciting time for us. Our change of title to include “entrepreneurs” brings us into line with our colleagues all over the world where the word is immediately understood as meaning people creatively engaged in business and not merely administering. Nearer home, another advantage is that “entrepreneur” is very much the word of the moment’.

MOTION AND TIME STUDY DESIGN AND MEASUREMENT OF WORK By Ralph M. Barnes. (John Wiley, £12.00) SINCE this classic work was first published, six editors and over forty years ago, the concept of time and motion study has considerably expanded. It remains, however, a powerful means for increasing productivity, though there may even have been some change in the meaning of this latter term; hence the inclusion of a new first chapter, “Productivity”, which defines the terms Labour productivity, Capital productivity and Materials productivity, and discusses the applicability of time and motion study to each.

In the U.S. private sector, women are less likely than men to be union members. This study analyses a unique na‐tional survey (conducted in 1984) to determine if women are less interested than men in unionising or if, instead, they are equally interested but face higher barriers to unionisation. The results support the latter interpretation. In particular, non‐union women in private sector white‐col‐lar jobs (representing over half of the female non‐union, work force) expressed more interest than comparable men in joining unions. This finding appears to reflect more optimism among the women in this group than among the men about what unions can accomplish; it is not explained by gender differences in attitudes toward jobs or em‐ployers. The authors discount theories that family respon‐sibilities, or concerns of female workers that set them apart from men, present special barriers to unionisation.

Reviews two reports which analyse employment patterns, salaries and skills of people employed in the City. The first report, The City Labour Market finds that there are wide differences in base salary, bonus etc., with individuals facing large variations in pay. The second report, A Review of Professional and Managerial Skills in the City, reveals a disproportionately large number of skilled and educated staff within the City.

This chapter provides personal – co-autoethnographic – reflections on the concept of authentic leadership from authors' professional and life experiences, synthesising factors that could be applied to a hypothetical leader. The authors come from Fortune 500 businesses, entrepreneurship start-ups and the research- and teaching-focused sphere of academia. While they recognise the foundation of authentic leadership, they see trends in the unspoken doctrines – primarily quantitative, positivistic and overly optimistic biases – to be factors hindering its development. The authors discuss practical and theoretical limitations of authentic leadership and suggest these provide the basis for research to develop an understanding of authenticity in leadership.

In an interview in 1991, the Nobel Prize-winning author Laurens Van der Post proclaimed that the era of leaders is over (Block, 1998). A decade later, the topic of breakthrough leadership was the subject of the first special issue in the Harvard Business Review’s seventy-nine year history. Leadership has endured as a consuming issue in both personal and organizational life since Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince was written in 1513. In truth, however, leadership exists as part of a duality: Leaders forge and sustain relationships with followers (Goffee & Jones, 2001). Strikingly, Hitler sensed this duality. In a speech to his personal guard corps, he exclaimed: “All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone” (Kellerman, 2001, p. 21).

Some evidence of a relationship between training provision and the extent of skills shortages is provided by presenting the results of a survey of small firms operating across a range of manufacturing and service industries within the Portsmouth area of south Hampshire. By empirically distinguishing between different types of training providers and measuring the severity of skills shortages between companies, it is shown that those organisations which lay emphasis on the development of human resources are less adversely affected by skills shortages than those organisations which, in contrast, lay emphasis on the exploitation of human resources.