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Just over a year ago, when reviewing MSC's first year of operation1, I looked forward to a growing role for the Commission as it developed its concept of a comprehensive manpower policy. This article is an attempt to take stock of its present position after a year of very considerable activity on several fronts.

The services now provided through the MSC have a long history. Employment exchanges started in 1909, and Government Training Centres (now called Skill‐centres) in 1925. For much of their life these services have been seen as mainly social in purpose, to alleviate the hardships of unemployment. Employment exchanges in particular came to be associated in the mind of the public more with the payment of unemployment benefits than with job placement. Only in the last decade or so has it been seen that effective working of the labour market brings economic as well as social benefits.

The Manpower Services Commission has now been operating for just over a year. In that time it has assumed responsibility for the employment and training services previously provided directly by the Department of Employment. It has expressed its views on a number of issues affecting the labour market, industrial training and education, and has considered its future role. Contingency plans for high unemployment and manpower implications of offshore oil have also occupied the Commission's attention in a busy programme which included seventeen meetings of the full Commission during 1974. The MSC describes itself as ‘a new approach’. Is this claim justified?

There has been a surprising amount of criticism lately in a number of quarters concerning the activities of TEC. Some of this criticism has been less than well‐informed, and much of it has been self‐contradictory; but there is no doubt that underlying much of it is a genuine concern for the well‐being of TEC and support for what it is trying to do.

Those of us who are advocates of change are now very much at the receiving end as far as the training scene is concerned. Against all the rules of good change management however, there is a noticeable absence of direction and we are left in a period of uncertainty and confusion. Most of the ITBs are on their way out and the MSC is promoting a New Training Initiative which may well prove useful in providing certain key skills in the future but is unlikely to make a significant impact in tackling urgently the national disease of poor business productivity. As a result, the ball is now firmly back in the hands of management. For those who are brave enough to take up the cudgels, there is a golden opportunity to bring a new sense of purpose to training.

This research analyzed the existing academic and grey literature concerning the technologies and practices of people analytics (PA), to understand how ethical considerations are being discussed by researchers, industry experts and practitioners, and to identify gaps, priorities and recommendations for ethical practice.

An iterative “scoping review” method was used to capture and synthesize relevant academic and grey literature. This is suited to emerging areas of innovation where formal research lags behind evidence from professional or technical sources.

Although the grey literature contains a growing stream of publications aimed at helping PA practitioners to “be ethical,” overall, research on ethical issues in PA is still at an early stage. Optimistic and technocentric perspectives dominate the PA discourse, although key themes seen in the wider literature on digital/data ethics are also evident. Risks and recommendations for PA projects concerned transparency and diverse stakeholder inclusion, respecting privacy rights, fair and proportionate use of data, fostering a systemic culture of ethical practice, delivering benefits for employees, including ethical outcomes in business models, ensuring legal compliance and using ethical charters.

This research adds to current debates over the future of work and employment in a digitized, algorithm-driven society.

The research provides an accessible summary of the risks, opportunities, trade-offs and regulatory issues for PA, as well as a framework for integrating ethical strategies and practices.

By using a scoping methodology to surface and analyze diverse literatures, this study fills a gap in existing knowledge on ethical aspects of PA. The findings can inform future academic research, organizations using or considering PA products, professional associations developing relevant guidelines and policymakers adapting regulations. It is also timely, given the increase in digital monitoring of employees working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The creation and dissemination of fake news can have severe consequences for a company’s brand. Researchers, policymakers and practitioners are eagerly searching for solutions to get us out of the “fake news crisis”. Here, one approach is to use automated tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, to support managers in identifying fake news. The study in this paper demonstrates how AI with its ability to analyze vast amounts of unstructured data, can help us tell apart fake and real news content. Using an AI application, this study examines if and how the emotional appeal, i.e., sentiment valence and strength of specific emotions, in fake news content differs from that in real news content. This is important to understand, as messages with a strong emotional appeal can influence how content is consumed, processed and shared by consumers.

The study analyzes a data set of 150 real and fake news articles using an AI application, to test for differences in the emotional appeal in the titles and the text body between fake news and real news content.

The results suggest that titles are a strong differentiator on emotions between fake and real news and that fake news titles are substantially more negative than real news titles. In addition, the results reveal that the text body of fake news is substantially higher in displaying specific negative emotions, such as disgust and anger, and lower in displaying positive emotions, such as joy.

This is the first empirical study that examines the emotional appeal of fake and real news content with respect to the prevalence and strength of specific emotion dimensions, thus adding to the literature on fake news identification and marketing communications. In addition, this paper provides marketing communications professionals with a practical approach to identify fake news using AI.