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The major ethical questions occuring in the process of personnel management are reviewed. These issues become particularly pronounced in the transition countries during the process of transformation of their economic and social system. Their specific character is determined not only by the nature of employment, but are understandable also in terms of the specifics of personality development occuring in Eastern Europe over the last half century.

The police organisation receives much media attention regarding its record on Equal Opportunities. Research suggests that the organisational culture in police organisations plays a major role in impeding the progress of women. Using repertory grid technique, the culture of a police force, conceptualised at the level of performance value judgements or recipe knowledge was investigated. It is argued that rank, rather than gender has the greatest influence on the content of performance value judgements and that this is attributable to the way that hierarchy influences the way in which the grass‐roots role is constructed. We argue that women’s progression is impeded not because of dominant constructions of the role per se, but by the way such constructions intersect with broader socio‐cultural constructions of women’s domestic roles.

Many occupations require people to draw on their experience to make decisions based on intuition and subjective judgement; this includes craft‐ and skill‐based tasks, and the more cognitive tasks associated with strategic decision‐making by senior managers. Discussion of the processes involved tends to regard them as somehow inappropriate or illegitimate, excessively subjective because not open to scrutiny. The repertory grid is a powerful and precise way of making tacit knowledge explicit; moreover, it rests on a detailed and epistemologically convincing theory of knowledge, personal construct psychology. Both have been used in a great variety of occupations, and this paper will sample some of them, concentrating on the identification of the intuitive factors involved in bank commercial lending, and venture capital investment, decision processes. The willingness of financial institutions to support, and their reluctance to adopt, this particular approach to the identification of tacit knowledge will also be examined.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and understand the process of successful introduction of total quality management (TQM) in Poland and the way in which it impacted on identity of Polish managers.

The study is based on a combination of ethnographic research and repertory grid interviews.

The process of TQM introduction and implementation is examined through the application of translation as a model incorporating cultural and socio‐economical dimensions in addition to individual and organizational levels that shaped the development of TQM in Poland. It then draws on the idea of fantasy as theorized in Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to incorporate the unconscious element of translation process which is missing from Latour's theorization and which forms an important aspect of adoption of new technology and the emergence of a new post‐transition generation of managers in Poland. The paper argues that a complex combination of contextual factors, amongst them the notion of fantasy shaped the process of translation of TQM to Poland, the identity formation of Polish managers and to the emergence of a new post‐transition generation of managers in Poland.

This paper contributes to the literature on the post‐command transition by illustrating this process through the fantasy of total quality management explored in a specific socio‐cultural and geographical context and by combining the idea of Latour's translation with Lacanian fantasy.

Provides a number of basic indicators in support of the assertion that, while the general‐management literature on post‐command developments in central and eastern Europe is well established, the corresponding literature in HRM/HRD is probably less well advanced. Highlights the issues identified by each of the contributors, two organising themes being involved. The first asserts the value of mutual knowledge transfer, through which the western academic and practitioner might benefit as much as his/her central European counterpart; the second considers the extent to which personnel managers can make a strategic, as distinct from administrative‐operational, contribution to the organisation in the post‐command economy.

Earlier work on career choice has identified that career choice involves gendered processes which lead to differentiated career outcomes for women and men. However, this literature remained anaemic in offering career counselling strategies for addressing the negative impacts of these processes. The paper aims to explore the creativity cycle and other tools derived from personal construct psychology (PCP) and other feminist literature as potential means for dissolving gendered perceptions of various professions and organisational practices.

This is a conceptual paper.

The paper argues that PCP can provide a theoretical and methodological framework for discussing how dichotomous and gender identified the perceptions of professions can be and how such perceptions might be challenged.

This theory and its techniques allow us an exploration of the flexibility of one's constructions system, which determines a person's ability to construe alternative views and to develop new ways of understanding oneself and others.

The PCP's potential as a technique to combat gendered perceptions of a career is examined.

The positions of four Central European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) on Hofstede's dimensions of national cultures are estimated on the basis of matched samples of students. Findings from The Netherlands are used to calibrate the scores found for the four Central European countries. The findings show that there are important differences between the value orientations in Western Europe (represented by The Netherlands) and Central Europe. Furthermore, there are substantial differences among the four Central European countries. Slovakia has an extreme position among these countries on four of the five dimensions. The differences found may have implications for the political and economic processes of integration within Europe.

The purpose of this article is to present a case study of an HRD team from the UK that delivers training to a large public service Hungarian organization with the aid of interpreters and translators.

The article takes the form of a case study.

The article acts to illustrate good and ineffective practices, and practical difficulties inherent in the acts of translation and interpretation within an HRD context.

The article helps set the base for best practice in similar situations, and will therefore be useful to practitioners undertaking work through interpreters and translators. Implications for HRD research are also presented.

The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.