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Looks at developments in assessment methods and discusses issues likely to affect attempts to use sophisticated tools such as assessment centres. Discusses employee development, ownership and responsibility for development. Suggests ways in which managers and human resource specialists can plan and develop systems to match future needs.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.⁷ Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.⁸ However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.⁹ Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

In recent decades, the concepts of sustainable development (SD) and sustainability have become a part of the everyday information flow. Is there real impact on students who have potential to become stakeholders and decision-makers? To be able to answer this question, the authors focussed on the following problems: whether the discourse of SD has any impact on students of economics concerning their knowledge of the environmental pillar of SD; and whether it has an impact on their individual value orientation towards the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP).

A group of 120 university students of economics programs from the Czech Republic was chosen for the quantitative research of this study. About a half of them have already encountered environmental education. The questionnaire included topics of environmental pillar of SD and revised NEP scale.

Using correlation analysis, the results show that the discourse of SD does have an impact on the students’ knowledge of the environmental pillar of sustainability and it also has an impact on their individual value orientation towards the NEP in general. The knowledge of the environmental pillar of SD is not significantly influenced by the study of a subject which included the topic of SD and its principles. Value orientation towards NEP is not significantly influenced by the study of a subject which, among other things, included the topic of SD and its principles.

Findings should be accepted with the knowledge of the limited sample from one country, on the other hand, information flow – usual discourse of SD is global.

There is positive NEP orientation among the students of economics – young women and men have pro-environmental attitudes. This can be considered as great unused social potential in higher education.

This study deals with knowledge of SD, environmental education and value orientation. It is broader concept taking into account the real social environment in terms of usual SD discourse and individual value orientation, not only direct influence of education on knowledge. The study rejected direct impact of the environmental education on knowledge and value orientation in terms of SD discourse among the students of economics. The findings bring several important questions regarding the effective forms of environmental education.