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Corporate communications models conflict with the management research literature in assuming that managers hold unitary beliefs about organizational interests. In reality, while displaying some adherence to formal goals, managers have a tendency to pursue highly personalised agendas. What is more, endemic tensions in middle manager roles have recently increased in the wake of declining career opportunities and job security. Using a longitudinal case study of job change, shows how middle managers' notions of their self‐interest can conflict with fulfilling the employee psychological contract. In the face of greater penalties for poor performance, middle managers were prepared to neglect and even violate their subordinates' psychological contracts in order to appear to be meeting their commitments to top management. Concludes that the prevailing unitarist assumptions held about managers weaken the corporate communications literature and should be abandoned. Suggests that corporate communications models would be enhanced by revisions which take account of the political nature of management motives and actions.

The recruitment of young, “green” workers has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the greenfield site. Extends understanding of how person‐centred recruitment, with its emphasis on employee acceptability, disadvantages the older greenfield applicant. Whether it be a new high commitment or customer service site, worker age is shown to combine with the conventional recruitment criteria of skill, class and gender to constitute an excluded labour segment. In its superior capacity to shape workforce composition, greenfield person‐centred recruitment is shown to be important to understanding the ways in which managerial control is pursued and exercised more widely than within the labour process. Leopold and Hallier’s framework of greenfield types is also modified to encompass new customer service sites where acceptability recruitment is critical to greenfield employers’ labour relations strategies. Concludes that person‐centred recruitment should be studied as a critical feature of greenfield workplace politics and practices.

Explores recent expressions of support by employers for the importance of training in creating business success. Argues that this change in posture cannot be explained in terms of a growing recognition of the weaknesses of the labour force in intermediate‐level skills, because the new focus is on personal development, self‐management and “correct” attitudes rather than technical skills. Shows that while the changes in the valuation of training are consistent with Anglo‐Saxon notions of business management, they are more reflective of attempts to reshape the employer‐employee relationship. Observes that competitive pressures on organizations over the last 20 years have undermined traditional expectations of career opportunity and job security. This context has created the conditions under which this emphasis on normative training helps in the development of a new kind of psychological contract based on a rhetoric of partnership. Concludes that employers’ discovery of training is more about finding ways to secure employee commitment in uncertain times than about transforming skill levels.

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees’ contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees’ contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense‐making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management’s entire body of behaviour during the reorganization.

While HRM has stimulated studies assessing the extent of UK training, there has been little sustained research into trainer roles and influence. Using semi‐structured interviews with trainers in public and private sector organizations, considers the assumptions and tactics that trainers use to enhance their influence. Shows that, at a rudimentary level of service, attendant approaches to build credibility with line management locks training into a subservient position. Likewise, while shared threats can close some of the status gap between training and line management, alliance tactics are insufficient to improve the general status of trainers. High status training is not achieved by a progressive passage through a common sequence of mobility stages. It develops from a supportive training culture where trainers develop new ways to assess their organizational contribution on conventional performance criteria and from charismatic trainers innovating training knowledge. Continually reinventing their contribution, however, means that high status remains conditional.

Goffman’s concept of cooling out the mark (Goffman, E., “On cooling the mark out: some aspects of adaptation and failure”, Psychiatry: Journal of the Study of Interpersonal Relations, Vol. 15 No. 4, 1952, pp. 451‐63) is proposed as helpful for understanding self‐regulating groups’ attempts to pacify transferring colleagues who are facing admission failures. A longitudinal study of an air traffic control company is used to examine what happens to the status and operation of a long‐standing group‐regulated cooling out process when the rejection of applicant colleagues suddenly increases following the onset of mass job moves. Groups saw the tradition of using cooling out to obscure trainee complaints about admission decisions as less important than publicising failure by pressing management to address their new staffing problems. The pressures surrounding the decline of cooling out were also found to weaken the common basis of these groups’ established occupational identity. Specialized occupational and group constructions emerged that linked identity and task on the basis of unit location, specialist operational skills, and even desirable age profiles. The conclusion drawn is that while the very act of turning away from the cooling out tradition may undermine the process of self‐regulation, it may, paradoxically, represent a necessary step in the transformation of the group from one type of self‐regulated identity to another.

Greenfield sites have been seen as the most favourable setting for the adoption of human resource management (HRM). Presents a study of two greenfield employers’ attempts to introduce and maintain HRM philosophy and practices. Contrasts one management’s creation of HRM philosophy with another’s efforts to replicate its principles in a new unit. Describes and assesses these managements’ practices over the ten years since start up. Demonstrates that in the face of market pressures, greenfield managers are no more capable of maintaining soft‐version practices than their brownfield counterparts. Shows how these managers attempted to legitimize hard‐version practices by continuing to rely on language which reflected the humanistic principles of HRM. Concludes that without a radical reappraisal of management’s values, the long‐term aims of HRM will elude greenfield and brownfield sites alike.

Aims to illustrate how the use of a social identity approach can help to refine our understanding of how organizational professionals experience the introduction of managerialism and the incorporation of managing specialist roles.

Draws on theories of social identity and social categorization to examine the process by which clinical directors tackle and assign meaning to their managing roles. Interviews were conducted with a sample of current and previous clinical directors over a five year period. Variations in doctors’ responses were explained by a range of self enhancement strategies that emerged to deal with tensions between prepared management identities and actual role experiences.

Reveals the importance of multiple self‐enhancement strategies as a way for doctors to protect self definitions in failing identity situations where immediate exit from a new role is not feasible. Concludes that a greater use of social identity and social categorization theory may add much to general explanations of how varied stances towards management interventions emerge and develop among professional workers.

Points to how we might achieve a deeper understanding of the diverse ways that the organizational professionals experience the introduction of managerialism and the incorporation of managing the specialist roles.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.