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The purpose of the article is to investigate the issue of covert surveillance of employees in the workplace.

Opinion-based piece that draws on the UK legal environment to assess the legalities of filming and recording staff in the workplace.

The paper sets out the circumstances in which surveillance can be used legally in the UK.

This is the author’s own opinion based on his experience as both an employment lawyer and judge at employment tribunals. It offers original content and was written specifically for Strategic HR Review.

The aim of this paper is to describe the rapid development and effectiveness of online education in an urban college, emphasizing the use of distance education by local students, their academic performance and perspectives for future growth.

The paper provides a description of the phases of distance education development. It analyzes of survey data on student response to online learning and analysis of grades indicating academic performance online in relation to overall undergraduate performance.

The paper finds that early unplanned development has brought increased administrative support: plans are being made for programs, major concentrations, and advanced degrees on the undergraduate and graduate level. Student academic success reflects the special demands of online education and indicates the need for special screening processes and support services.

The academic success of students reflects the special demands of distance learning and qualifies the popularity of distance education as seen in rapid increases in online enrollment.

The promise of distance education for a local student population (to speed progress to degree completion by increasing the number of courses per semester) should be tested in terms of student academic success.

This account of how distance learning can develop in an urban, commuter college and the possibilities for improving service to existing students while increasing enrollment, suggests strategies for effective integration of online courses into the existing undergraduate and graduate curriculum.

The objective of this paper is to document and analyze the organizational activities of faculty members using a personal information management (PIM) framework developed by Jacques (2016).

Interviews were carried out with seven faculty members, focusing on their personal information organization practices as they relate to their academic activities. These interviews took the form of a guided tour of informants' digital workspaces.

Analyses focused on PIM activities make it possible to identify the different strategies adopted by faculty members to organize their academic personal information. This qualitative approach highlights four activities involved in the organization of personal information: inclusion, exclusion, apprehension and implementation. It also reveals differences in the ability of faculty members to analyze their own practices. Finally, the relationship to time and memory of PIM practices is examined through the lens of the concepts of virtualization and actualization.

This research provides a more nuanced understanding of PIM practices, specifically of organizational activities, by considering the meaning of these practices for individuals as part of their daily lives. It aims to foster literacy by facilitating the interactions of individuals with their personal information through educational activities.

Although in recent years elder abuse has attracted considerable social and professional attention, it is still in the opinion of many a taboo subject. In this paper the author examines why this is the case and considers what has been learnt. In doing so he considers causation and predisposing factors and the modes of intervention available

This study examines users' information selection strategy on knowledge-sharing platforms from the individual level, peer level and societal level. Though previous literature has explained these three levels separately, few have simultaneously examined their impacts and identified the dominant one according to their effect strengths. The study aims to fill this research gap of the competitions among different levels of information selection mechanisms. Besides, this study also proposes a three-step decision-tree approach to depict the consumption process, including the decision of first-time exposure, the decision of continuous consumption and the decision of feedback behavior participation.

This study analyzed a clickstream dataset of a Chinese information technology blogging site, CSDN.net. Employing a sequential logit model, it examined the impacts of self-level interest similarity, peer-level interest similarity and global popularity simultaneously on each turning point in the consumption process.

The authors’ findings indicate that self-level interest similarity is the most dominant factor influencing users to browse a knowledge-sharing blog, followed by peer-level interest similarity and then global popularity. All three mechanisms have consistent influences on decision-making in continuous information consumption. Surprisingly, the authors find self-level interest similarity negatively influences users to give feedback on knowledge-sharing blogs.

This paper fulfills the research gap of the dominance among three-levels of selection mechanisms. This study's findings not only could contribute to information consumption studies by providing theoretical insights on audience behavior patterns, but also help the industry advance its recommendation algorithm design and improve users' experience satisfaction.

Peer review – The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2020-0475

This study aims to explore homeless-support workers’ perceptions of homeless welfare recipients and their experiences of navigating new conditions placed upon them by UK welfare reform. It examines support workers’ views of the most punitive feature of the welfare system, sanctions, on those recipients.In 2012, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition Government introduced the largest and most radical overhaul of the UK benefit system, significantly increasing the level of conditionality and sanctions for non-compliance, part of a shift in welfare, suggesting that rights must be balanced by responsibility and the “culture of worklessness” and “benefit dependency” should be addressed.

Welfare reforms in the UK and the increased use of sanctions as part of welfare conditionality are reviewed. Data are collected from eight semi-structured interviews taking place in five housing support groups in the South East and South West of England in 2019–2020. The interviews followed an approach from interpretive phenomenological analysis.

Findings from this study indicate that the government’s reforms serve as a disciplinary measure for the poor, reinforcing inequality and social marginalization. To mitigate the effects would require a comprehensive review of universal credit prior to its full rollout to claimants. Data are analyzed thematically.

Welfare conditionality and welfare reform is well-researched in the UK. There is also a significant volume of research concerning homelessness. This paper, however, fills a gap in research concerning the experiences of those working in housing support agencies working with homeless people in the UK.

Although the argument will review a good deal of contemporary and historical research data, it is not to be thought of as an empirical undertaking. It is mainly an exercise in secondary interpretation or meta‐analysis, in which findings and propositions produced by a variety of writers for a variety of audiences is reworked and re‐presented. The paper starts from the problems of contemporary manufacturing in Britain. As one authority has recently suggested: “The relatively weak performance of British firms in international markets for technologically sophisticated products in…electrical machinery and engineering products is an acknowledged fact” (Balasubramanyam, 1994. See also Coates, 1994; Ackroyd and Whittaker, 1990). In this paper it is taken as self‐evident that the successful manufacturing firm must deploy in the market high quality and differentiated products at competitive prices. The main part of the answer of how to do this under current market conditions is equally plain: it involves innovating new products, adapting product lines rapidly and, when required, increasing (and, if necessary) decreasing the scale of productive operations. The word which best sums up these requirements for successful manufacturing in current market conditions, is flexibility. Whilst we would agree that the Atkinson model of the flexible firm is based on inadequate research and inadequate analysis, against the view of some other commenta‐tors (see, in particular, Pollert, 1991), it seems to us that the question of flexibility is worth considering in more depth (see also Procter, et al, 1994). The question with which this paper is concerned is: to what extent can the British achieve flexible manufacturing?

In the context of a highly regulated teacher education system, this chapter offers an alternative vision for a ‘better normal’ for teacher education in England. It foregrounds the need for teacher educators and teacher preparation curricula to promote ‘a way of being’ that enables teachers and teacher educators to have agency, develop as ‘thinking’ professionals and be resilient in an ever-changing policy context.