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Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Kate Feather is an HR professional at PeopleMetrics, Philadelphia. In her article, “Helping HR to measure up: arming the ‘soft’ function with hard metrics”, she establishes how HR, typically viewed as a discipline which does not operate within traditional business practices of measurement and corporate strategy, can and should be embraced as an asset in holistic business management.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the more strategic role HR departments can play in their organizations. By prioritizing the measurement strategy in organizations, HR leaders can demonstrate to leadership the impact employees have on the business and how an investment in internal processes and programs can boost engagement – and ultimately business results.

This paper outlines a four‐step process for effective employee engagement measurement: use behavioral and emotional outcomes; correlate employee engagement survey results to meaningful outcomes; focus improvement efforts and investments on the high impact/low performing areas; and re‐measure to assess success. A series of de‐identified examples from PeopleMetrics clients illustrate the importance of following each step in the process.

By measuring employee engagement, tying the results to other HR and business metrics and using the findings to target improvement efforts, organizations are demonstrating to leadership the impact employees have on the business and how an investment in internal processes and programs can boost engagement – and ultimately business results. As more organizations recognize the value of using rigorous metrics to evaluate and optimize their workforces, the HR function will benefit because it will be serving a more strategic function than it has traditionally been associated with in the past.

These findings are based on the fieldwork experience of PeopleMetrics.

The paper provides a very useful perspective for HR managers to consider, particularly within organizations with extensive measurement systems.

The purpose of this paper is to clearly define the concept of engagement and distinguish it from other descriptions of positive employee well-being. It then discusses how to measure this concept objectively and reliably.

The paper looks at the distinctive meaning of the term “engagement” and expresses concern that the term has been diluted with its popularity. It analyses the drivers of true engagement and then looks at how the evidence of the reality can be measured and the drivers themselves. It concludes with a brief summary of the link between engagement and performance.

Some key conclusions in the paper are that engagement should not be confused with measures of satisfaction; that a clear distinction should be made between the evidence and reality of engagement and the drivers that cause it; that both should be measured and much more frequently than the typical annual opinion survey; that off-the-shelf surveys should be validated against the specific employees we are surveying and added to if necessary; and that the link between true engagement and improved performance is solidly established.

This paper is based partly on engagement literature and partly on models and experience of the author. It critiques a number of current practices.

As Ratnam makes clear, a cultural–historical perspective on teacher/faculty excessive entitlement is indispensable if we are to use this concept to work with, rather than undermine, education practitioners. In this chapter, a networked relational model of activity is proposed as a tool for understanding excessive entitlement from a cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective, so that the transformative potential of both entitlement and the modeling of it may be harnessed. The networked relational model, which represents CHAT activity systems as a hand-draw or painted network of relationships between actors and artifacts, allows its creators, in their capacity as researchers or academics, to use it as an imaginative artifact in the Wartofskian sense. That is, by representing activity systems of academic performance as networks of interacting entities, the emergence of excessive entitlement can be traced to, and perhaps mitigated through the relationships that they represent. In this regard, the why, what, and how artifacts proposed by Engeström are taken up as useful means for enhancing the functioning of the networked relational model not just as a tool for analyses of entitlement but also a means for envisioning alternative countercultures into being.

Introduces a one‐year research project, based on a questionnaire survey of nearly 300 archives and record offices, and interviews with librarians, archivists and conservationists. Posits that the research will gather and analyse information on written preservation policies and strategies; reprography policies; environmental control; housekeeping routines; staff training; user education; security; disaster management; and statistics for preservation planning. Initial findings highlight concern regarding the increasing emphasis on user services and damage caused by photocopying; the problem of disintegrating collections printed or written on poor quality paper; the central role of microform as a surrogate medium; interest in the feasibility of establishing a central repository for microfilm; and interest in the surrogacy potential of digitization. Expects that the research will produce good practice guidelines for libraries, archives and record offices and will result in detailed recommendations as to what a national preservation policy might contain and the issues it should consider, thus pointing the way towards a national preservation policy and significantly strengthening the case for it.

During early childhood, Indians and non-Indians learn a definition of “Indianness” (Merskin, 1998, p. 159). Around 18 months of age, human beings begin to recognize themselves as distinct and separate from their mothers and others (Lacan, 1977). By age 6, most attributes of personality formation are already established (Biber, 1984). The content of the information that consciously and unconsciously reaches children is critical for the formation of a healthy, grounded sense of self and respect for others. Today, in the absence of personal interaction with an indigenous person, non-Indian perceptions inevitably come from other sources. These mental images, the “pictures in our heads” as Lippmann (1922/1961, p. 33) calls them, come from parents, teachers, textbooks, movies, television programs, cartoons, songs, commercials, art, and product logos. American Indian images, music, and names have, since the beginning of the 20th century, been incorporated into many American advertising campaigns and marketing efforts, demarcating and consuming Indian as exotic “Other” in the popular imagination (Merskin, 1998). Whereas a century ago sheet music covers and patent medicine bottles featured “coppery, feather-topped visage of the Indian” (Larson, 1937, p. 338), today's Land O’ Lake's butter boxes display a doe-eyed, buckskin-clad Indian “princess.” The fact that there never were Indian “princesses” (a European concept), and most Indians do not have the kind of European features and social “availability” that trade characters do, goes largely unquestioned. These stereotypes are pervasive, but not necessarily consistent, varying over time and place from the “artificially idealistic” (noble savage) to images of “mystical environmentalists or uneducated, alcoholic bingo-players confined to reservations” (Mihesuah, 1996, p. 9). Today, a trip down the grocery store aisle still reveals ice cream bars, beef jerky, corn meal, baking powder, malt liquor, butter, honey, sugar, sour cream, chewing tobacco packages, and a plethora of other products emblazoned with images of American Indians. To discern how labels on products and brand names reinforce long-held stereotypical beliefs, we must consider embedded ideological beliefs that perpetuate and reinforce this process.

Interdisciplinary approaches to health education are becoming increasingly common. Here, the authors describe an arts-based approach designed by academics and artists to both supplement the study of mental illness and support the individual mental health of undergraduate and postgraduate university students, by raising the visibility of mental illness in an innovative way.

Through workshops, university students were guided in a sensory and physical way to discuss psychological health and vulnerability. This was followed by the creation of physical representations of mental distress through art pieces.

Students were able to design their own art pieces and discuss mental health issues in an open and creative way. Students reported that the arts-based initiative was beneficial to their practice as future professionals and provided a holistic learning experience. At the same time, artists were able to generate powerful images which facilitated further discussions within the faculty.

This project provides an innovative model for workshops which could be employed to raise the visibility of common mental health disorders among university students while providing a safe space to discuss and support wellbeing. Additionally, variations could be implemented to enhance the teaching of affective disorders within a university curriculum.

This paper presents the results of collaboration between academics and artists, who together generated an innovative way to both support students' mental health and provide an alternative way to supplement experiential learning about common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

WITH the closing years of the nineteenth century the Public Library stood in such relation to its readers as the traditional mountain did to the prophet Mahomet. While any direct advertisement was in the nature of things impossible, the attitude of the library was too often that of a part of inanimate nature rather than of an intelligent mechanism which should have been in the full tide of advance. And, to maintain the metaphor, readers were suffered to obtain knowledge or amusement from its stock in much the same manner as they might have gathered blackberries from a hillside; the books were there to be taken,—if you took them judiciously, or injudiciously, or left them alone—what matter? But of late years improvement has appeared. In certain cases the progress has indeed been reluctant; some library committees and librarians, who had apparently quoted to their institutions Browning's line, “Grow old along with me,” were pushed indecently out into the open and forced to make some show (usually of the fuss and feathers order) of participation in the movement. The thrall of comparative statistics by which—like a bull's‐eye lantern, revealing the surroundings while the holder stands in darkness—one proved, not how bad he was, but how much worse his neighbours were, still held sway. It is now more abundantly realised that the public, which we have by turns feared, distrusted and ignored, is in reality and as a composite whole, of a childlike inquiring disposition, and needs, above all things, guidance—more guidance than it asks for, more perhaps than it appreciates. To every aid which the librarian offers, readers turn willingly, but it must be added that much of the reading which is done by the mass of the people is desultory, unsystematic and indiscriminating. It has no cumulative effect, nor does it lead in any definite direction. From whatever cause it arises, whether the increasing strenuousness of modern commercial conditions, or the attenuation of the national nerves, modern writers, of fiction especially, show a tendency to appeal almost exclusively to the emotions. Emotion precedes thought, and it is easy to fall into the evil habit of automatic reading, which clogs all avenues of thought and allows no appeal save through the emotions. Owing to this, the argument used against Public Libraries, that they foster a species of mental loafing, is difficult to refute. But now, “to redress the balance of the old,” to provide against this want of system, we have the National Home‐Reading Union. The objects of that body have been thus defined:—“To bring the Public Libraries into bearing.” The objection mentioned is attacked at its heart; the Union provides lists of books, encourages reading‐circles, meets and dispels incidental difficulties, and is both an educational and an examining body. The cost of member‐ship is small enough to be no deterrent to anyone, and as this is the day of cheap literature, many of the books which appear on its lists may be easily obtained. But as also there are many works of importance, which know not the cheap edition, and are thus beyond the purchasing powers of the “intelligent artisan” and his class, it follows that unless it finds a complement, the National Home‐Reading Union must remain only partial in grasp and effect. There can be no doubt that the Public Library is more fully equipped for fulfilling the absent requirements than any other institution. Not only does it interest and develop the minds of readers, but it is the only organisation which provides a wide range of books in a greater variety of subjects than could be obtained by any but the rich. Of late years many librarians, recognising the immense advantages accruing from a connection between the library and the school, have formulated plans for actively interesting the children in the library. The National Home‐Reading Union forms an admirable connecting link between these two agencies of popular education, lending aid from itself to both, and borrowing something from each to transmit to the other.