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To become a successful hairdresser you must primarily like people, and get on well with them. In addition, you must have a quick adaptable mind, a reasonable level of education, some artistic sense and creative flair — and be a refined, well‐groomed, neatly‐dressed sort of person keen on working with your hands, which ideally should have long fingers and easy manipulation. On top of all this, you must be prepared for very hard work, and a good deal of grinding training and learning. These are exacting requirements, it is true; but the profession can be a most rewarding and satisfying one, both financially and creatively, if you are prepared to stay the course and work your way upwards, either into exclusive top styling, or as a salon proprietor.

In this chapter, I consider arguments for aligning ELA with the demands of a soon-to-arrive knowledge economy. I ask how these arguments call ELA teachers to prepare students to work in an economy that values creativity, interpretation, and cutting-edge literacies – the stock-in-trade of ELA classes. Although these arguments have many strengths – they play down standardization and play up creativity – they rest on faulty assumptions about the number and distribution of high-skills jobs in the near future. Most people will not perform work that leverages creativity and cutting-edge knowledge. Given this reality, I ask how teachers of ELA teachers can take what’s good in the knowledge economy approach and adapt it so diverse students can acquire literacies that may help them succeed in and, perhaps, transform the economic field. This more viable approach to ELA calls teachers to teach not only economically valuable forms of reading and writing but also ways of critiquing and changing economies in line with democratic principles. I illustrate the latter approach to ELA instruction with a scenario activity for a unit on A Raisin in the Sun.

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.