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The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the concept of psychological contracts underpinned by relational/transactional exchanges provides an adequate description of knowledge workers' contracts.

The research approach uses interviews with ten scientists from within a pre‐eminent Australian scientific research and development organization, the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

The research strong evidence of an ideological currency within the psychological contract for this set of knowledge workers.

The research raises questions over the role of normative occupation‐specific beliefs about work, and the sharing of common currency elements by individuals in the same organization within the same occupation. The analysis lends support to calls in the literature for a reconsideration of the transactional/relational interpretative framework that underpins the psychological contract.

This exploratory study lends support to calls in the psychological contract for the reconsideration of the cognitive‐perceptual definition of the concept and its transactional/relational interpretative framework.

The use of technology to enable or facilitate the delivery of services has the potential to benefit customers and service providers alike. Correspondingly, however, the purposes to which technology is put, and the manner in which it is used, also has the potential to disenfranchise customers. Therefore the operational desirability and gains of any employment of technology to facilitate service provision should be balanced against the perceptions and behavioural response of customers. Our research aims to shed light on the reasons why customers adopt or reject technologically facilitated means of service delivery, and to develop a means by which likely adoption or rejection may be predicted. The research we have undertaken to date suggests that adoption or rejection of technologically facilitated services is moderated by the personal capacity and willingness of individuals.

States that the rapid expansion of the information technology (IT) industry has brought about skill shortages in many advanced western economies. Examines human resource (HR) policies and organisational structures for developing and retaining IT staff through two case studies of organisations in the IT and telecommunications sector in Australia. Concludes that developing HR policies in order to recruit and retain staff, and linking these to appropriate organisational structure, is becoming of increased importance in order to encourage employees to remain with a company.

Workplace learning and HRD are considered legitimate topics for study and investigation alongside organisational strategies and practices. Considers key themes in the workplace earning literature in addition to its relationship with HRD. Identifies a paradigm shift from formalised, intermittent and discontinuous learning to increasingly informal, experiential, asynchronous and real‐time situated learning. Highlights three contemporary themes in both the workplace learning and HRD literatures, namely: knowledge, expertise, competence and capability; organisational learning; and employability and career issues.

That someone can make you feel good is a quality in itself. There has been much talk within British government circles, for example, about “the feel‐good factor”, which is constantly reminding us that it is just around the corner! Whether or not we can believe in this is another matter, but it certainly displays an awareness that making other people feel good can have positive benefits for you also. How this can be achieved will differ depending on your particular line of business. Having a good quality product does not in itself guarantee success as service quality must also be taken into account. This is where the feel‐good factor comes into play. It is all very well, for example, going to a restaurant to have a top‐class meal (in that the food was good), only to have it thrown at you. Quality, therefore, must not be seen as a separate entity, but more as a package deal.

Using a unique data set from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), we estimate the gender starting-salary gap for college graduates from 2000 to 2010. Simulation techniques are used to estimate how the salary gap would change if women had selected the same majors or job types as men. We find that about 90% of the starting-salary gap is explainable by gender differences in majors and types of job offers – a higher percentage than found in most other studies. Duncan indexes of dissimilarity also indicate that the gender distributions of job offers by college major and type of first jobs have not become more similar over the past 10 years. Although differences in college major and types of first jobs explain most of the gender gap in starting salaries of college graduates, small but unexplained gender pay differences reveal themselves in the NACE statistics.

The year 1988 marks a special anniversary for Russia. Exactly 1,000 years ago Christianity was officially introduced into Russia from Byzantium. This was accomplished when, in 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev ordered a mass baptism of the Russian people

In this project, we propose and test a new device – wearable sociometric badges containing small microphones – as a low-cost and relatively unobtrusive tool for measuring stress response to group processes. Specifically, we investigate whether voice pitch, measured using the microphone of the sociometric badge, is associated with physiological stress response to group processes.

We collect data in a laboratory setting using participants engaged in two types of small-group interactions: a social interaction and a problem-solving task. We examine the association between voice pitch (measured by fundamental frequency of the participant’s speech) and physiological stress response (measured using salivary cortisol) in these two types of small-group interactions.

We find that in the social task, participants who exhibit a stress response have a statistically significant greater deviation in voice pitch (from their overall average voice pitch) than those who do not exhibit a stress response. In the problem-solving task, participants who exhibit a stress response also have a greater deviation in voice pitch than those who do not exhibit a stress response, however, in this case, the results are only marginally significant. In both tasks, among participants who exhibited a stress response, we find a statistically significant correlation between physiological stress response and deviation in voice pitch.

We conclude that wearable microphones have the potential to serve as cheap and unobtrusive tools for measuring stress response to group processes.