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This paper sets out to draw comparisons and make linkages between strengths and competency methodologies. Whereas some authors have seen the strengths approach as a revolution in human resources (HR), the authors of this paper see it more as a natural evolution. The paper aims to overview the strengths approach as well as presenting a case study of strengths‐based graduate recruitment from the Big Four professional services firm, Ernst & Young.

The strengths‐based approach to recruitment is described in general, and the particular approach taken to graduate recruitment at Ernst & Young is outlined. Rather than assessing for generic competencies, strengths‐based recruitment seeks to identify the natural strengths of individuals that are aligned to the role for which they are applying. Assessors are trained to look for energy and authenticity, together with evidence of high performance of the strength.

The strengths‐based graduate recruitment project at Ernst & Young delivered a 15 percent increase in the number of candidates de‐selected at first interview, together with a 12 percent increase in the number of candidates appointed following assessment center, compared with the previous competency approach.

Strengths‐based graduate recruitment provides a robust and reliable methodology for attracting, selecting and appointing the best candidates for the role. It delivers a better candidate experience and builds a more positive and differentiated employer brand.

Ernst & Young is one of the first UK organizations to use strengths‐based graduate recruitment systematically in this way The strengths methodology not only supports its interviewing and assessment centers, but also is used throughout its campus events and through attraction and candidate engagement with an online strengths tool developed and managed by Capp.

This paper aims to outline work to support the employability agenda in the Library at the University of Sheffield, set in the context of debates about the nature of employability, employability skills and information literacy in the workplace.

The paper starts with a brief review of literature on employability and student skills in the UK higher education sector, the place of information literacy as an employability attribute and information literacy in the workplace. It goes on to outline work done in the Library at the University of Sheffield to support the employability agenda. This includes the development of a commercial awareness workshop in collaboration with other services and the incorporation of student and alumni voices in an employability guide.

The literature reviewed highlights the differences between information literacy in the workplace and academia. This could present challenges and opportunities in promoting information literacy as an employability attribute. The case study highlights the benefits of working in collaboration with students and services beyond the library in the employability arena.

The approaches taken in Sheffield may be of interest to other institutions looking to develop support for the employability agenda.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

This paper is about marketing accounting. It is about reading marketing writing and writing marketing reading and what calls them into being. It is about our “ab‐outing” practices; those signifying practices by means of which we week to capture a piece of the world and show it off, wrapped in a suitable tale of discovery, in a cabinet in the museum of marketing knowledge. You may wonder why should we bother, since without those representation practices and textual conventions how could we be sure that the objects on display were real, not fakes; that our representations were true images of objects in the real world, not mere simulations of simulations? Do you find comfort in the view that marketing discourse organizes in such a way as to sustain the convention that objects in the marketing world “out there” are antecedent to our images of them? And does it discomfort you to recognize the ideas of Garfinkel (1967) being used to suggest that marketing accounts are constituent features of the settings we make observable? Whatever your answers, how textual organization persuades and makes real is a point worth considering. I think this is a timely project, as we warm to qualitative methods, especially ethnography, on the (mis)understanding that they can reveal truer, deeper, thicker insights into the real world. For it is not possible to avoid the problem of representation in this way, as Geertz (1973) reminds us in his invitation to reflexive ethnographic inquiry.

The most powerful and effective forces of hierarchizing are those that naturalize difference so that it is beyond dispute and something to be tacitly accepted. In the Classic Maya world, this “social speciation” was materialized and naturalized through a complex web of ritual practice, deity emulation, enhancement of body aesthetics, and the fabrication and possession of hypertrophic goods. The architecture of Classic Maya royal courts broke with an older Maya residential pattern of accretional construction filled with ancestral burials in order to materialize more effectively social difference, to provide space for exclusive ritual performance, and to showcase the highly valued and gendered labor of textile production. Such instruments of authority are “weapons of exclusion” that can be wielded to fend off assaults on hierarchy. From this perspective, informed by the ritual economy approach, the profound transformations of the 9th century in the Maya lowlands are considered an assault that was not defendable.