Moving From Multiculturalism to Critical Race Theory Within a School of Social Work

The continued presence of racism and white supremacy has risen to a crisis level as today’s global pandemic, police abuse targeting Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) communities, and mass urban uprisings rock the nation. This article presents a case study of a West Coast school of social work that has carried out a five-year systematic campaign to move all levels of the program beyond a multicultural orientation towards critical race theory. This study reveals the results of a self-organized cross-racial committee within a school of social work, motivated by an ambitious goal to implement a racial justice orientation throughout the school’s personnel, practices, policies, and curricula. The committee has been further characterized by its commitment to engage across the power-laden divisions of field faculty, tenure track faculty, and administrative staff. The article offers documented stages of development, narratives from across differences of identity and professional role, and thick descriptions of strategies that led to the adoption and infusion of an intersectional critical race analysis throughout the school’s curricula. The organic development of the campaign and the leveraging of opportunities throughout the campus and across campuses offer important lessons for other schools of social work undergoing transformational change.

Developing faithful stewardship for environment through green HRM

Purpose This paper aims to assess the nexus between green human resource management (GHRM) practices, green culture, environmental responsibility and environmental performance (EP). Design/methodology/approach Using a supervisor-subordinated nested design and multi-time data collection approach through convenience sampling, the authors obtained 330 responses from 15 hotels operating in the metropolitan cities of Pakistan. Findings The study results indicate the prominence of GHRM practices toward enhancing hotels’ EP. The authors also found green culture and environmental responsibility as potential mediators in the direct association between GHRM and EP. In addition, the findings suggest that the GHRM and environmental association can be deeper when individuals exhibit green values and showcase green responsibility about their environment. Taken together, the findings of the present study found support for all direct and indirect hypothesized relationships hence, forwarding notable implications for theory and practice. Research limitations/implications This paper forwards both theoretical and practical implications. Drawing upon ability-motivation-opportunity (AMO) theory, this paper asserts that GHRM practices shall be used to improve EP through green values and environmental responsibility. The authors specifically suggest that pro-environment personnel practices can nourish green culture and a pro-environment sense of responsibility that facilitates in robust pro-environment results. Originality/value The study advances and addresses gaps found in prior studies to help support organizational scholars, practitioners and pro-environment enthusiasts to understand the interplay of GHRM, culture, responsibility and EP.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the book’s contribution to understanding the role of individual legislators’ attributes in the collective goal pursuits of political parties. It assesses the performance of parties on the premises derived from our theory by calculating for each party a “batting average” describing the degree to which premises of the expertise model, electoral–constituency model, and issue ownership hold for each party. It graphically depicts the parties in the book’s two-dimensional space regarding how a country’s electoral system affects a party’s dependence on the geographic location of votes and the personal votes of individual legislators. In this manner, it reveals considerable support for the theory, which states that the less parties depend on these electoral factors to maximize seats, the more they tend to use the expertise model. The more dependence in either dimension, the more the electoral–constituency model tends to explain a party’s personnel strategy. The chapter expands on the role of electoral system variation—including electoral reform in Japan and New Zealand—on party personnel practices. It discusses how our results provide new evidence for the proposition that mixed-member proportional (MMP) systems may offer “the best of both worlds” in representation, and offers a discussion of further extensions of the theory and applications of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm to competing political parties.

Japan

This chapter focuses on the case of Japan, and its electoral reform, analyzing both the current mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system and its former single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system. The chapter tests for impacts of electoral system change in the Liberal Democratic Party’s assignment of members to committees in the House of Representative of the Diet. It finds that the some aspects of the expertise model apply more strongly under MMM than under SNTV, but that the party follows the logic of the electoral–constituency model more than the expertise model, even under MMM. Both findings conform to theoretical expectations. The chapter also analyzes the main alternative parties in each electoral system era: the Japan Socialist Party (under SNTV) and the Democratic Party of Japan (under MMM). For these two left-leaning parties, we find considerable evidence that a party’s issue ownership matters to party personnel practices.

Developments in the HRM–Performance Research stream: The mediation studies

Testing Human Resource Management (HRM)’s effect on organisational performance has been a core part of HRM research over the past 25 years. Whereas pioneering studies in the field neglected the mechanisms explaining this relationship, treating it as a ‘black box’, in the last decade the focus has been on examining the mediators of this relationship. Most recently, a series of reviews has been more critical of the field, particularly highlighting its diversity and underplaying of employee involvement, a concern central to its inception. This paper assesses these mediation studies in the light of these concerns, which provide criteria by which I summarise them and assess the extent to which they have advanced the field. The analysis demonstrates that the main problems of the black-box studies remain: the misalignment of the use of additive indexes and the theory of synergistic relationships, confusion over analysis methods, inadequate justification of the selection of practices in the empirical investigations, and under-representation of employee involvement. The researchers continue to present the field as a unified one. However, since the majority of studies are centred on high-performance work systems, there is a clear schism across them between these studies and those centred on high-involvement management. The paper reinforces the importance of this distinction, on the basis that a high-performance work system is a technology, a set of sophisticated personnel practices, whereas high-involvement management is a managerial philosophy or orientation towards fostering employee involvement. The paper concludes by suggesting ways of overcoming the recurring problems in HRM–performance research, and how these vary between the two perspectives.

Familienunternehmen und Personalmaßnahmen in Krisenphasen

This work examines family and non-family businesses and their use of personnel practices in times of crisis. The detailed questions that it addresses are, firstly, whether these types of businesses, in connection with crisis indicators, exert an influence on the use of personnel practices. Secondly, the study clarifies whether there are differences between family and non-family businesses and to what extent this is influenced by varying crisis indicators. The author previously worked as a research assistant, during which time, in addition to the topics covered in this work, he was primarily concerned with quantitative research methods. Since completing his dissertation, he has been working in the field of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

Churn: Mobilization–demobilization and the fungibility of American military life

This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across three registers. First, I contrast it with dominant scholarly framings of ‘transition’, ‘reintegration’, and ‘militarization’, terms that analytically compartmentalize war in space and time. Second, I show how mobilization–demobilization drives the uptake and release of military labor and accounts for continuities between war violence and ‘war-like’ domestic political relations in 20th- and 21st-century US military recruiting, welfare, and personnel practices. Finally, I describe the trajectory of one veteran caught up in some elements of mobilization–demobilization, including injury, post-traumatic stress, substance use, and law-breaking, which are structured by the military’s management of his labor. These dynamics demonstrate crucial empirical links between the domestic and global faces of US war-making, and between war and nominally non-war domains.