The Future of Workforce Planning

This chapter examines the future of workforce planning in contemporary work organisations. Workforce planning is regarded as one of the essential human resource management (HRM) activities in recent times. The reason is that it gives indication on areas of needs and serves as the pillar for all HRM activities such as job analysis, recruitment and selection, training and development, remuneration/rewards, and promotion. A review of empirical literature reveals that workforce planning has a strong relationship with organisational performance as well as productivity. This chapter submits that HR metrics and workforce analytics can be used as a tool to improve organisational outcomes. To boost human activity, intelligence apps and analytics or cognitive analytics robotics could be adopted to improve HR's value to the business.

Antecedents and Consequences of Perceived Inclusion in Academia

A diversified workforce is a current trend in organizations today. The present paper illuminates the antecedents, consequences, and potential gender differences of a rather new concept salient to contemporary work life, namely, perceived inclusion. The hypothesized relationships were tested in a sample of academics and faculty staff at different higher education institutions in Norway (n = 12,170). Structural equation modeling analyses supported hypotheses that empowering leadership and social support from the leader (but not the fairness) are positively related to perceived inclusion. Further, perceived inclusion is positively related to organizational commitment, work engagement, and work–home facilitation and negatively related to work–home conflict. By utilizing multigroup analyses, we found support for the hypothesis that compared to women, men perceive their organization as more inclusive. However, in contrast to what was hypothesized, the proposed relationships in the model were stronger for men than women, suggesting that not only do men perceive their work environment as more inclusive, but their perception of inclusion is also more strongly related to beneficial outcomes for the organization. These results provide insight into the antecedents of and strategies for fostering an inclusive work environment, as a response to leveraging and integrating diversity in everyday work life.

Work Design in the Contemporary Era

Work design refers to the roles, responsibilities, and work tasks that comprise an individual’s job and how they are structured and organized. Good work design is created by jobs high in characteristics such as autonomy, social support, and feedback, and moderate in job demands such as workload, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Established research shows good work design is associated with work outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work safety, and job performance. Poor work design is characterized by roles that are low in job resources and/or overly high in job demands, and has been linked to poor health and well-being, absenteeism, and poor performance. Work design in the 20th century was characterized by traditional theories focusing on work motivation, well-being, and performance. Motivational and stress theories of work design were later integrated, and work characteristics were expanded to include a whole variety of task, knowledge, social, and work-context characteristics as well as demands, better reflecting contemporary jobs. In the early 21st century, relational theories flourished, focusing on the social and prosocial aspects of work. The role of work design on learning and cognition was also recognized, with benefits for creativity and performance. Work design is affected by many factors, including individual traits, organizational factors, national factors, and global factors. Managers may impact employees’ work design “top-down” by changing policies and procedures, while individuals may change their own work design “bottom-up” through “job crafting.” In the contemporary era, technology and societal factors play an important role in how work is changing. Information and communication technology has enabled remote working and collaboration across time and space, with positive implications for efficiency and flexibility, but potentially also increasing close monitoring and isolation. Automation has led to daily interaction with technologies like robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, which can influence autonomy, job complexity, social interaction, and job demands in different ways, ultimately impacting how motivating jobs are. Given the rapidly changing nature of work, it is critical that managers and organizations adopt a human-centered approach to designing work, with managers sensitive to the positive and negative implications of contemporary work on employees’ work design, well-being, and performance. Further research is needed to understand the multitude of multilevel factors influencing work design, how work can be redesigned to optimize technology and worker motivation, and the shorter- and longer-term processes linking work design to under-researched outcomes like identity, cognition, and learning. Overall, the aim is to create high-quality contemporary work in which all individuals can thrive.

Integration between the Blue Ocean Strategy and the Value Chain and its Role in Achieving Competitive Advantage: An Applied Research in the International Development Bank

The research aims to demonstrate the role of integration between the blue ocean strategy and the value chain in achieving competitive advantage through their application in the International Development Bank, as economic units, including banks, face intense competition at the local and international levels within the contemporary work environment, therefore, they had to prepare and implement new strategies that enable them to withstand the challenges imposed by competition in order to maintain and achieve its goals, as technological developments and market changes stemming from changes in the tastes and desires of customers have led to the development of these strategies, including the blue ocean strategy, which derives its name from the concept of blue oceans, which are calm and clear because they are far from the atmosphere of competition. This strategy is implemented through its four dimensions (reduction, exclusion, increase, innovation). Nevertheless, to apply these dimensions, the value chain contributes to the analysis of activities into value-adding and non-value-adding activities, thus applying the dimensions of strategy at the level of each activity in order to achieve value for the economic unit and the customer. Furthermore, the research reached a set of conclusions, the most important of which is the integration between the blue ocean strategy and the value chain, a framework that contributes to reducing and excluding costs for activities that do not add value, in addition to creating advanced banking services for customers that achieve a competitive advantage for the bank.

Contemporary Conflicts in Perspectives on Work Hours across Hierarchical Levels in Public Accounting

Socializing personnel into accepting work hour norms has been fundamental to how accounting firms function, but is now challenged by contemporary work perspectives. Using 40 semi-structured interviews of personnel across hierarchical levels at a national firm and an international firm, we show how strangeness and contradiction expressed in work hour perspectives across different levels within both firms are reconstructed as compatible and complementary. Highlighting various firm adaptations, including alternative work arrangements, offshoring, and technological tools, our interviews suggest a major shift in firms’ approach toward work hours. This shift is fueled by work perspectives embraced by younger generations desiring work life balance and purposeful work, and enabled by technology supporting remote work and increasing work efficiencies. The question remains whether firms are evolving to genuinely embody work perspectives of younger generations or restructuring to rely on a smaller workforce willing to accept traditional work hour norms, or some combination thereof.

Wellbeing and Engagement in Hybrid Work Environments

This paper explores how working from home has impacted leaders and the workforce in corporate environments during the pandemic, how these experiences might influence the workplace of the future, and what role coaching could play to foster skill development in the 21st century workplace. Before the pandemic, plenty of research had already been done on what factors influence well-being and engagement in the workplace. Models explaining the elements of well-being and engagement, as well as, tools to measure their existence or the lack of have been reviewed, tested, and validated. We know little at this point about what combinations of factors caused the decline in well-being and engagement during the pandemic, and what skills in leaders, or requirements for the workplace would be necessary to hone and implement, to improve the situation of well-being and engagement in future work environments. This paper explores how coaching could support leaders in the 21st century workplace. The business world is facing challenges while moving into post-pandemic workplace scenarios. The plurality of interests increases the complexity of the topic. The literature on well-being and engagement has been reviewed. Data that was collected during the pandemic by different organisations and conclusions drawn from these were compared with what the literature says and it was combined with experiences the author made in the field while coaching leaders and their teams in corporate environments during the pandemic. This paper concludes with a recommendation on how to enhance coaching skills among leaders and to build their knowledge and literacy in the field of coaching, to result in positive effects on workplace well-being and engagement in contemporary work environments.

Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty

Can gene editing and agroecology be complementary? Various formulations of this question now animate debates over the future of food systems, including in the UN Committee on World Food Security and at the UN Food Systems Summit. Previous analyses have discussed the risks of gene editing for agroecosystems, smallholders, and the concentration of wealth by and for agro-industry. This paper takes a different approach, unpacking the epistemic, socioeconomic, and ontological politics inherent in complementarity. I ask: How is complementarity understood? Who is asking and defining this question? What are the politics of entertaining the debate at all? I sketch the epistemic foundations of science and technology that organize different notions of evidence used in agroecology and genetic engineering. On this base, I offer 8 angles on the compatibility question, exploring the historical contradictions that complementarity discourses reveal and the contemporary work they do. I work through questions of (1) technological neutrality, (2) “root cause” problems, (3) working with nature, (4) encoding racism, and dilemmas of (5) ownership and (6) access. These questions, I argue, require a reckoning with (7) ontologies of coloniality-modernity, which help us get underneath—and beyond—the complementarity question. Finally, I offer (8) a framework for thinking about and working toward technology sovereignty.

On Common Speech

The multilingual turn in literary studies emphasizes the fairly recent emergence of a monolingual attachment to language. While this rightly calls into question the academic focus on monolingual competencies and offers a substantial area of inquiry for scholars working with the linguistically diverse regions of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this essay posits that the persistence of multilinguality among historical actors from these regions does not merit a shift away from monolingualism in contemporary scholarship. This argument derives from the claims analyzed in this essay, made by South Asian writers in colonial India, about the singularity of one's own language (swabhasha) and the writers' anxieties to protect this language from vulgar speech (gramyam). Building on contemporary work on the vernacular, the essay seeks to draw renewed attention to the role of speech in language debates in Telugu, a language whose particularity has not become a metonym either for the nation (like Hindi) or for a pan–South Indian identity (like Tamil). In tracing the movement from vulgar speech to proper language in this archive, this essay reframes vernacularity as an ethical compulsion premised on the common.

Disagreement and Religion: Problems and Prospects

Chapter 1 covers contemporary work on disagreement, detailing both the conceptual and normative issues in play in the debates in mainstream analytic epistemology, and how these relate to religious diversity and disagreement. Section 1 examines several sorts of disagreement, and considers several epistemological issues: in particular, what range of attitudes a body of evidence can support, how to understand higher-order evidence, and who counts as an epistemic “peer.” Section 2 considers how these questions surface when considering disagreements over religion, including debates over the nature of evidence and truth in religion, epistemic humility, concerns about irrelevant influences and about divine hiddenness, and arguments over exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Finally, section 3 summarizes the contributors’ essays in this volume.

China and the Internationalisation of the Sociology of Contemporary Work and Employment

The China e-Special Issue brings together 11 articles on the sociology of contemporary work and employment in China which have been published in WES in the past two decades, highlighting the increasing frequency of submissions, and also reflecting the diversity, complexity and plurality of work and employment in the region. The foci of debates include the changing fault lines of work and employment; the changing relationships between state, employers and workers; the impact of rural to urban migration and urbanisation on the labour process and employment configurations; the interrelations between production and social reproduction and its gendered dimensions; and the need to develop established methodologies further given the changing nature of the research subject.