Search Results

In the past few decades the number of women entering graduate and professional schools has been going up and up, while the number of women reaching the top rung of the corporate and academic worlds has remained relatively stagnant. Why are so many women falling off the fast track? This book traces the career paths of the first generation of ambitious women who started careers in academia, law, medicine, business, and the media in large numbers in the 1970s and '80s. Many women who had started families but continued working had ended up veering off the path to upper management at a point the author calls “the second glass ceiling.” Rather than sticking to their original career goals, they allowed themselves to slide into a second tier of management that offers fewer hours, less pay, lower prestige, and limited upward mobility. Men who did likewise—entered the career world with high aspirations and then started families while working—not only did not show the same trend, they reached even higher levels of professional success than men who had no families at all. Along with her daughter, an aspiring journalist, the author has written a guide for young women who are facing the tough decision of when—and if—to start a family. It is also a guide for older women seeking a second chance to break through to the next level, as the author herself did in academia.

After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, this book guides us through Milton's poetry and polemical prose. What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider both the big learned words and the very small ones; when we consider the frequency and uniqueness of words; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton through his life, or become keywords to a particular text; when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages? This book explains the shape of Milton's writing career and the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the pressures of political circumstances. The effect on his vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church government and its divorce laws was galvanic. He discovered that he enjoyed verbal conflict and he developed a new set of verbal resources. He never got over the experience of writing the divorce tracts. It was still on his mind when he revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana. When he was called upon to justify the Long Parliament's execution of Charles I, it forced him to come to terms with the political keywords of his generation. Milton's poetry and prose have been segregated for so long that we have not tended to track his favourite political words into the great poems, where they change their valence.

This book looks at how large organizations have managed and adapted to changing conditions of employment shaped by the recent economic and political environment. Additional data are presented based on evidence from other significant actors such as agency employment firms and trade unions. The book also engages with important North American debates on the changing nature of work, careers, and employment.

Twenty-first century capitalism has been marked by an increasing international economic independence, and considerable differences between dominant economic systems of coordination and control. In this context, national competition and coordination within industries has increased, but the governance of leading firms and the kinds of competences they develop remains quite diverse. This book suggests how we can understand this combination of diversity and integration by developing the comparative business systems framework in three major ways. First, by identifying the particular circumstances in which distinctive business systems and innovation systems become nationally established and reproduced, as well as how changing endogenous and exogenous pressures have affected the major kinds of business systems that developed in many OECD states during the post-war period. Second, by showing how variations in authority sharing with employees and business partners and in the provision of organizational careers lead institutional regimes to affect the nature of organizational capabilities that dominant firms develop and enable them to deal with different kinds of risks and opportunities in particular technologies and markets. Third, by identifying the circumstances in which multinational firms are likely to develop distinctive transnational organizational capabilities through such authority sharing and careers, and so become different kinds of companies from their more domestically focused competitors. In many if not most cases of cross-national managerial coordination, these conditions rarely exist, and so the extent to which multinational firms do indeed constitute distinct organizational forms and strategic actors is much less than is sometimes claimed.

This book focuses upon the clergy of the established Church in England and Wales as a professional group, and investigates their role in their parishes and society during the ‘long 18th century’ between 1680 and 1840. It concentrates on the ‘lower clergy’, that is parish clergy, and their role within the broader social context of later Stuart and Georgian society. It considers the nature of professions during the period, and examines the social backgrounds; recruitment and selection; education, at school and university or otherwise; career development; and finances of the clergy. It also investigates what they actually did in their parishes in terms of conducting worship, exercising pastoral care, and providing education in the Christian faith, and their relations with the people amongst whom they lived and worked. It takes account of changing expectations during the period, especially the pressure for, and steps towards, ‘reform’ from the 1780s onwards, and, where possible, offers comparisons with people in other professions, especially doctors, lawyers, and ministers of dissenting churches. It also considers the evidence of the accountability and acceptability of the clergy to their congregations, and the extent of anticlericalism, and the means by which they were supervised by bishops and their officers. The clergy emerge as the most carefully recruited and educated of the ‘learned professions’ with a strong supervisory role exercised by bishops, in relation to a generally responsive but not uncritical or subservient laity. The book effectively challenges the received view that the majority of the clergy were inappropriately educated, poverty-stricken, and inattentive to their canonical duties.

This book addresses some of the major contemporary issues in comparative business and employment relations. At its core are the findings of a four-year international exploration of the management of employment relations in American multinational companies in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and Spain. Data from detailed case studies are used to illuminate the tensions between the forces of globalization and the continuing distinctiveness of national business systems. It looks at what is distinctively American about US multinationals, asking how the US business system’s particular features influence their management of human resources across national borders. It shows that the transfer of ‘Americanness’ is not a technical, top-down, managerial process, but a highly political and ‘negotiated’ one in which groups and individuals at different levels within the company try to influence the terms of transfer. The book uses a wealth of empirical material to explore the ways in which US multinationals manage international employment relations in different host countries. Four areas of policy and practice are considered in detail: pay and performance; collective employee representation; the management of workforce ‘diversity’; and managerial careers. It shows how global HR policies are made; how they are diffused internationally; and how they are adopted, adapted, or resisted by overseas subsidiaries. It also explores some of the structures and processes that characterize US multinationals: the changing balance between centralization and subsidiary autonomy; the management of international learning; and the structure and role of the international human resource function.

Professional politicians have increasingly come under public attack in most democratic countries, yet they have received surprisingly little systematic attention in political science. This is the first comprehensive overview of professional politicians in democratic countries.\par This book demonstrates that there are both striking similarities between professional politicians in different countries and notable national peculiarities. The introduction develops a common conceptual framework, which is put into use in the following chapters. Using Gaetano Mosca's term and Max Weber's seminal insights, it reconstructs the concept of political class to demonstrate the degree of common ground between politicians of different parties and institutions. The twenty country chapters written by scholars from sixteen countries provide information on professional politicians in their respective countries, as well as discussing the merits of the theoretical approach employed. Each chapter looks at the historical process of professionalization, the institutional context of professional politics, the size of the political class in each country, typical career paths, the remuneration of politicians, and recent reform debates.

This work is a completely rewritten version of The Fasti of Roman Britain (1981), with biographical entries for all senior officers and higher officials who served in the island from AD 43 to 409. All new governors, legionary legates, senatorial tribunes, procurators, and fleet prefects discovered since 1981 are included, and the entries for those previously known are revised. Translations of all sources are also added in this edition. There are sections on local government; governor’s staff; the careers of senators and procurators in the principate; the subdivisions into Upper and Lower Britain, then into four, and finally five, provinces; and the late Roman civil and military system. Further, imperial visits or involvement in British affairs are discussed in detail. These include Claudius’ participation in the conquest and his victory celebrations; Hadrian’s visit in 122 and the building of his Wall; the building of the Antonine Wall; Severus’ expedition, 208-211; the usurpation of Carausius and Allectus; Constantius’ recovery of Britain and Pictish campaign; Constantine’s proclamation as emperor at York and possible later visits; Constans’ expedition in 343; Stilicho’s defence measures; and the end of Roman rule. This book offers a narrative history of Roman Britain, with full citation of sources. The analysis of the background and careers of hundreds of individuals sheds light on the way the Roman Empire worked during a period of over 360 years.