The private equity business model and associated strategies for HRM: evidence and implications?

Are private equity firms significant actors in the UK market for corporate control? Do they represent a new organizational form befitting a new business model? What are the direct and indirect pressures on management that flow from the diffusion of this business model and its associated organizational form? In terms of human resource management does acquisition by private equity have a significant or negligible effect? This paper looks at the development and diffusion of private equity and the ‘take private’ private equity business model (PEBM) and the effects of these on the management of HR. In addition to this the paper evaluates the PEBM within comparative institutional approaches to international business and HRM.     

Land administration “best practice” providing the infrastructure for land policy implementation

Land administration systems, and particularly their core cadastral components, are an important infrastructure which facilitates the implementation of land use policies. While most land administration systems traditionally have a primary objective of supporting the operation of land markets, they are increasingly evolving into a broader land information infrastructure which supports economic development, environmental management and social stability in both developed and developing countries. While a great deal of attention is given to land use policies worldwide concerned with such areas as forest management, coastal zone management, environmental sustainability and managing the urban environment, less attention is given to the infrastructures which facilitate the implementation of the associated policies and programmes. Importantly, all these activities rely on some form of land administration infrastructure which permits the complex range of rights, restrictions and responsibilities in land to be identified, mapped and managed as a basis for policy formulation and implementation. As a result, there is an increasing interest in the concept of land administration infrastructures and their core cadastres, in the principles and policies concerned with establishing such infrastructures and in “best practices”. In addressing this need, this paper attempts to explain the evolving concept of land administration infrastructures, the concept of “best practice” and the concept of a land administration “tool box” of principles, policies, laws and technologies which are useful in reforming or re-engineering land administration systems in support of a broader land policy agenda.     

The construction of career aspirations amongst healthcare support workers: beyond the rational and the mundane?

This article engages with a literature that views the limited career aspirations of low‐paid, low‐status workers as a reasonable response to material and structural constraints. Based on four hospital trust cases studies, the article contests this view, revealing how healthcare support workers in NHS England have retained the cognitive capacity to override such constraints to develop a strong and authentic career goal to become a nurse. This goal is acknowledged by the healthcare support workers themselves as unlikely to be achieved and is therefore presented as a flight from rationality. Its emergence is explained by workplace interactions that allow such an ambition to become taken‐for‐granted. The article deepens understanding of career ambitions amongst low‐paid, low‐status workers, while adding weight to a literature suggesting that career aspirations can be driven by values and norms, not only by a means‐end rationality.     

Variety in the innovation process of UK research and development service firms

Research and development service firms (RDSFs) are a particular type of technology-based knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). RDSFs provide clients with R&D services on a contract basis, and operate as knowledge intermediaries linking research and market. They are innovative in their own right, as well as supporting innovation efforts by their clients; they rely on their own innovation efforts to be competitive and to develop new value propositions for their clients. The present paper explores the innovation process in RDSFs, drawing on semi-structured interviews with founders and senior managers of 32 companies in the United Kingdom. Our findings suggest that RDSFs vary considerably in terms of their primary innovation drivers (i.e. whether they are mainly driven by market demands or by technological opportunities) and the outcomes they pursue (i.e. whether their outputs are mainly services to clients or a mixture of services and products and/or intellectual property). Four major orientations of RDSFs were identified: (i) technology-based innovation exploiters; (ii) science-focused innovation explorers; (iii) client-driven innovation integrators; and (iv) open innovation translators. This variety among firms normally belonging to the same, small subsector of KIBS, suggests the need for caution in generalising about behaviour in terms of such statistical groupings.     

Market power and unemployment

This paper explores the under-consumptionist idea that market power can preclude the existence of a full employment equilibrium within the framework of the modern theory of economic growth. It is shown that the introduction of market power can indeed eliminate the full employment equilibrium. In an attempt to assess the importance of this possibility maximum values for the market power parameters consistent with a full employment equilibrium existing are computed. In some plausible cases these maxima are uncomfortably low suggesting that market power has significant potential for causing unemployment.     

Delineating a forum for business policy scholars

This note is a follow-up on one published in 1987. A sample of tenured business policy scholars, with significant track records in publishing, rated key management journals with respect to their appropriateness as outlets for scholarly research in the business policy field. The results of the survey are reported.     

Book reviews

New Technology and Industrial Relations R. Hyman & W. Streeck Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Strategic Planning: Development and Implementation. Bonita H. Melcher & Harold Kerzner Blue Ridge Summit, PA, TAB Books, 1988, 404 pp., £23.65.

Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R & D, 1902-1980 D.A. Hounshell & J.K. Smith New York, Cambridged University Press, 1988.

Sharpbenders: The Secrets of Unleashing Corporate Potential Pete H. Grinyer, David G. Mayes & Peter McKiernan Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, 287 pp., £25.00.

Small and Medium Size Enterprises and Regional Development Maria Giaoutzi, Peter Nijkamp & David J. Storey (Eds.) London, Routledge 1988, 314 pp.