1 Overview
Does the recruitment and selection process fill you with dread? Discrimination and equal opportunities legislation can make this area feel like a minefield. If you are faced with appointing a new employee, then this unit will provide a straight-forward guide to the process: from writing job descriptions to finally assessing who to appoint.
Activity 8: Exploring cultural dimensions on Hofstede's website
We know that culture guides the way people behave in society as a whole. But culture also plays a key role in organisations, which have their own unique set of values, beliefs and ways of doing business. This unit explores the concepts of national and organisational culture and the factors that influence both.
Activity 7: Hofstede's way of thinking about national culture
We know that culture guides the way people behave in society as a whole. But culture also plays a key role in organisations, which have their own unique set of values, beliefs and ways of doing business. This unit explores the concepts of national and organisational culture and the factors that influence both.
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4.2 A process perspective on organisations The overall transformation process can be broken down into a series of micro-processes. Attention to processes within organisations can provide a powerful tool for understanding organisational performance. In the extract below, David Garvin discusses how attention to work processes can yield new insights for managers about the ways in which performance may be improved. Next steps After completing this unit you may wish to study another OpenLearn Study Unit or find out more about this topic. Here are some suggestions: 2.2 Postscript A headline-grabbing weekend of ‘midsummer madness’, when six murders occurred in (parts of) Glasgow over the weekend of 5–6 August 1995, reinforced the ongoing nature of contestation and debate about the issues discussed in the programme. As noted in The Scotsman (8 August 1995), the legacy of the imagery of No Mean City was quickly resurrected by the press – for example, ‘a darker side to that much-vaunted transformation of Glasgow from No Mean City to Cultu 2.1 How the programme progresses The programme takes the form of a visit to Glasgow. We talked to people and asked about their image(s) of Glasgow and whether these had changed – what was the ‘old’ image; what is the ‘new’; how has it changed; what will it be like in another ten years? The five main participants have different experiences of Glasgow and these are represented in the images which they hold and aspects of the city's character which they highlight. The themes and ideas behind the progra 1.3 Constructing a new image The image ‘Glasgow's miles better’ was deliberately constructed by the City Council, avowedly to make Glaswegians feel better about Glasgow but in fact largely on behalf of business. But it begged a question – ‘miles better for whom?’ Certainly, the city centre was better for shoppers and visitors and the new roads were literally ‘miles better’ for motorists, but the spiralling problems of the housing schemes provided stark counter-images. In other words, as with 1.2 The hard side of Glasgow Prior to its currently projected image of dynamism, Glasgow was regarded as the place which best illustrated all that was wrong with the modern industrial city: ‘Once called the “second city of the British Empire” because of its size and industrial might, Glasgow had sunk so low that even the locals disdained it’ (Bryson, 1989). 3 Making photographs that make demands: stories from the oil industry There are strong links between the audio files in Activity 2 and the series of photographs in Activity 1. The discussion on the audio and the content of Activity 1 show how debates on the activities of the oil industry have become part of the public domain. The audio explores stories about people who have worked in the oil industry, or whose lives have been affected by 2.3 Activity 1: Discussion Responding to the way in which the content and style of photographs are so often limited by the production and distribution processes of the mass media, Owen Logan uses digital technology to produce a new way of seeing the oil industry. As you can see, many of his pictures are made by digitally splicing separate photographs together. The effects of these montages are in part about the relationship between what is put together. For example, to me Logan's use of a photograph of an oil platform 4.1 National identities and UK politics Why do British people speak ‘English’ and not ‘British’? Why is it easier to travel from London to any British city than to travel from Bedford to Leamington Spa? Why are the National Gallery, the British Museum and Tate Modern all in London? Why does London house the Stock Exchange? This has to do with the pivotal role played by England in the constitution of the UK and by the designation of London as the capital of the UK. Within any given country, we are likely to b 3.2 Sub-state forms of nationalism The advancement of democracy in contemporary Western nation-states and the intensification of globalisation processes have encouraged the re-emergence of nationalist movements representing oppressed or silenced nations that demand the right to self-determination. In the case of ethnic groups formed by people of immigrant origin, democracy has provided them with the tools to pursue the right to develop and practice their indigenous culture and language alongside those of the host country. One 3.1 What makes a nation, a state or a nation-state? Why do England, Scotland and Wales take part in the Six Nations rugby championship alongside Italy, Ireland and France? Are they all ‘nations’? What do we mean by calling them ‘nations’? The nation has become one of the most contested concepts of our times. Scholars, politicians and political activists present different definitions of the nation, usually focusing on a variety of cultural, political, psychological, territorial, ethnic and sociological principles. The lack of 2.5 Summary of Section 1 England, Scotland and Wales are nations. Wales was conquered by the English in 1282 and its parliamentary union with England took place in 1536. The United Kingdom of Great Britain was formed by the Act of Union of 1707, although the term Great Britain had been in use since 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England (including Wales). Later unions created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 2.3 Wales In 1282, Edward I conquered Wales and the Statute of Rhuddlan (or Statute of Wales, 1284) established English rule. Rather than involve the assimilation of the Welsh by the English the conquest saw ‘a colonial system … established in those parts of Llywelyn's Principality which were by 1284 in the hands of the king’ (Davies, 1991, p. 166). In 1400, Owain Glyndwr led the most outstanding and successful rising in Wales against the new order and the tyranny of the English border 2.1 England England played a dominant role in the medieval history of Britain, and the history of the UK is undoubtedly the history of the political and cultural domination of the English nation over those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In the making of the UK, each component nation played a different role: the English and Scottish kingdoms, the incorporation of Wales into the English Crown, and the subjugation of Ireland. The making of the UK was complex and fraught with violent confrontations, particu 1 The politics of devolution This unit examines the politics of devolution and the relationships between the various nations that constitute the UK. It does so by examining the transformation of the UK from a centralised unitary state into a decentralised unitary state. (If you want a quick summary of the terms of devolution, you will find one in Section 5.5.) The unit shows how the devolution process grew out of a long history, and how it is continuing in the c Next steps After completing this unit you may wish to study another OpenLearn Study Unit or find out more about this topic. Here are some suggestions:
