Browse

What makes some people more likely to initiate positive change within their organizations? Why some employees are more proactive than others? Can this behavior be influenced by management? What supervisors, team managers and organizations can do to promote employees’ proactivity? Employee proactivity has largely been understood in terms of employees changing their environment or changing themselves. People who are proactive envision a better future and take action to achieve it. They should be confident, motivated, and energetic, as it is not always easy to bring about change. Being supported in relationships with surrounding others is the greatest aid to such courage. By introducing and developing the notion of attachment theory as a new theoretical lens through which to examine such behavior, this book unpacks a relational basis of proactivity and provides academics with a new way of thinking about employee behavior and creates a compelling guide for practitioners and managers.

This timely book provides a thorough analysis of contemporary youth employment entry route schemes in the U.K.Drawing on a Post-Foucauldian approach, the book providesa critical interrogation of the policy contexts governing a range of youth employment training schemes in four diverse regional economies within England and Scotland, including employability training, enterprise training, internships and volunteering. Supplemented with new ethnographic case study research conducted by the authors, the book’s chaptersexplore each training scheme in turn through the eyes of regional policy makers, trainers, work experience providers and young people. The authors demonstrate how neoliberal beliefs and practices, such as individualisation, responsibilisation, flexibility and resilience to risk are thoroughly implicated in youth employment policy and training practice. The book also makes obvious how the constraints faced by, and opportunities permitted to, different young people are shaped by the broad and complex interplay of national and regional historical events, economic processes and social structures.These function not only to reproduce but often to further retrench social inequalities, positions of liminality and vulnerability to risk for young people trying to get in and get on in good quality work across the different regional economies of the U.K.

This book brings about insights and key concepts from the field of transnational migration studies to bear upon the field of organization studies. It expands upon multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism, and historical global conjuncturesas relevant transnational concepts for studying people and difference in novel ways including agentic, reflexive mobile subjectivities as the new subjects of diversity research that emerge in a ‘post-identitarian’ world. Specifically, the book offers transmigrant, hybrid, and cosmopolitan subjectivities as new the subjects of diversity research. Beyond new subjectivities, mobility ontology requires rethinking the epistemology of multiculturalism, examining inequalities, and redirecting the methodologies adopted to attend to difference. In expanding on these, the book offers new frameworks for the study of people on-the-move and organizations through a mobility ontology that foregrounds movement as the natural order of the social world. It also calls into question the ways existing research paradigms and approaches have potentially replicated the creation of boundaries and borders through implicit assumptions about difference, race/ethnicity and belonging. By shifting the ontological premise upon which the field of organization studies rests, this book provides novel ways of theorizing difference, people and work beyond static epistemologies guiding much of the field.