Drawing on interviews with HR, finance and marketing directors, this article examines the locus of strategic decision making in organisations, who makes those decisions and the characteristics and competencies of strategic decision makers. The article finds that strategic formulation takes place in the Chief Executive Officer Group (CEOG). Board of director membership is unnecessary to be influential on the strategic decisions made in organisations. The article also concludes that even if directors are not members of the main board of directors and/or of the CEOG, there exists in organisations informal channels through which they can exert influence in the formulation of strategy. A third conclusion is that strategic decision makers are business-focused general managers rather than advocates of their management speciality. The article concludes by considering the implications of its findings for management education and for the research agenda and management academics

The important debate on the relationship between personnel specialists and line managers is the theme of this article. It argues, on empirical evidence, that the development of the relationship has not been to the detriment of personnel managers but has secured mutual benefits for both themselves and their line counterparts.

This paper reviews the state of the field of the sub-disciplines within UK management research, based upon the submissions of 94 UK higher education institutions to the Business and Management Studies Panel in the UK's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It offers observations on the UK model of the assessment of quality in, and funding of, research conducted in publicly funded higher education institutions.

No abstract

While the concepts of performance evaluation and total quality management (TQM) have been explored in the management literature of the last decades, there has been relatively little work on the particular characteristics that an organisation with a TQM approach to human resource (HR) performance evaluation should adopt. To this end, this paper provides a review of the literature in the area of TQM and HR performance evaluation, in order to establish the context for future empirical research. This study provides a brief overview of the implications of a quality orientation for the evaluation of employee performance. It reveals the main difficulties with the concept of performance evaluation from a quality perspective; and it also examines particular characteristics of performance evaluation that could maximise the effectiveness of HR performance evaluation in organisational environments with a quality orientation. Both the assumptions of TQM and the requirements for HR evaluation are used as a foundation from which to examine the ways in which HR performance evaluation might have changed to integrate TQM requirements. By examining the relevant literature, the main criteria of a TQM-based HR performance evaluation system are refined and enhanced, thus moving towards a situation in which TQM can drive HR performance evaluation in practice. The results also serve as a guide for the evaluation of the effectiveness of such a system.