SummaryThis paper reports the findings of a two-wave longitudinal study investigating relationships between organizational and individual career management activities and organizational commitment in the early years of graduate careers. Several hypotheses are tested and receive mixed support. High organizational commitment predicts the practice of career management activities by graduates to further their career within the organization while low commitment is closely associated with behaviour aimed at furthering the career outside the organization. Graduates who manage their own careers also receive more career management help from their employer. This suggests that there may be the potential for employers to create a 'virtuous circle' of career management in which individual and organizational activities complement each other.

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The focus of this paper is on a method for the design of bespoke small-scale pilot, metalforming processes and models that accurately represent corresponding industrial-scale processes. Introducing new complex metal forming processes in industry commonly involves a trial and error approach to ensure that the final product requirements are met. Detailed process modelling, analysis and small-scale feasibility trials could be carried out instead. A fundamental concern of scaled experiments, however, is whether the results obtained can be guaranteed to be representative of the associated industrial processes. Presently, this is not the case with classical approaches founded on dimensional analysis providing little direction for the design of scaled metal-forming experiments. The difficulty is that classical approaches often focus predominantly on constitutive equations (which indirectly represent micro-structural behaviour) and thus focus on aspects that invariably cannot be scaled. This paper introduces a new approach founded on scaled transport equations that describe the physics involved on a finite domain. The transport approach however focuses on physical quantities that do scale and thus provides a platform on which bulk behaviour is accurately represented across the length scales. The new approach is trialled and compared against numerically obtained results to reveal a new powerful technique for scaled experimentation.

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Organizational politics is implicated in all levels of organizational functioning, from power structures and informal interaction to individual identity. This study argues that organizational politics provides an approach to examining professional women's experiences of organizations as gendered. Women graduates in male-dominated organizations claimed not to be limited by explicit discrimination, but they construct organizational politics as being masculine in character and as a barrier to their careers. These women represent organizational politics as irrational, aggressive, competitive and instrumental, leading to individual, not organizational, success. Their accounts undermine the stereotypical dichotomy of masculine rationality and feminine emotion by claiming that women behave reasonably and by focusing on emotion in men's political game playing. However, claiming to be rational and rejecting politics, while acknowledging its role in career success, is uncomfortable for ambitious women. They risk sabotaging their own position by appearing too sensitive to engage in the less savoury aspects of organizational life. Organizational political processes are seen as fundamental to gender in organizations, first, because political activity is seen as gendered and masculine and contrary to female identity; secondly, because politics is part of the informal system which constructs organization from which outsiders are excluded; and finally, because political activity is linked to the performance, achievement and maintenance of power.

Self‐ratings and supervisor perceptions of employee work competences are likely to have substantial effects on work performance, supervisor–subordinate relationships and perceptions of training needs. Yet little is known about how people in early career view their competences; whether their supervisors share their views; or whether ratings of competences vary between organizations and/or with tenure. This paper draws on the self‐assessment and other literatures to identify seven questions which are then addressed using ratings on five competence dimensions from 784 graduates and 531 managers of graduates in eight UK‐based organizations. As predicted, mean ratings differed between competence dimensions and organizations, and self‐ratings were higher than manager ratings. The magnitude of the discrepancy between graduates and managers varied between competence dimensions, but not between organizations. Self‐ratings did not generally increase with tenure. The implications of the results for graduate career development are discussed, with particular reference to organizational practices for fostering feelings of competence, and the role of the supervisor in such practices.

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This paper describes the development and testing of the UK version of the Migraine-Specific Quality-of-Life instrument (MSQOL), a measure designed to assess the quality of life of migraineurs. The work was part of an international research study conducted in eight countries, with the initial development work conducted in the UK and the USA. In the UK, interviews were held with 30 patients with migraine, while in the USA, 25 individual interviews were conducted, along with one focus group with 5 participants. Transcripts were produced of the interviews/group discussion and these were used to determine the questionnaire items, which were then considered by an international translation panel. The panel considered the feasibility of translating the items into other European languages. The instrument was then assessed for reliability and validity. The UK version of the MSQOL was shown to have excellent test-retest reliability (0.93 over 2 weeks) and internal consistency (0.92 and 0.93 on the first and second administrations, respectively). Scores on the measure were also found to be related to a comparator measure of well-being and to perceived severity of migraine and disruption caused to patients by the disease. Findings for the other language versions of the MSQOL supported those from the UK, suggesting that the instrument may well be suitable for inclusion in clinical trials.