Dr Richard McBain of Henley Management College’s HR Centre of Excellence discusses the findings of research into current employee engagement practice at 10 organizations and puts forward a resulting model of engagement and commitment. He argues that while employee engagement is a desirable goal, it should not become an end in itself ‐ organizations need to keep it within a strategic context.

This chapter explores the nature of disengagement and the role played by emotions and in doing so will disentangle the overlapping theories and definitions of both engagement and disengagement. The research that forms the basis for the chapter comes from two related studies exploring engagement and disengagement in 10 large UK public and private sector organisations. Both studies used an interpretive approach involving 75 managers and employees. The chapter suggests the that emotions play a mediating role in the process of disengagement and the emotional reaction involved provides a distinction to being 'not engaged'. It highlights the confusion that different approaches bring to distinguishing engagement and disengagement from other job attitudes.

Employee engagement is a useful recent concept in HRM: it is a composite construct that describes inter alia employees' commitment, job satisfaction and involvement. Increasingly, employee engagement has also come to be recognised as making a significant difference to performance at all levels within the company. But there still exists some vagueness about the meaning of the term: how exactly may employee engagement be defined? This article presents a genealogy of the new construct.

Using survey data from alumni of one of the UK's earliest and largest MBA programmes we explore how career capital, career outcomes and career satisfaction are impacted by learner context. We adopt comparative capitalisms theory to investigate whether graduates from a standardised programme marketed as 'One MBA' report broadly similar career outcomes irrespective of their work and study location. We find that despite the rhetoric around globalisation in management education there are differences that fit the theories of comparative capitalisms literature; thus supporting the view that, despite the global nature of MBA branding, context still plays a role in shaping learning and career outcomes as evidenced by differences reported here. Significant findings are reported in terms of the reported development of career capital 'knowing how'; career satisfaction and perceived organisational support, however differences in terms of the achievement of objective career success (promotion and career mobility) were less pronounced.

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