Continuing advances in digital technology are producing widespread changes in work and its management, particularly where work is performed away from an employer's premises through remote working. Whilst such changes can offer remote workers greater temporal and locational flexibilities, there is growing concern that their work is being insidiously commodified in line with Labour Process Theory to enhance the position of firms in Global Value Chains (GVCs). Integrating insights from these frameworks and relevant fields of scholarship, we examine how the nature and location of remote work and its HRM are being recontextualised. Our systematic analysis of peer-reviewed published empirical findings demonstrates the need to broaden the existing firm-centric focus of the GVC literature to encompass workers and their HRM, particularly as there are increasing numbers of workers operating outside firms using digital technology. It also reveals that the digitisation of the labour process is generating a spectrum of nuanced and unfolding implications for remote workers and their HRM, and a complexity of spatial reconfigurations, which provoke debate and agendas for future research and HRM practice.

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Information technology (IT) services multinationals in India provide rich environments for the analysis of emerging patterns of diversity and inclusion management. Growing interest in this field of management has been accentuated by claims tabled by the business case and resource‐based rationales. However, challenges and tensions potentially undermine not only the viability of these assertions, but also the impact of diversity and inclusion interventions themselves. This article investigates the tensions and challenges faced by a sample of firms in India in relation to age, gender, and intra‐ and international diversity. The findings shed light on the implications of these tensions for HR management in these organizations, which need to be addressed if the claims put forward by the business‐ and resource‐based perspectives are to be realized and the management of diversity and inclusion is to be successfully aligned with business and HR strategies. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

How do women, outnumbered and outranked, navigate work and careers in information technology? Only one in six information technology (IT) specialists in the UK is female. Such extreme male dominance potentially gives rise to a gender structure that affects women’s experiences of IT work. Using data from interviews with 57 technically skilled female IT professionals, we examine how women orient this gender structure and how they make sense of their gender identities as women working in IT. Our findings elucidate how the IT gender structure shapes women’s careers in this field of work. They reveal how women use their agency to assert notions of femininity into technical careers, disentangle narratives around whether women have unique and different (but less technically focused) strengths in IT and interface with ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ identities to achieve successful IT careers. In doing so, they provide insight into how technical women continue careers within a structure that externalises them through gender norms. This understanding can be used to aid efforts to retain women within IT as well as other fields facing similar challenges.

Knowledge workers are widely considered to represent the vanguards of a new employment era, characterised by a greater degree of balance in the relationship between the employer and the knowledge worker. This fundamental shift in power relations is expected to lead to the emergence of a new group of so‐called ‘free’ or empowered portfolio workers, who share boundaryless career arrangements and internationally ‘universal’ forms of flexibility. However, such propositions have been made without extensive comparative research. This paper therefore examines the organisation of knowledge worker careers and the nature of the temporal flexibility available to knowledge workers through an Anglo‐Dutch case‐study of a multinational consultancy firm. The data collected by this study provides little evidence to support the notion of free/boundaryless career models and demonstrates that national context has a significant impact on the construction of consultancy careers and the availability, level and form of flexibility offered to consultants.

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Knowledge workers are said to be the vanguard of a new era in work and employment, with some even claiming that these workers have been freed from the constraints of organizational employment (Pink, 2001; Reed, 1996). However, many knowledge workers operate as employees and emerging research suggests that the interplay between these workers and organizations generates strong competing tensions. This article proposes that these conflicts lead to a hybridization of the employment relationship.The findings from this case study of a large consultancy firm suggest that these tensions along with organizational context, the form of knowledge work, the seniority of the individual and the level and nature of client influence play an important role in shaping the degree and balance of this hybridization in contemporary bureaucracies.

The management of human resources represents a critical strategic function for consultancies. For such organisations, the HRM literature aligned to the resource-based view prescribes practices that centre on strengthening the relationship between a consultancy firm and its staff. However, this insular framework fails to take adequate account of consultants' engagement with external actors, particularly clients. This article explores the interplay between the synergies and conflicts of interest generated by the relational environment in which consultants operate and the implications of these tensions for consultants' attitudes and behaviours in a leading international consultancy firm. The findings from this study advance our understanding of the factors that affect the management of these key human resources and contribute to growing critiques calling for the refinement of the resource-based view.Please cite this article in press as: Donnelly, R. (2011) 'The coalescence between synergies and conflicts of interest in a top consultancy firm: an analysis of the implications for consultants' attitudes and behaviours'. Human Resource Management Journal 21: 1, 60-73.