My life as a service-worker

Abstract

This paper presents Val’s idiographic account of her life as a service-worker. Val’s oral history is important as it reminds service business academics not to dehumanise service-workers as part of their reified interpretations of human activities. Rarely is a service-worker’s personal interpretation of their world heard directly within management academia. Val’s personal account goes someway towards addressing this issue. She juggles the competing pressures of multiple life-worlds and demonstrates how their nature, boundary and importance are fluid depending upon her current construction of the situation. Her story as a service-worker provides insight into the complexity and sophistication of her interpretations and reminds us of the risks of reification and simplification

Linking corporate entrepreneurship and human resource management in SMEs

“…HRM, therefore, is about creating and sustaining superior human resource contributions for firms (Litz and Stewart, 2000). Several authors have argued that the adoption of HRM practices may lead to achieving sustained competitive advantage through developing human capital pool and encouraging employees to pursue the interest of the firm (Lado and Wilson, 1994; Wright et al , 1994; Barney and Wright, 1998; Wright et al , 2001; Kidwell and Fish, 2007; Perren and Stevens, 2008).…”