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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Contextualising HRM

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The chapter argues that the keys to the understanding of human affairs, such as HRM, lie within their context. Although context is difficult to conceptualise and represent, readers can draw on their existing understanding of environmental issues to help them comprehend it. Awareness and comprehension of context are ultimately empowering because they sharpen critical thinking by identifying and challenging our own and others’ assumptions.
Multiple interests, conflict and stressful and moral issues are inherent in the immediate context of HRM, which comprises the organisation (the nature of which generates a number of tensions) and management (defined as the continuous process of resolving those tensions). Over time, managers have adopted a range of approaches to their task, including scientific management, the human relations school, humanistic organisation development and HRM. Examination of this immediate context uncovers the existence of some significant assumptions that inform managers’ differing practices and the competing interpretations that theorists make of them. It also highlights ethical issues.
The wider social, economic, political and cultural context of HRM is diverse, complex and dynamic, but some very different and unconnected strands of it are pulled out for examination, such as the legacies of the two world wars in relation to the management of the employment relationship. Other threads are the alternative ways of thinking that locate HRM within a contemporary framework of ideas that challenge assumptions about the management of the employment relationships.
The chapter, however, finds it insufficient to conceptualise context as layered, like an onion. Rather, HRM is embedded in its context. The metaphor of a tapestry is therefore used to express the way in which its meaning is constructed from the interweaving and mutual influences of the basic structures of society, with alternative ways of thinking derived from perceptual, epistemological, philosophical and ideological positions. These include positivism, phenomenology, constructivism, social constructionism, feminist thinking, systems thinking and new developments in science, which make their impact through ideology, hegemony and rhetoric. People, events and issues are the surface stitching.
The nature of this tapestry, with its multiple and often competing perspectives, ensures that HRM, as a concept, theory and practice, is a contested terrain. However, the chapter leaves readers to identify the implications of this through their critical reading of the book.
This examination of context challenges readers to develop their critical thinking and highlights ethical issues.

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