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Fleet Bank acquisitions caused severe stress on employees who must change their life style and work habits. Productivity increased and the company profits rose as a result of the program developed with the help of Radcliffe.

Making an explicit link between people's personal needs and business goals can be a catalyst for changing work practices. In the end, both the company and the employees benefit. At [...]

The number of women in technical/scientific careers is still very small worldwide. The aim of the present paper is to understand how women who are already pursuing technical careers experience and reconcile the demands of their professional and private lives in two different national contexts. Participants in the study were 453 women in two countries with different socioeconomic, political, and cultural backgrounds: the United States and Israel. The cross-cultural perspective is employed here in order to better understand the universal aspects of the phenomenon, as opposed to those that are tied to a particular situational or cultural context. Women in both countries face a practical dilemma in combining career and family as well as a femininity dilemma related to their identity as women. These dilemmas differ according to the life stage of the women, but the effects vary by national culture.

HUMAN RESOURCE PROFESSIONALS ARE OFTEN CAUGHT BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL DEMANDS AND EMPLOYEE CONCERNS. To HANDLE THESE COMPETING pressures, they tend to develop elaborately structured and tightly controlled systems for managing people. [...]

Many technically-trained managers become stranded halfway up the corporate chain of advancement at mid-career. This article discusses efforts companies may take to open new pathways for these individuals. (Author/RE)

In reflecting on Joan Acker's legacy and her influence on us, we had the dialogue we reproduce here. We hope it shows our admiration and gratitude for her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article distinguishes between "strategic autonomy" (the freedom to set one's own research agenda) and "operational autonomy" (the freedom, once a problem has been set, to attack it by means determined by oneself, within given resource constraints). The article argues, and presents some preliminary corroborating data, that technical careers in the R&D lab should start lower on strategic than on operational autonomy, that operational autonomy should show initial fairly rapid increase, which should be followed by increases in strategic autonomy, and that thereafter a number of different career paths should be available for technical employees. Most labs, however, seem to espouse a philosophy of strategic autonomy combined with operational controls, which creates dilemmas and contradictions in the technical career, particularly at its start. It is proposed that these two aspects of autonomy can usefully be thought of as a two-dimensional grid. Different positions on this grid seem to fit with different orientations and different tasks, and require different strategies for career management. The article ends with a discussion of these managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women who are engineers demonstrate a more ambivalent attitude than their male colleagues about technical expertise, according to an analysis of questionnaire data from 51 matched female-male engineer pairs. Very similar positions and orientations are demonstrated for the pairs on the role of work in their lives. Results appear to stem from the singular, 'masculine' way in which technical work is defined, rather than from complications associated with women's multiple roles. Women seem to be involved in new models and show less ambivalence in managerial roles, where criteria for effective performance are more difficult to specify.