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This volume of Advanced Series in Management offers cutting-edge research from Human Resource Management professionals and academics, which engages with the potential opportunities and challenges of digitization in the workplace. Contributors introduce fresh evidence and innovative ideas on the changing work environment, to help business leaders' shift to the digital mind-set. The book suggests new ways of managing, organizing, and leading a positive social change towards a human-centered organization. For example, a collaboration between HRM and IT, adoption of design thinking, using integrated analytics, and developing new competences. The book explores this new world for HRM, developing critical insights about three main issues: HRM's new role in the 4.0 era New job and organization design for the smart economy New HRM tools and practices for digital organizations. HRM 4.0 For Human-Centered Organizations provides both researchers and professionals working in Human Resources Management, Organization Design and Organizational Behaviour with practical guidelines to turn the challenging scenario of Industry 4.0 into a successful transformation for the HRM domain.

PurposeThis study adopts the popular culture lens to investigate the collective understanding behind the human resources (HR) occupations.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical study analyzes 129 characters from 87 movies, television (TV) series, books and comics. The measurement model was tested using structural equation modeling and cluster analysis identified five HR representations in the popular culture.FindingsPopular culture reflects five HR representations: The Executor, the Hero, the Buddy, the Bore, and the Good-time person. Results suggest that public opinion pays scarce attention to the so-called HR "strategic position" while underlining the need for a more socially responsible HR approach.Originality/valueThe authors' study serves as a means for integrating past research on HR role and reputation, occupational image, self-identity and popular media. While most scholars have addressed popular culture as a single case and paid almost no attention to the HR domain, this article complements the literature by offering a fruitful way to distil HR summative popular culture representations, thus advocating for both a theoretical and a methodological contribution.

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to examine, drawing on organization studies and stakeholder theories, the organizational configuration that enables the social enterprise to succeed by combining social and economic imperatives in a sustainable way.Design/methodology/approach– The research project is based on the analysis of a multiple cross-national case study consisting of seven social enterprises that are active in the drug rehabilitation context. Multiple rounds of data gathering and analysis combined with within-case analysis and cross-case comparison enabled the authors to evaluate the perceived, declared and subjective organizational perspectives.Findings– Results suggest that organizational performance – measured as the ability to achieve social goals, generate resources and pursue sustainability over time – depends on the implementation of a participative organizational configuration defined by the interaction of six organizational components (i.e. time and space designed for collective activities, low degree of formalization, social control, centralized decision-making processes, transformational leadership style and a workforce structure based on social stakeholders as workers). The involvement of social stakeholders emerges as a distinctive feature in the social enterprise domain.Originality/value– The study contributes to extending the configuration approach to the social enterprise domain, also as a fruitful method to manage social stakeholders and to advance the discussion on hybrid organizations.

AbstractIn Western societies and organizations, episodes of discrimination based on individual demographic and social characteristics still occur. Relevant questions, such as why ethnic discrimination is perpetuated and how people confront it in the workplace, remain open. In this study, we adopt a social-symbolic work perspective to explore how individuals confront workplace ethnic discrimination by both upholding and challenging it. In doing so, we incorporate the perspectives of those directly experiencing, observing and neglecting discrimination. Specifically, we focus on the Italian branches of North American professional service firms (PSFs), performing a qualitative investigation of the worlds of concern among professionals regarding the topic of ethnic discrimination to explore how different backgrounds motivate social-symbolic work. We find that different forms of work are enacted to support the status quo, shape the boundaries of existing organizational practices, and balance professional identities, emotions, and careers to silence episodes of ethnic discrimination. We also highlight cases of 'soft,' yet increasing, work that contests the status quo. Finally, we discuss our results in light of neo-institutional and critical management research to ultimately inspire our focal firms and societies to find alternatives to the rhetoric in the established approaches to inequality.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the organizational redesign opportunities currently offered by web-based technological innovations contribute to rebuilding and strengthening the employee-HR department relationship, rendering personnel management policy criteria more transparent, increasing perceived fairness and thus helping to instil trust in the HR department, albeit in a diverse virtual context.Design/methodology/approach– The authors designed a survey involving 526 Gen Y employees and tested the hypotheses using structural equation modelling analyses.Findings– The results confirm a positive relationship between relational e-HRM system adoption, procedural justice and trust in the HR department.Research limitations/implications– The results provide evidence that technology can support the development of institutional trust in virtual environments and thus contribute to the growing e-HRM literature, to the more consolidated strategic HRM research domain and to the debate on trust in technology-mediated relationships.Practical implications– The paper provides valuable and at times unexpected results on the new potential role of the HR department in the current fluid and insecure labour market, thereby forming the basis for defining some useful guidelines to design and implement the e-HRM architecture.Originality/value– The paper focuses on understanding how relational e-HRM could impact on the direct employee-HR department relationship, from the Gen Y employees perspective, that is almost neglected in the growing literature. Moreover it suggests some unexpected insights on the role of technology innovativeness in moderating the impact of e-HRM on trust in the HR department.