THE TOPIC IS " THE FUTURE OF HOME - BASED EMPLOYEMENT".

The topic is " The future of Home - Based Employement".

The future of Home - Based Employment

Introduction

Purpose - To give an overview of some recent research into human resource (HR) deployment in library services in UK universities and colleges of higher education. Design - The aim of the research in question was to evaluate the effectiveness of HR deployment. This implied a positivistic methodological approach, maintaining that the reality under examination, HR deployment, existed objectively and independently of the researcher. However, the research aimed to discover not only what happened but also why. So there was an overlap between the positivistic and phenomenological approach. To this end, the research collected quantitative data via a survey and the present paper provides a summary of the research aim, objectives, methodology and results.

There are many kinds of resources involved in any form of economic activity. These have been categorised in a variety of ways - for example, as people, capital and technology. For the purposes of the present research the focus is on people: people are the critical component to success; they drive capital growth and technological expansion, or should do. These human resources (HR) need care and attention to effectively and consistently perform at a high level (Updegraff, 2004).

Human Resources are arguably the greatest and the costliest business asset. This is particularly true in education - for example, 50 per cent of higher education institution library budgets are spent on staff (Paterson, 1999; SCONUL, 2004a). Within libraries specifically, people are a key resource in achieving organisational objectives (Rowley, 1996; McKenna and Beech, 1995; Paterson, 1999).

People are all different and they all have different profiles (Hatfield, 2005). They all bring different life and employment experiences, qualifications, interests, skills, abilities and competencies. Library directors need to know these profiles, to know what potential there is and to know the full extent of the resources at hand (Paterson, 1999; McManus, 2003).

Part of the uniqueness of human capital is its diversity, and within the field of Human Resource Management (HRM) comes the management of diversity, which is not just about concentrating on issues of discrimination but about ensuring that all people maximise their potential and contribution to the organisation. It is a concept that embraces a broad range of people and should not exclude anyone.

The five most widely identified groups are: minority ethnic people, disabled people, older people, lesbians and gay men and women (Kirton and Greene, 2000, p. 9). Managing diversity concentrates on movement within the organisation, the culture of the organisation and the meeting of business objectives. Whereas equal opportunities are often seen as something that concern mainly HR practitioners, managing diversity is seen as being the concern of all employees, especially managers within an organisation. It differs crucially from equal opportunities in its lack of reliance upon positive action or affirmative action (Kandola and Fullerton, 1994).

Objectives

Within the frame of reference defined above, this paper describes an evaluation of HR deployment in ...