Human Resource Strategy provides an overview of the academic and practitioner responses to these and other questions. Applying an integrative framework, the authors review twenty years' worth of empirical and theoretical research in an attempt to reconcile often-conflicting conceptual models and competing empirical results. The authors present much of the relevant research in the context of the critical strategic decisions that executives must actually make with regard to human resource investments and deployments. As a result, often complex theoretical models and scientific findings are presented such that they are not only understandable but also highly relevant to non-research-oriented practitioners.

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions—the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next—are much rarer than we think.

First Published in 1997. The second in the readers' series, Resources for the Knowledge-Based Economy, Knowledge In Organisations gives an overview of how knowledge is valued and used in organisations. It gives readers excellent grounding in how best to understand the highest valued asset they have in their organisations.

Proceedings from a conference "A global assessment of the 1989 recommendation on the safeguarding of traditional culture and folklore" held at the Smithsonian Institution June 27-30 1999. The purpose of the conference was to assess the implementation of the Recommendation (an international normative instrument adopted by UNESCO in 1989), to bring together points of view and perspectives on the Recommendaion from around the world, and suggest ways in which the Recommendation might develop in the future so that its purpose, the safeguarding of traditional culture and folklore, might be achieved.