An increasing awareness of the significance of the management of people to competitiveness, alongside new practices and new paradigms such as 'human resource management', demands a critical appraisal of both the theory and practice of personnel management. This new and thoroughly up-dated edition of the best-selling Personnel Management provides a challenging analysis of recent thinking and developments. Original contributions from leading experts offer a provocative, path breaking treatment of personnel management in the lean organization and the extended organization as well as the main issues in each of the key areas of planning and resourcing, performance management, training and development, involvement and participation and management-trade union partnership agreements. Overall, it offers the fullest analysis to date of what is happening in personnel management and the most comprehensive framework within which to understand both present and likely future trends, including the challenges of Europeanization following the UK's signature of the social chapter of the EU Maastricht Treaty and the launch of the critical stage of Economic and Monetary Union. This book's distinctive approach, in simultaneously bringing together and advancing knowledge and understanding of how people are managed in work organisations makes it a vital source for policy makers, teachers and researchers in the field, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate management students and practitioners taking IPD qualifications.