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This paper aims to explore the past and future impacts of automation on family businesses, with a focus on the opportunities for human capital empowerment.

This paper draws upon a contemporary literature search to examine a range of scholarly and practitioner perspectives of the challenges and benefits of automation, exploring the evolvement towards hyperautomation and the empowerment of human capital in family businesses.

Automation, transforming to hyperautomation, general purpose artificial intelligence (AI) and beyond has the possibility of radically improving productivity. Fear of job obsolescence has been present since the birth of modern automation, and whilst some jobs are at risk of redundancy, a net gain towards higher-skilled labour is already evident. Family business leaders must be prepared to react appropriately to the accelerating war for talent by implementing a strategy for human capital empowerment.

This unique paper synthesises developments in automation and proposes a future perspective centred upon the empowerment of human capital in family businesses.

The present paper is intended to form an introduction to the ideas of machine translation; it is in no sense a complete account of the work which has been carried out at Birkbeck College and elsewhere and which interested readers can study in more detail in a book which is in course of publication.

This article reviews Honda’s strategy to localize operations, organization and employment relations at Honda of the UK Manufacturing (HUM). The management literature describes Honda as an unusually un‐bureaucratic company where individual initiative thrives. However, the production system and organization of work at HUM were found to be very tightly controlled, with little variety of work and individual initiative constrained within strict bounds. This may reflect the relative youth of the plant and the company’s strategy to embed its production system thoroughly before permitting change, or it may suggest that production work at Honda does not fit the usual characterization of the company in the literature. Local management has been given freedom to adapt certain aspects of the organization and employment relations framework to fit the British environment, but with no impact on the direct transfer of the production system.

The key to any successful organization must be its communication network. Bold statement, but is it true? It is, of course, a sweeping generalization and one with which anyone would have difficulty in picking an argument. One way to determine what is, and what is not, vital to your organization is by eliminating it from the equation and asking yourself where you would be without it. Do away with your communication system, apart from the most basic, and see what you are left with? If the answer is not a great deal, then you can hopefully appreciate the importance of what you have, and realize the attention it deserves. Taking things for granted is an all too common phenomenon. When developing new systems and new strategies, it is important to remember the existing systems so as not to ignore their development too. Distribution and logistics management is an area which is experiencing many changes and, because of this, it is important for the communication system to be first class.

Facilities management is becoming a key issue in many organizations as change is, as Charles Handy et al. have recognized, the only way forward. Companies which remain stagnant eventually fall behind their competitors or have change enforced on them. The latter is obviously undesirable for many reasons owing to hastily planned measures which have probably not been properly thought through. This will have an obvious knock‐on effect to staff with potentially enormous strategic problems. Change is something we all have to get used to in order to progress and develop, and it is against this backdrop that the right type of facilities are needed to enhance the smooth transition of the change process. People normally associate change with an organization which is shrinking or off‐loading unwanted space and facilities which are no longer any use. This would probably be quite undesirable owing to the recession‐hit 1990s in which companies either have gone into liquidation or have made radical changes to meet the demands of the modern industrial era. But successful organizations also make radical cuts in staffing and facilities. Barclays Bank, for example, cut 2,000 branch jobs in the UK during 1994 while it increased its profits by 181 per cent to £1.86bn. This controversial strategy of cutting back on staffing levels and making better use of facilities while continuing to make huge profits is quite obviously a contentious one, as many organizations are looking for “smarter” ways of working. This entails examining alternative working practices to maximize the use of current facilities.

The key to any successful organization must be its communication network. Bold statement, but is it true? It is, of course, a sweeping generalization and one with which anyone would have difficulty in picking an argument. One way to determine what is, and what is not, vital to your organization is by eliminating it from the equation and asking yourself where you would be without it. Do away with your communication system, apart from the most basic, and see what you are left with? If the answer is not a great deal, then you can, it is hoped, appreciate the importance of what you have, and realize the attention it deserves. Taking things for granted is an all too common phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how an individual enters a career as a gerontologist.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment based on the author's experience and career choices. It is a brief autobiographical account focused on occupational opportunities and the influence of family commitments.

Career choice can often be a mix of opportunity and chance. Having good colleagues and a supportive research community is the secret to success. Retirement for an active professional brings further opportunities to learn new skills and knowledge.

Personal insights from professionals at the height of their career can help young researchers understand what it means to take opportunities when they arise.

This paper describes a study of factors that have influenced the career development of senior managers in local government. It extends earlier work on business chief executives and chief officers of police carried out by Margerison and Kakabadse. It was found that the influences could be categorized into three main groups: two kinds of personal attributes – ability factors, motivational factors – and the third group comprising situational factors. Certain of the individual factors are consistent with the findings from competency research. While there are some differences from the earlier research the extent of the similarity is more striking, suggesting the enduring importance of many influencing factors across both time and employment sector.

Flexifactories, where the product made can be changed at low cost and quickly, constitute an important aspect of manufacturing flexibility. Examination of Honda flexifactories worldwide reveals how models are changed over, the model mix altered, and whole factories switched to making new types of products. Flexifactories are logically operated as networks, constituting a bridge between the “micro” flexibility of people and machines and overall corporate flexibility, resulting in improved mass production. This is not to argue that the flexibility of flexifactories is without limit, nor that they do not contain their own rigidities. Further empirical and theoretical research is needed to compare the flexifactory model with previous models of optimal factory organization.