Employee Selection and Performance Appraisal Essay

Employee Selection and Performance Appraisal - Essay Example Organizational operations, in both profit making and ‘non-profit’ making enterprises, require evaluation for reconciliation with set objectives as well as for comparison with operations with other enterprises in a similar industry. Assessment is the process of evaluating a subject, which can be a process, in order to ascertain its potential or quality. Management on the other hand refers to the act or responsibility of controlling people or activities. Assessment and management are therefore critical elements in the life of an organization. This paper seeks to discuss performance assessment and management of McDonalds Company. The paper will explore the established culture of employee selection and appraisal criteria that McDonalds applies in its human resource management. The paper will, with this respect, offer an overview of McDonalds human resource practices in employee selection and appraisal initiatives and then further analyze the processes. McDonalds is a multinational company that operates in a number of cultures across the world. Its human resource management is however converged to a uniform culture. With an overall workforce of more than thirty thousand employees, McDonalds has its personnel management strategies incorporated in its core objectives. In order to achieve its goal of being the best service provider in the food industry, the company’s ensures that it has a diversified cultural base with excellent employee management. McDonalds has a broad based approach in selecting its employees. This includes a special consideration to disabled people who may have some specialized capacity to service delivery. The company has also adopted a universal program for handling older employees more than 55 years of age that follows a criterion of being fair and ‘non-discriminatory’. It has therefore been open to different categories of cultured workforce. As far as recruiting is concerned, the company relies on the

Gender as a Structure of Social Practice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gender as a Structure of Social Practice - Essay Example Hegemony refers to the subordination of one group by another by mere implication that the other is greater. Hegemonic masculinity is exemplified in patriarchal systems where government is controlled by men. Narrowing down to hegemony among groups of men brings up the concept of subordination. The best example of subordinated masculinity is gay masculinity. Homosexual men in society are subordinate to heterosexual men who dominate society (Connell, p. 78). Complicity refers to the quiet acceptance by men of hegemonic structures because they benefit them at the expense of women. Marginalization brings into play class and race as factors that affect the masculinity of an individual. For example, black masculinity in the United States of America is marginalized by white hegemonic masculinity that holds economic power. Black men become associated with poverty, crime, violence, prison and other negative traits (Connell, p.79). Quentin Tarantino’s crime movie Pulp Fiction, considered a classic study of society’s underworld, contains outstanding examples of how society constructs masculinity. All the leading characters are male. The movie has been said to glorify violence among men; all the men in the movie are either career criminals or commit a crime at some point. The men are not above killing other men to achieve their goals, and do not hesitate to physically and emotionally abuse women. To illustrate the workings of Connell’s theory of masculinity, the focus is on the movie’s crime boss, Marcellus Wallace. Marcellus, a black character, is the biggest crime boss in the area. From the onset, he illustrates marginalization masculinity; a black man in oppressed America can only rise to immense wealth and power through crime. It is implied that Marcellus has risen to the top by being ruthless, cold and calculating. He also has a beautiful white trophy wife, played by Uma Thurman. His wealth qualifies him to marry a white woman, representing marginalization masculinity as manifested in the fantasy of the black man as a sexual predator of white women. Black men such as Marcellus actualize the worst fears of the white men in the hegemonic repressive system; taking their women. The ideology here is that a black man has to be extremely wealthy and successful to qualify to marry a white woman as a way of breaking society’s restrictions. Marcellus as boss of the underworld deals in different criminal operations such as drug rings, extortion, prostitution and gambling dens. He represents complicity to hegemonic masculinity as he has adapted the system to his benefit. The businesses he conducts involve prostitution, a form of exploitation of desperate women. He uses these women to enrich himself. He further illustrates hegemonic masculinity by controlling his wife’s every move and treating her like personal property. She has round-the-clock bodyguards under the guise of protection; in reality, he guards her jealou sly and monitors her every move. His paranoid actions seem justified however, when one of his henchmen succeeds in seducing his wife. To men like Marcellus, women are one more thing to be owned and used. Marcellus also treats his henchmen and underlings as disposable, illustrating further compliance to the hegemonic system. He does not hesitate to order assassinations of those who displease him. When a boxer, who was supposed to throw a match, played by Bruce Willis, ends up killing the