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Competency management has become a new trend in the public sector. There is some doubt, however, if competency management is really something new or whether it is just old wine in new bottles. Academics seem to be more sceptical about its novelty than practitioners. This article attempts to combine theory and practice. Some theoretical aspects of competency management are explored and definitions, reasons for implementation, novelty and implications for the HRM function are discussed. The theory is then confronted with two cases of competency management in the public sector. The first deals with the appraisal system in the Flemish administration and the second with the HR‐policy towards public managers in the Dutch civil service. The research material for the case studies was collected during a research project on international perspectives for HRM in the Flemish government.

What had begun as a respectable stream of information about Asia during the sixteenth century became a virtual flood during the seventeenth. Literally hundreds of books about Asia and its various parts were published during that century, authored by missionaries, merchants, mariners, physicians, soldiers, and independent travellers. At least twenty-five major descriptions of South Asia, appeared during the century; another fifteen on mainland Southeast Asia, about twenty devoted to the Southeast Asian archipelagoes, and sixty or more to East Asia. Alongside these major independent contributions stood scores of Jesuit letterbooks, derivative accounts, travel accounts with brief descriptions of many Asian places, pamphlets, newssheets, and the like. Many of these were collected into the several large multivolume compilations of travel literature published during the period. In addition, several important scholarly studies pertaining to Asia were published during the seventeenth century - studies of Asian medicine, botany, religion, and history- as well as translations of important Chinese and Sanskrit literature.

AbstractThis article contributes to the ongoing debate on the representation of global poverty in Western media. Both NGOs and journalists are being criticized for their one‐sided emphasis on the misery and dependency of people in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to measure the extent of such problematizing representation in newspaper articles and NGO‐advertisements. A frame analysis was conducted of 876 articles and 284 advertisements from the Netherlands, Flanders and the United Kingdom. The results challenge some conventional assumptions. Overall, the 'victim frame' and 'pitiful images' do not dominate the discourse of NGOs and newspapers. However, British NGOs are an exception: they portray the poor as 'pitiful victims' twice as often as their counterparts in the Netherlands and Flanders. Furthermore, the findings confirm the conviction that the media predominantly highlight poor countries' dependence on the West. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractThis article focuses on furnishing practices in the domestic space of the homes of white Flemish and Dutch Muslim female converts to Islam who madehijra(Islamic migration) to Morocco. Fed up with European Islamophobia and longing for a place that supports and strengthens their faith, they decided to emigrate to a Muslim country. However, remarkably, once settled in Morocco, many experience discontent with regard to a perceived "lack of true Islam" in the country. To gain insight into the positions and experiences of these women, I look at how they create a sense of belonging through furnishing practices in the domestic space of their new homes. I am interested in how various senses of belonging are expressed and come together in relation to their construction of religious belonging and place, and are renegotiated through domestic decoration practices. Building on literature on home, transnational migration, conversion, and material religion, I demonstrate that mechanisms of distinction and notions of religious (im)perfection intersect in the organization of the domestic space. Based on ethnographic accounts, I argue that my interlocutors bring a "culturalized" West-European Islam to Morocco, with tastes and sensibilities that jostle uneasily against local Moroccan religious practices but also allows them to repair some of the privileges they lost upon their conversion in their homeland. Lastly, this article shows that it is through the engagement with mundane material forms, but also with absence and empty spaces, that Islam becomes present in their domestic spaces, enhancing the cultivation of their ethical selves.

In our contemporary mediatized societies, philanthropy seems to be part of celebrities' ontology, while celebrities have become indispensable for the charity industry. This has provoked both negative and positive appraisals, although the specific nature and consequences of celebrities' involvement remain unclear. This article contributes to these debates by providing a systematic analysis of the roles celebrities play in telethons, which we redefine as charity media events, allowing us to study the shows in their full contextual complexity as ideological constructs. Applying qualitative content analysis, we have analysed two charity media events following the 2010 Haitian earthquake. In general, four distinct roles have been discerned: celebrities add an aura of exclusiveness and glamour, they render distant suffering relevant to domestic audiences, they function as principal motivators, and also contribute to the commodification of charity. Celebrities' involvement thus reinforces charity media events' dominant discourse of charitainment, in which a disaster is portrayed as a short term problem that can be remedied by supporting relief aid. Although this analysis does not disregard the usefulness and impact of fundraising campaigns and the contribution celebrities can make, it criticizes the oversimplified representation of complex issues and the decontextualized and depoliticized interpretations of distant suffering.

Studies in Portuguese on the Dutch period in Brazilian history are scant; in fact several important works by historians of other nationalities such as ones by Aldenburgk, Netscher and Wätjen have been translated into Portuguese. However, we shall limit this survey to Portuguese and especially Brazilian authors. We thought you might be interested in what has been written by them on a topic of interest to expansion studies.