Open Access

Supply chains often match the supply of labour to uncertain demand by using precarious workprecarious workers. This increases flexibility and lowers costs for the supply chain by shifting risk to the workers and costs to society. Supply chains are maximizing profits, often literally, on the backs of their workers by creating serious negative externalities for society. We address this issue using a powerpower perspective because powerpower is asymmetrically oriented against workers in many supply chain contexts. This allows us to identify examples of how to reverse this trend and shift powerpower back to workers. The goal is to get to where stakeholders understand the costs and limited benefits of precarity, where we can separate the notion of flexibility from low costs, and where through a combination of incentives, policy, social norms of ethical behaviour, and consumer action, we can get to a better place than where we are now.

Virtual reality (VR) is starting to realize some of its promise as a tool to improve training effectiveness. However, research on VR for training and development is limited. Existing theories and models relating to organizational training and learning are infrequently used in the VR literature. A greater understanding of why VR works in the training context would help training designers create effective programs that leverage this continuously developing technology. This paper provides a typology of VR technologies specifically relevant to HR and integrates HR training frameworks and theory into findings on VR training from these other literatures. We specifically focus on immersive VR technology and seek to better understand reasons for the effectiveness of VR technologies for both training and assessment. We review findings, integrate related streams of research, and offer guideposts for those contemplating VR implementation in four important areas: training reactions in a VR context, VR-specific learning outcomes, opportunities for assessment using VR, and the effect of VR on training transfer. We conclude the paper by identifying a VR-training agenda for HR researchers.