20 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL ± VOL 8 NO 3 T he idea of a psychological contract has become fashionable as a normative rhetoric and as an analytical insight into the changing nature of employment relations and the `new deal’ being offered by employers. Leaving aside the empirical case for such claims, the key features of the new employment relationship, are, on the one hand employee perceptions of less job security which have resulted from leaner organisation structures, the collapse of traditional promotion channels and employer requirements for more ¯exible ways of working. On the other hand, organisations are expected to become `learning’ organisations in which `empowered’ employees take on greater responsibility for their work, training and careers (Hendry and Jenkins, 1997). Thus at the heart of this new psychological contract lies the relationship between job security and the recent upsurge of interest and activity in training and career development (see, for example, Poole and Jenkins, 1996; Storey et al, 1997). Using the framework of the new psychological contract, this article explores the relationship between job security and training and career development in a longitudinal study of a Scottish-based textiles company. Speci®cally, we examine two popular theses on this topic. The ®rst of these has been labelled the employability thesis (Rajan, 1997), the proposition being that `enlightened’ employers who are no longer able to guarantee job security have been offering a new deal to employees. This new psychological contract has, with employer assistance, encouraged employees to develop; primarily as a way of adding value to their organisations but also as a hedge against possible unemployment. In return for this, they are demanding more ¯exible hours and ways of working from employees (Herriot et al, 1997; Johns, 1997). The second thesis is that the increase in demand for training has less to do with enlightened employers and more to do with employee-driven demand. As Herriot et al (1998) have pointed out, it is employees themselves that are behind the increased demands for training and development as a consequence of a broken `old’ contract (security for loyalty) and of a broken new rhetoric (we’ll give you employability instead of job security). Thus, as employees adjust to the new climate of job insecurity by taking on board the rhetoric of employability, they may have developed a heightened set of expectations of what they are owed by employers in training and development, and often feel let down by what is actually delivered by their organisations (Beard and Edwards, 1995). The particular contribution of this article is to provide support for the second thesis and, in doing so, add to the research agenda on the determinants of training and development recently outlined by Lewis (1997). In line with the contextual and processual model of the psychological contract proposed by Herriot and Pemberton (1996;1997), the data show how key aspects of the context of changes have had a significant impact on employees’ perceptions of the psychological contract. Hence, the thrust of our argument is that changing demand conditions, redundancies, different types of jobs, prospects of alternative employment and types of work undertaken by employees have influenced employee perceptions and feelings of powerlessness to shape their expectations of training and Linking job security and career development in a new psychological contract Graeme Martin, Harry Staines and Judy Pate Dundee Business School, University of Abertay