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The purpose of the article is to call upon educational leaders to consider the forces that hinder hope‐giving and to consider viewing their work as inspiring warranted hope among their constituents in situations of well‐defined reality.

The author argues that hope is an essential component of leader agency which when unhindered and defined in a multidimensional fashion may be used to transform the experiences of learning communities.

The author argues that leaders who foster warranted hope in constituents will gain transformational leverage to improve educational practice and the experiences of learners and their communities.

The author provides leaders with an overview of the utility of a reality‐based notion of hope that may serve to legitimate and focus constituent energies and make sense of key organizational challenges.

Provides a unique framing and synthesis of the multi‐dimensional concept of hope into the context of educational leadership, association with relevant allied constructs, and the challenges of education in the twenty‐first century.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The increasing number of online courses in higher education has provided students with convenience and flexibility. However, some adverse effects also come with online learning, including negatively affecting student beliefs in themselves and their perceptions of the instructor. Both are important factors for academic success. Grounded in media richness theory, this study aims to examine the impact of medium choices by investigating instructor messages on student beliefs and perceptions in an online course.

This study employs a survey methodology using validated items to assess university student perceptions following faculty interactions (video versus customized email).

The authors find that videos and personalized emails, using mass distribution Excel features, help increase student beliefs, including social belongingness and self-efficacy, and improve students' perceptions of the instructor and learning environment.

This study contributes to the literature by establishing that the richness of media of faculty messages can impact student beliefs, which in turn, may help with student success and retention. The activities used in this study are low-effort for the instructor and may have lasting effects on the students. In addition, this study fills a gap in the literature by examining multiple forms of the richness of media and their impact on multiple aspects of students' beliefs and perceptions of the instructor.

Building on findings from research designed to bring to description teachers’ own understandings of what it means to flourish in their work, the purpose of this paper is to show how principals and teacher–leaders in schools are agents capable of building developmental relationships and mentoring cultures that can orient and support teachers toward well-being.

This conceptual paper is anchored with findings from a multi-year qualitative research project that was designed using perspectives from positive organizational studies and positive psychology scholarship. The research methods encompassed collaborative and generative use of appreciative inquiry and strength-based research activities in school districts in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan, Canada. Data used to build this conceptual paper are from appreciative focus group conversations with teachers and principals over the course of two years. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were thematically analyzed using the research literature framing the study.

This paper offers four domains of inquiry and a model for flourishing schools that encourages principals and teacher–leaders to develop habits of mind and heart to build developmental relationships in ways that help both mentors and mentees to embody and enact positive, appreciative and generative ways of noticing, nurturing and sustaining the work of teaching and learning; all with aspiration to sustain and enhance the well-being of every member of the school community.

This paper offers conceptual models and storied descriptions that can aid mentors in noticing and nurturing more developmental relationship approaches to mentoring for well-being as opportunities to build mentoring relationships from appreciative and growth-based habits and approaches. As these relationships are built across the school, positive mentoring cultures may foster and grow in ways that promotes a flourishing-for-all approach to teaching and learning.

This paper contributes a different and complimentary perspective to research and practice on mentoring, offering a positive organizational perspective that highlights and promotes the perceived and evidenced benefits of deliberately focusing on what goes well and what provokes vitality in schools. The conceptual models in this paper offer tools for mentors and mentees to develop and foster in others appreciative and positive capacities for positive mentoring.

No psychometrically sound measurement scale exists to effectively measure sports team reputation. The current study proposed and developed the Spectator-based Sports Team Reputation (SSTR) by considering the most important stakeholder groups - spectators. The results indicated that SSTR had a positive and direct impact on team identification and trust towards a team. The most significant theoretical contribution of this study is the conceptualisation and development of the SSTR scale, with a multi-dimensional approach from the spectator perspective.

The purpose of this multiyear research study is to examine leadership in K-12 schools using a positive organizational perspective to understand how to foster, support and encourage flourishing in schools. In this article, the authors describe the lived experiences of a small group of principals and vice-principals in K-12 schools describing how they have experienced flourishing in their work.

The research was carried out using a qualitative, phenomenological approach to examine the lived, concrete and situated experiences of a small sample of school administrators (N = 9) in two school districts in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Data were collected through individual interviews that were designed to be appreciative in nature. These lasted between 60 and 90 min, were recorded and transcribed. The interview data were deductively and inductively analyzed and arranged into themes that demonstrate the key components of positive leadership for flourishing in schools, derived from these participants' experiences.

Building on and extending their findings that school administrators feel a sense of flourishing when they focus on their work from the values of purpose, passion and play, the authors found that a fourth value, presence, was important for these participants to experience well-being at work. Principals’ sense of well-being was strongly related to the notion of balance in their work and life, which helped them address potential stress and ill-being. Findings suggest that a strengths-based, positive approach to school leadership offers an alternative perspective for supporting and encouraging well-being at work.

Limitations of this research include the small sample size and the appreciative focus with which the data were collected that meant that participants were providing their experiences from a positive perspective. This article offers a complementary perspective for researching well-being in schools, from a positive, strengths-based approach to examining the work of administrators.

The authors offer insights into the work of school leaders from an appreciative, strengths-based perspective on understandings and practices that may be useful to principals and vice-principals who wish to enhance their workplace well-being. The authors suggest that administrators can learn to craft their work in ways that highlight existing well-being conditions toward amplifying and sustaining well-being. Working from four animating values for flourishing seemed to promote well-being for this small sample of administrators within the existing challenges and complexities of their work.

This article offers examples of lived experiences of principal and vice-principal well-being that highlight what happens when school leaders attend to their work from a positive, appreciative, strength-based perspective. This research perspective is an additional source of knowledge about well-being in schools complementing the existing research on well-being from a stress management and reduction perspective.

From Keith Harris's “Death and transfiguration” — which one University Librarian significantly baulked at reviewing for LR — onward, Atkinsonian thinking has produced extended if confused debate in Britain. Roger Hickman, formerly of Glasgow University Library, looks in perspective at the original UGC report, the debate, and the future.

This paper documents findings from a qualitative research project on flourishing in schools using a positive organizational research approach. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and bring to description educators’ experiences of the conditions, forces and influencing factors for flourishing in their context. The main objectives were to inform research and practice in school improvement from a positive perspective, provide knowledge and practice about noticing and growing well-being for educators and to encourage an attention on individual and collective well-being as an organizational imperative.

To gain a rich description of what it means for educators to feel a sense of flourishing in their work, the researchers used qualitative, case study methods and appreciative research activities. For the case study reported on in this paper, data were collected through open-ended, appreciative, focus group conversations and researcher observations in the participants’ classrooms. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. The researchers analyzed the transcripts using an iterative process of coding, categorizing and abstracting data.

Participants grew their adaptive communities through balancing structures (collaboration, purpose, administrator support) with flexibilities (synergy, creativity, tinkering, friendships) for adaptation and co-creation. Well-being was connected with feeling collegial support, care, shared meaning and engagement and where positive relationships were central in their work. These relational conditions seemed to contribute to building a social container that promoted flourishing. This led to innovation as teachers worked together in ways that promoted their learning and growth as a group, and increased their sense of vitality in their work. The researchers found that the principal plays a vital role in fostering, encouraging and sustaining conditions for teachers to cultivate adaptive community.

While small in scale and not generalizable across contexts, this research offers particular examples of what is working well for these teachers. Insights from these examples are intended to be generative, potentially resonating with and inspiring others to examine the possible benefits and potentials that may come from a positive approach to research and practice in school improvement in their own contexts. Engaging in positive organizational research in schools led to new insights on the work of teaching, learning and leading in schools. The researchers suggest that this positive, appreciative and generative perspective offers potentials and benefits for new understandings on school improvement.

The findings from this case study indicate that more attention is needed to supporting educators to cultivate the conditions necessary to experience rich and meaningful relationships within which they will thrive, grow and innovate in their teaching. At a system level, the authors argue for a re-orientation of schools toward well-being and a more holistic and human-development perspective on schooling.

Currently and internationally, schooling is under re-design as the authors learn more about the need to organize the schools in ways that encourage the kinds of teaching and learning necessary to prepare young people for an increasingly unpredictable future. The findings from this study highlight the importance of attending to teacher well-being as a fundamental aspect of encouraging the kind of teaching needed for the kinds of learning desired in schools across all contexts.

This case study provides the findings that illustrate the potential and benefits of research on school organizations from a positive organizational perspective. Additionally, this study is a reminder of the systemic nature of all living systems, such as schools, and the associated need to ensure well-being for all members of the learning community.

The body of literature in the field now commonly known as the “quality of working life” (QWL) has grown steadily over a period in which the industrialised nations have increasingly come to question the role and status of human beings in the modern technological environment. In recent years concern with the nature of work, its impact upon people, and their attitudes towards it, seem to have sharpened. Investigation of, and experimentation with, the qualitative aspects of working life—its ability to confer self‐fulfilment directly, for example, as opposed to being a means of acquiring goods—has gained momentum under the influence of a unique set of economic, social, political and technological factors. The outpouring of books, reports and articles from a wide variety of sources has, not surprisingly, grown apace.