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Despite the vast amount of literature covering the concept of leadership, it remains contentious, under‐conceptualised and often uncritical. The purpose of this paper is to question the validity of the concept and dispute its application.

The paper reviews what the idea of leadership means, how it relates to competing accounts of management in the public services, and what value it adds.

There is no evident reason why the supposed roles, tasks, or qualities of “leadership” either need to be or should be concentrated in the person of a leader; the tasks involved in “leading” an organisation are not in fact the tasks of motivation, influence or direction of others which are at the core of the literature; and there is no reason to suppose that leadership is a primary influence on the behaviour of most organisations.

In the context of the public services, there is no set of skills, behaviours or roles that could be applied across the public services; the emphasis in leadership theory on personal relationships may be inconsistent with the objectives and character of the service; and the arrogation to a public service manager of a leadership role may be illegitimate.

The argument here represents a fundamental challenge to the concept of leadership, its relevance and its application to public services.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically upon current debates and tensions in the governance of research in the UK and more widely, particularly the imperative that social science research should demonstrate impact beyond the academy.

Drawing implicitly upon the Bevir’s theory of governance, the paper positions discourses about “research excellence and research impact” as elite narratives that are rooted genealogically in forms of managerial audit culture which seek to govern the practices of social science academics. The paper reviews relevant literature, draws upon key contributions that have shaped debate and refers to the author’s own research and experiences of “research impact”.

Initiatives such as the UK’s “Research Excellence Framework” can be understood as a form of governance that further enables already present neo-liberalising tendencies in the academy. The “impact agenda” has both negative (e.g. it can distort research priorities and can lead to overstatement of “real world” effects) and positive potential (e.g. to provide institutional space for work towards social justice, in line with long-standing traditions of critical social science and “public sociology”).

There is a need for more critical research and theoretical reflection on the value, threats, limitations and potential of current forms of research governance and “impact”.

To date, there are very few article-length, critical discussions of these developments and issues in research governance, even fewer that connect these debates to longer-standing radical imperatives in social science.

This article is primarily concerned with professionals, their institutions and their relations with the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), from a British point of view. It will be argued that professionals in Europe are not simply affected by European Union (EU) legislation, they help formulate it and they administer it to an extent bounded by the Commission.

Retirement protection has been widely debated in Hong Kong over two decades. The debate about the relationship between social insecurity and retirement protection, and provoked consideration of a choice between a rights-based universal retirement system and means-tested protection for senior citizens are still contested. This study aims to explore the understanding and behaviours of young workers regarding retirement planning, their difficulties and worries with the implementation of providing support for their parents' retirement.

This was an exploratory study to target young workers aged 20–34 years to participate. Qualitative data presented in this study were drawn from 16 young workers. Seven were female and nine were male young workers.

The research found that young workers who have a relatively low level of income, particularly for non-standard workers and the self-employed, both are likely to find difficulties to contribute to their own retirement planning and their parents' retirement with the emerging problems of job insecurity and instability. Young working people in lower socio-classes have further limited choices and control over their own retirement planning, as well as providing support for their parents' retirement that may cause a breach of intergenerational contract.

With the increasing number of young workers with precarious employment or unemployment, this study has contributed to a shift in views regarding intergenerational contracts, particularly in the need to support other generations of family members in a contemporary Hong Kong society.

Philosophers and political scientists have a long history of dealing with the difficult puzzle of leadership, and how it is to be distinguished from management and administration. The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether the innovative role of elected executive mayor in England can be considered as leader or manager. The paper critically assesses the concept of leadership before using empirical evidence to come to conclusions about the current role of elected mayor, an office with an uncertain history and unclear future in English public sector leadership.

The paper draws from the authors’ qualitative interviews with mayors from the inception of the office to the recent past.

The study finds that elected executive mayors are both leaders and managers, but that the notion of leadership in the local public sector remains contested as the mayor is a part of a bureaucratic structure of administration which limits the exercise of leadership as outlined in the existing literature.

As central government continues to advocate the expansion of the office of mayor, not least as part of English regional devolution, the study relates to future practice and to overall understanding of just what elected mayors do.

The paper provides useful insight into the forthcoming expansion of the mayoral system into the new Combined Authorities.

The paper provides original evidence about the faltering progress of the mayoral system in the English public sector.

This research highlights age-specific barriers to employment for older workers and the gap between activation policy design and implementation, focusing on difficulties in extending working life under employment support services.

This research employed a qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews to gather perspectives on extending the working lives of older adults. Eighteen experienced social workers who worked in employment support services for older workers who aged fifty-five and above participated in the study.

This study underscores the importance of comprehensively understanding the heterogeneity of individuals' circumstances and emphasizes the impact of intersectionality on the development of extending working life. It incorporates individual and familial difficulties, including considering caregiving responsibilities, health issues and housing challenges before exploring employment-related concerns. The study also highlights external factors influencing older workers' employment prospects, including employer perspectives, government support levels and public recognition of the necessity to extend working life.

This research sheds light on the impact of welfare-related stigma, which imposes obstacles and inflexibility on older workers seeking employment. It ultimately contributes to the sustainability and dynamism of the Asia–Pacific workforce while also informing regional discussions on social security and welfare services.

It uniquely employs the perspectives of social workers providing employment support services to highlight challenges and policy gaps in extending the working lives of older workers in Hong Kong. It also provides practical insights into strategies and mechanisms for extending working life across diverse social contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between social policy and late-life happiness by analyzing the impact of the basic old-age pension on the happiness of older people in South Korea.

People aged 65 and over selected from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing are analyzed in the study.

It shows that the association between the basic old-age pension and the happiness of older people is negative. This may be attributable to the frugality of the benefits and the side effects of the means test.

This implies that the relationship between social policy and late-life happiness is not linear but it is affected by the context of the policy. It suggests that changing the fundamental benefit system to be more progressive can be a more useful policy option to realize the initial policy goal for recipients.

The behaviour of an enterprise (including ethical behaviour) strongly depends on the organization’s culture, values and beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that organizational culture differs according to enterprise life cycle stage. Also the importance of the knowledge and awareness of these differences to enterprises’ management in order to be able to ensure enterprises’ success is argued.

The case study research methodology was applied to explore the differences in the type of organizational culture as well as cultural strength depending on the enterprise’s life cycle stage. For the empirical testing, the author have selected Slovenia, one of the most developed European post-socialist transition countries.

The research revealed differences in the types and strengths of enterprises’ organizational cultures and showed their dependence on the enterprises’ life cycle stages.

Knowledge of differences in organizational culture in relation to an enterprise’s life cycle stage can significantly contribute to the behaviour of the enterprise’s key stakeholders by ensuring the long-term and sustainable success of the enterprise.

The available literature does not provide similar research of differences in organizational culture in relation to an enterprise’s life cycle stages.

Although neo‐classical economics has undoubtedly driven the global pension privatization reform agenda, it does not provide an adequate framework for the reform of retirement income protection. Indeed, it poses salient decision risks for policy‐makers because of its naturalist epistemology and agency ontology, which deny both the value of hermeneutic knowledge and the existence of structural imperatives. When confronted with the challenge of income maintenance for those in retirement, policy‐makers must necessarily tackle strategically important, values‐laden questions. This requires them to engage in policy discourses that are informed by competing welfare ideologies. Reflecting these discourses, national governments have adopted three reform approaches to public pension privatization. All are consistent with values of community solidarity, social cohesion and citizenship rights, which are seen by national governments to be preferable to the values that underpin neo‐classical economic analysis, namely, individual responsibility, freedom of choice and contractual rights.