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The Problem in Cleveland In May 1985 it came to the attention of the Cleveland Area Manpower Board, via the Careers Service, that 40 per cent or more of those youngsters who had previously had difficulty in coping in their school environment were failing to succeed in YTS. A review of the literature of “both sides” — government/MSC proponents versus their critics in education and industry — revealed that there was cause for concern regarding the sector of youth referred to as low achievers. Some aspects of the problem, if indeed one did exist, were self‐evident. At some time during the school career the low achiever's ability to conceptualise within the school framework of cultural values and academic subjects either did not develop, or ceased to develop at some point, or was not yet sufficiently developed to keep up with class norms. This meant that, relatively speaking, while the rest of the class built layer after layer of verbal and numerate expertise it went on outside the scope of the low achiever's comprehension.

To report on an exploratory study on unwritten rules carried out in Australia, place this study in the context of the historical development of thought on rules and discuss implications for management learning.

This paper has three parts. The first part reviews the theoretical scholarly writings on rules as social structures from the early sociology of the nineteenth century to the organizational theory of the present day. Theories of structural functionalism and institutionalism are acknowledged as historical influences on rules and the assumptions likely to be made by managers about compliance and implementation. In the second part, the research is described in which staff members from five organizations were invited to technology‐supported focus groups. The data collection was supported by group support systems technology, which allowed anonymous inputs. Staff were asked, in various ways, about both official rules and unwritten rules. These included the use of scenarios, reported here. In the third part, the findings are discussed and three implications for management learning are suggested.

The research produced evidence that rules exist, are acted upon and require a view of the rule‐implementer as complex and holistic. The findings supported Giddens' theory of structuration which suggests that the individual rule taker draws on rules and also personal sensibility when involved in social encounters.

This paper provides contemporary data on rules as perceived practice which is presented within the context of the historical development of relevant management theory. Attention is drawn to three implications for management learning, which are: what rules mean, assumptions of managers, and deep listening as social responsibility. The future research agenda should be of value to those considering a practical contribution to this original field of institutional inquiry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate employees' and managers' accounts of interactive learning and what might encourage or inhibit emergent learning.

The approach taken was a constructivist/social constructivist ontology, interpretive epistemology and qualitative methodology, using grounded theory method. Data collection included semi‐structured interview, “complete this sentence” and “scenarios” from 51 respondents: 22 managers and 29 employees in four private sector organisations. As respondents' theories emerged, these informed the next round of data collection, this process named “theoretical sampling”. Managers and employees were asked about perceptions of their own role and the other's roles in learning.

Reciprocity and participative learning involving managers and employees emerged. There was dynamism to the data and evidence of both Billett's notion of affordances and Stacey's patterns of local interactions. Employees encouraged learning through peer discussions, and motivation/personal initiative. Managers encouraged learning through have a go coaching, formal training opportunities and working with company structure and resources. The data support the idea of complex and integrated learning.

The data informed both managers and employees in such a way as to highlight the dynamic and complex interactions around learning processes. One practical implication is employee and manager training in emergence and complexity as learning environments. Ideas of complex responses and patterns of local interaction resonated with the data more than particular typologies of learning.

This paper captures insights, especially from employees, into the dialogue and dynamism of their learning opportunities, whilst supporting existing theories. The need for managers to “learn” employees' local interaction patterns emerged as a future research agenda, alongside the need to penetrate the social space of employee learning more deeply.

This paper aims to report on an empirical case study, (single case multi‐site) employing both a “hard” and “soft” method. The tangible, visible component of the study was the production of a database whose fields were to be the source of tacit knowledge emergence.

The proposition was that the possibility for the capture of tacit knowledge was subject to four conditions. The first was the need for a teleological motive and purpose. The second was a bounded environment expressed in this case in terms of the published corporate goals and key business drivers. The third was the production of a controlled vocabulary that made sense to both the respondents in the context of the true nature of the business activity. The fourth and most important condition was the interactive and iterative process that allowed those involved to own the tacit knowledge emerging process.

Results supported the idea that under bounded conditions, a shared sense of purpose and an iterative process where ownership was possible, tacit knowledge could be captured. In the bounded environment tacit knowledge was found to be not haphazard, confirming its “end purpose” for being.

The findings of the research have practical application for organisations wishing to capture the tacit knowledge of their knowledge workers and describes a methodology for emerging and capturing it.

Is of value in presenting a method for emerging tacit knowledge in‐play in a bounded environment.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive narrative account of supervisory conversations with doctoral students. They include providing knowledge and experience about the nature of qualitative and quantitative approaches and their respective histories and rigour requirements.

An introduction reveals the complexity, debates and dialectics that are engaged with during the doctoral supervisory process. Two design issues are discussed. One is research design; the other is supervisor method.

Rigour in interpretive research is distinctive, linked to its characteristics and the unique role of the researcher as an instrument of data collection, conscious of the need to give voice to respondents and preserve their authentic responses. The audit trail is a centrepiece for both rigour and the reflection, reflexivity necessary to address ongoing biases, decisions and dilemmas.

Supervisory conversations are dynamic but there is a core, a set of initial conditions and these relate to the ethics and integrity of the doctoral student and the supervisor.

The paper penetrates the social space where supervisors and doctoral students interact. Within the text, “advice” and seminal ideas are presented from literature and the supervisor's experience that will inform researchers and demonstrate a supervisor method.

This contribution responds to the call of various researchers for a shift in Responsible Management Education (RME) to adopt a more human-centered and less organizational-centered approach. Service learning (SL) is introduced as a possibility to offer didactical opportunities for participants to connect real-world experiences to system thinking in various ways. We suggest an approach called a “Prism of Reflections” to pique participants' hermeneutical, technical, and emancipatory interests so they can delve deeply into local social and environmental issues and be able to connect them to broader global issues as encapsulated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We exemplify our method by demonstrating how students reflect on their experiences working at food banks, and how they relate to concerns of sustainability, poverty, and access to food. Our research suggests that this approach offers a way to situate organizational thinking and instrumental reasoning in a larger framework that considers the aims of hermeneutics, technical and emancipatory discourses. Our findings demonstrate that there are conflicts and dissonances when connecting intersubjective real-world perceptions to emancipatory interests and technical knowledge, particularly when it comes to challenges in the realm of food.

In a study of merger-evoked cultural change in three organizations, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from individuals at all employment levels in both merger partners within each organization. Results were that most individuals perceived that the merger had impacted significantly on them personally. There was, however, a perceived lack of congruence between the organizational cultures of merging partners, resulting in culture clashes and significant changes to the organizations’ organizational cultures. More specifically, outcomes for both individuals and the subsequent acculturation following the mergers were related to the approach adopted to manage the merger process: incremental, immediate, or indifferent.

Reports the findings and implications of a retail bank marketing study which was conducted in the City of Perth in Western Australia in 1995. More specifically, the study was designed to determine and evaluate the importance of selected patronage motives used by Australian retail bank customers in choosing commercial banks. Also it sets out to determine the perceived usefulness of the variety of services offered by commercial banks to their customers and what these banks can do in order to improve their services to their clients to remain competitive. Using the case of one of the commercial banks cited in the study, a set of core activities (front stage as well as back stage) for banking staff are described and evaluated. Discusses the need for commercial banks to consider more and different marketing strategies, one of which would be internal marketing in addition to consumer‐oriented external marketing activities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a synergy between the approaches of knowledge management in a learning organisation and supply chain management so that learning chains can be created in order to unleash innovation and creativity by managing knowledge in supply chains.

Through extensive literature review, commonalities between knowledge management and supply chain management were elicited. Knowledge Advantage framework, which was developed as a part of CRC for Construction Innovation Australia, research project “Delivering improved knowledge management and ICT diffusion in Australian construction industry”, has been proposed to extend across the supply chain in order to develop learning chains.

The paper provides a conceptual grounding for future research in the area of knowledge management and supply chain management and suggests that, as unit of competition changes from organisation vs organisation to chain vs chain under supply chain management, learning organisation itself will not be an answer to the complex and dynamic business environment. The learning chains are to be created instead, through managing knowledge in supply chains that will facilitate innovation and creativity essentially required to thrive in the unpredictable business environment of today.

The paper explores the role of knowledge management to serve as such a vehicle in the emerging paradigm of supply chain management through which innovation and creativity can be unleashed by a collaborative effort of all the members of the supply chain. This paper explains how the benefit derived from a KM initiative termed as “knowledge advantage framework (K‐adv)”, originally developed for a certain single organisation, can be extended across the supply chain partners, which helps creating a culture of knowledge sharing through which a knowledge advantage for the whole supply chain can be developed. It can then be used to unleash creativity and innovation in the construction projects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school administrators' power sources and teachers' organizational trust levels.

The sample of the study, which employed a survey research method, consisted of 376 primary school teachers in Kutahya, a city in western Turkey. The data gathering instrument of the study incorporated “School Administrators' Organizational Power Sources Scale” and “Organizational Trust Scale”. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis were used to analyze the data.

According to the research findings, the participant teachers' organizational trust levels were high. When power sources used by school administrators were considered, they positively correlated with the teachers' organizational trust perceptions at a moderate level. However, only referent power was the significant predictor of organizational trust perceptions, while referent power, expert power and reward power were significant predictors of trust in administrator. Although the other power sources were highly preferred, they did not have an influence on employees' organizational trust perceptions. Power sources used by administrators explained approximately two‐fifths of total organizational trust perceptions of the teachers and three‐fifths of trust in administrator perceptions.

The research was limited to state primary school teachers' perceptions.

The research findings could be used to analyze primary school teachers' organizational trust environment. To increase the organizational trust levels of the staff, school administrators can prefer the power of expertise, charisma and awards. In this respect, conducting studies especially to develop the expertise of the administrators can contribute to the development of the trust perceptions of the staff.

Although there are studies on organizational trust, research connected to the relationship between power sources preferred by administrators and organizational trust has not been found. Furthermore, organizational power at schools is one of the disregarded fields of education.