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The purpose of this paper is to compare the brand personality and brand user‐imagery constructs in congruity theory to examine their relationship in the image congruence model as a basis of modeling brand attitudes for publicly and privately consumed brands.

A total of 272 surveys measured subjects' self‐image perceptions and subjects' perceptions of brand personality and user‐imagery. Congruence measures were used as indicators of the difference between respondent self‐image and each brand's image, and served as independent variables in stepwise regressions with brand attitude as the dependent variable.

The results indicated that, for publicly consumed brands, user‐imagery‐based congruence measures contributed more often to the explanatory power of the model. For privately consumed brands, brand personality congruity produced significant regressions but did not account for a large portion of explained variance, while user‐imagery only entered one private brand model.

Brand personality and brand user‐imagery are often used interchangeably in self‐congruity theory research. Although both constructs have received past research attention, no studies have compared them in the same study. The study fills the gap in the literature and enhances the usefulness of the self‐brand congruity model, providing a knowledge base for determining an overall brand positioning strategy.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

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 purpose of this research is to more deeply understand how stress impacts the physical and mental health of employees and what management can do to attenuate the impact of stress on employee health. While the relationship between stress and employee health has received some empirical support in the literature (e.g. Cooper and Cartwright, 1994), less is known about workplace variables that may mitigate the negative effects of stress on health. This study aims to contribute to the literature by exploring three important workplace variables that could lessen the negative effects of stress on health.

A diverse group of employees from two healthcare organizations in the United States of America were surveyed about their work environments, job stress, mental health and physical health. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to investigate three unique workplace mitigators of the stress-health relationship.

Results support perceived organizational support, procedural justice and managerial perspective-taking as variables that serve to make individuals hardier to the health consequences of stressful work. However, different moderating processes seem to account for mental health (perceived organizational support) and physical health (perspective-taking), while procedural justice mitigates the effect of stress on both mental and physical health.

This study contributes to an enhanced understanding of the relationships between stress and mental and physical health in the workplace. In particular, three workplace factors associated with managerial practices were identified that organizations can utilize to protect employees from the negative health consequences of stressful work. These findings can assist managers and organizations who are interested in improving employee health.

This chapter examines the definitions of bullying used by students and adults in elementary schools and the effects that these definitions had within the broader school culture.

I combine interviews with 53 students and 10 adults and over 430 hours of participant observation with fifth grade students at two rural elementary schools.

Definitions of bullying held by those in these schools typically differed from those used by researchers. Even when individuals held definitions that were in line with those used by researchers, however, a focus on identifying bullies rather than on behaviors that fit definitions of bullying contributed to a school culture in which negative interactions were normalized and student reports of these behaviors were discouraged.

This study is limited to two elementary schools in the rural Midwest and cannot be seen as representative of all schools. Support for my findings from other research combined with similar definitions and school cultures in both schools, however, suggest that these definitions and practices are part of a broader cultural context of bullying in the United States.

These findings suggest that schools might be better served by focusing less on labels like “bully” and more on particular behaviors that are to be taken seriously by students, teachers, staff members, and principals.

Although other researchers have studied definitions of bullying, none have combined these definitions with observational data on the broader school contexts in which those definitions are created and used.

Most of the managers I meet (and I reckon to have met a few thousand over the last ten years) are dissatisfied with their lot. Many have an ambition to “retire at forty‐five” (or thirty‐five, depending on their age); a perceptible minority “drop out”, watched more or less wistfully by many of their colleagues; most of all, they tell you they want to do their own thing, to work for themselves.

The British countryman is a well‐known figure; his rugged, obstinate nature, unyielding and tough; his part in the development of the nation, its history, not confined to the valley meadows and pastures and uplands, but nobly played in battles and campaigns of long ago. His “better half”—a term as true of yeoman stock as of any other—is less well known. She is as important a part of country life as her spouse; in some fields, her contribution has been even greater. He may grow the food, but she is the provider of meals, dishes, specialties, the innovating genius to whom most if not all British food products, mostly with regional names and now well‐placed in the advertising armentarium of massive food manufacturers, are due. A few of them are centuries old. Nor does she lack the business acumen of her man; hens, ducks, geese, their eggs, cut flowers, the produce of the kitchen garden, she may do a brisk trade in these at the gate or back door. The recent astronomical price of potatoes brought her a handsome bonus. If the basic needs of the French national dietary are due to the genius of the chef de cuisine, much of the British diet is due to that of the countrywoman.

In this chapter, the author draws on a historical case study of the Australian wine industry to explore variations in collective agency. The inductively derived process model illustrates the emergence of a new profession of scientific winemaking, which unfolds in three phases. Each phase is characterized by a distinct form of agency: distributed agency during the earliest phase, coordinated agency during later phases, and orchestrated agency during consolidation. In addition to exploring the temporal shifts in agency, the study includes a detailed analysis of the early stages of distributed agency, examining how collective agency is achieved in the absence of shared intentions.

“Productivity Partnerships”, a regulars series of demonstrations held at The 600 Centre in Shepshed, saw the UK launch of a new machine loading robot system by Fanuc Robotics. A description is given of the rail‐mounted 6‐axis robot together with some of the claimed benefits. It is a system that has been well received in the USA and two brief examples of installations from that side of the Atlantic are given.