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The purpose of this paper is to detail the award-winning approach to achieving gold-standard safety and efficiency used by the Travis Perkins Group, a UK chain of builders’ merchant and do-it-yourself stores.

This paper focuses on company culture, teamwork, management style, communication, recruitment and training procedures.

The authors describe how implementing a company-wide culture of collaboration and engagement with business goals has directly affected both safety and efficiency, including a number of success stories detailing how employee contributions have resulted in practical solutions to challenges. It has also resulted in the group’s building–trade supplier subsidiary company Travis Perkins, achieving gold level in Transport for London’s fleet-operator recognition scheme.

This paper shows the positive and company-wide implications of fostering an inclusive, collaborative environment for employees.

The key role management plays in fostering employee engagement and the value of listening to, and acting on, employee feedback have been highlighted.

A number of HR practices that aid communication and motivation among employees have been explained. This paper shows that strong training and communication processes have a positive effect on employee motivation and work ethic, leading workers at all levels to contribute ideas and feedback that, in multiple cases, have led to changes in procedures that positively affect workers, customers and profitability.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the deviant behaviour of individuals in organisations. Deviants are those who depart from organisational norms. A typology of perceived deviant behaviour is developed from the deviance literature, and subsequently tested.

Star Trek: Into Darkness text is qualitatively analysed as a data source. Three different character arcs are analysed in relation to organisational deviance. Starfleet is the specific, fictional, organisational context.

We found that the typology of deviance is conceptually robust, and facilitates categorisation of different types of deviant behaviour, over time.

Deviance is socially ascribed; so better categorisation of such behaviour improves our understanding of how specific behaviour might deviate from organisational norms, and how different behaviours can mean individuals can be viewed positively or negatively over time.

Further research might determine management responses to the different forms of deviance, and unpack the processes where individuals eschew ‘averageness’ and become deviants.

The typology advanced has descriptive validity to describe deviant behaviour.

Social institutions such as organisations ascribe individual deviants, both negatively and positively.

This chapter extends our understanding of positive and negative deviance in organisations by developing a new typology of deviant behaviour. This typology has descriptive validity in understanding deviant behaviour. Our understanding of both positive and negative deviance in organisational contexts is enhanced, as well as the utility of science fiction literature in ethical analysis.

Prior research has shown that a work environment that facilitates work-life balance not only benefits the personal lives of employees but also leads to better job performance and ethical decision-making. Allocation of time between career and personal life is an age-old challenge for working people. Work-life balance refers to the manner in which people distribute time between their jobs and other activities, such as family, personal pursuits, and community involvement. This study compares the work-life balance perspectives of current and future accountants. Three research questions are examined. The first relates to the importance accountants place on work-life balance. The second concerns how work-life balance perspectives of current practitioners compare to future accountants. The third considers how gender differences affect work-life balance perspectives. Data for analysis was obtained via a survey of current accounting practitioners and of future accountants (students near graduation). Findings indicate that both current and future accountants believe that a healthy work-life balance is connected to work satisfaction, work performance, and ethical decision-making.

This paper hypothesizes that a system of accounting underpinned by attributions of harm has the capacity, more than conventional accounting, to elicit empathic concern among managers, by becoming the mediating link between organisational responsibility and concern for the “other”.

The literature-inspired reflections presented in this paper stem from the theoretical perspective of care-ethics supported by the notions of empathy and proximity to highlight how the propensity to empathise is mediated by attributions of harm and responsibility.

The proposed “new” accounting, coined “connected accounting” is proposed because of its potential to make visible the neglected and marginalised segments of society that presently lie hidden in conventional accounting. Accounting for the effects of organisational practice on people and society is expected to strengthen the care-ethic relationship between key actors – managers, accountants and stakeholders.

The paper is limited by the assumptions that underpin the conceptualised notion of “Connected Accounting”.

This essay introduces to the accounting ethics literature the role of emotion and empathic care in accounting, including sociological aspects of accounting reflecting the ongoing quest for understanding the processes and consequences of accounting as a social practice.

In the past couple of decades, higher education systems have been in transition in sub-Saharan Africa. The phenomenal growth of private, for-profit higher education institutions is almost universal. The global trends in higher education have affected the universities in sub-Saharan Africa as well. This chapter critically examines the rapid growth of private universities as a result of globalization and its impact on society. Although the research covers only Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, the findings have broad implications for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (Jokivirta, 2006). The chapter is divided into four major parts, namely globalization and the knowledge economy; the evolution of private higher education in the region, using two of the oldest universities as examples; the growth of private universities and the challenges facing them; and the linkages between foreign institutions and local ones. The empirical research on which this chapter is based is part of a longitudinal study, 2001–2006, of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa.

With the introduction of optical disc technologies in the mid‐1980s, access to periodical literature has entered a new era. Although librarians perceive inadequacies with some of the new systems and the means by which they deliver information, users have embraced them enthusiastically.

Studies of marketplace cultures emphasize the benefits of communal consumption and explain the ways that brand managers can leverage subcultures and brand communities. The ephemeral and often non‐commercial nature of consumer tribes means that they are more difficult to manage. This paper, aims to suggest that a necessary pre‐requisite for understanding how to engage with consumer tribes is to identify how consumers become members of tribes.

Data are drawn from a five‐year ethnographic study of the archetypical club culture tribe that utilized a variety of data collection methods including participant observation and in‐depth interviewing.

The paper identifies “learning to be tribal” as a communal practice that occurs through three interconnected processes of engagement, imagination and alignment.

This paper makes three contributions: it clearly distinguishes between the three main forms of communal consumption found in the marketing literature; it identifies how consumer tribes are formed; and it questions received wisdom and shows how tribal theory can guide managers to offer products and services as learning resources that facilitate tribal practices.

Argues that interlending services in Canada increasingly rely on new technologies. Discusses librarians′ use of new developments such as telefacsimile, CD‐ROM, high bandwidth networks, and OSI based systems. Shows that technical developments have served as a catalyst for extensive service and technical planning of national and regional interlending services.

If law's foundational promise lies in the belief that it promotes the social good, then we need to reassess the limits of that promise. Exploring the often problematic translation of legal goods into social ones, the central claim is that the legal discipline has been limited by a “legal imperative” that manifests itself in an excessive focus upon law as a social tool and attitude of complacency in the face of law's limits. Seeking to displace this approach, the author argues for an attitudinal shift that expresses honesty about limits, greater social inquisitiveness and care about law's promise.