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The aim of the current study was to develop and assess a method for obtaining peer‐, selfand teacher‐nominations of the participant roles in peer victimisation appropriate for use with children between the ages of five and eight years. Sixty‐eight five‐year‐olds and 69 eight‐year‐olds and their teachers took part. Peer‐nominations (including self‐nominations) were obtained from five‐ and eight‐year‐olds for participant roles of aggressor, reinforcer, assistant, defender, outsider, passive and provocative victim; and similar nominations from their teachers. At both ages, children were able to nominate for all the roles, and consistent gender differences were found. Test‐retest reliability (over an interval of one week) was moderate to high for all roles in eight‐year‐olds, but only for aggressor and provocative victim in five‐year‐olds. There was evidence for role discrimination, but five‐year‐olds gave similar nominations for aggressor and provocative victim. Within‐class pupil agreement was significant for aggressor and provocative victim at both ages, and for passive victim and defender at eight years. Peer‐ and teacher‐ratings showed better agreement with each other than with self‐nominations. The findings are discussed in relation to children's developing abilities to identify and report various roles, as well as developmental changes in the nature of peer‐aggression.

This study aims to investigate perceptions of bullying‐like behaviours in South Korea, from young children to adults; why they happen and how people judge them.

Focus groups were conducted across different age ranges, from preschool to workplace employees, in Seoul. A total of 113 participants were shown cartoons or descriptions of negative behaviours and asked “why these happened”, and “what do you think about them?” Interview transcripts were analysed by grounded theory.

Similarities and differences across ages were found for two themes, origins and judgments of behaviours. Situational and interpersonal factors were seen as important in causing the behaviours, both in school and the workplace. Pupils aged 15‐17 and mothers considered the behaviours less acceptable than younger pupils; whereas, ten to 15‐year‐old pupils and workplace employees gave more justification of the behaviours and were more likely to attribute the situation to victim's responsibility.

This is the first study investigating perceptions of bullying‐like behaviour from a life‐span perspective and also provides findings on the particular nature of Korean bullying or wang‐ta.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.

Utilising data from 18 in‐depth case studies, this study seeks to explore training, development and human resource development (HRD) practices in European call centres. It aims to argue that the complexity and diversity of training, development and HRD practices is best understood by studying the multilayered contexts within which call centres operate. Call centres operate as open systems and training, development and HRD practices are influenced by environmental, strategic, organisational and temporal conditions.

The study utilised a range of research methods, including in‐depth interviews with multiple stakeholders, documentary analysis and observation. The study was conducted over a two‐year period.

The results indicate that normative models of HRD are not particularly valuable and that training, development and HRD in call centres is emergent and highly complex.

This study represents one of the first studies to investigate training and development and HRD practices and systems in European call centres.

Women in public accounting firms are still proportionally much fewer in number in the highest levels of the hierarchy than men, whereas recruitment at junior level tends to be increasingly gender‐balanced. This paper aims to analyse the relationships between the glass ceiling and motherhood. The mechanisms explaining the difficulties encountered by auditor mothers in their hierarchical progression within the Big Four in France are identified.

From 24 interviews with male and female auditors of various hierarchical levels, one seeks to reveal the specificity of the difficulties encountered by auditor mothers.

It is argued that, throughout their careers, they are confronted with a dilemma that often leads to their being excluded and excluding themselves from the group of “those who may become partners”. It is shown that public accounting firms place both implicit and explicit obstacles in their way, tied to a desire to neutralise the effects, deemed costly, of motherhood. Moreover, the expectations of the organisation and society as a whole conflict on many points and confront female auditors with a dilemma: how to be a good mother and have a bright career? It appears that women who want to better manage this dilemma shape working practices imposed on the whole team and implement tactics to adapt their work‐life balance (specialisation and lateral move to staff departments). This leads to individual trajectories that break out of the organisational model and account for the scarcity of women in the upper management levels in audit firms.

The paper gives voice to male auditors and shows that managing the professional life/private life dilemma is difficult for fathers as well as mothers, in the long term. Moreover, rather than thinking in terms of horizontal and vertical segregations, this paper invites one to question the concept of the glass ceiling and consider the construction of the scarcity of women in the accounting profession.

This monograph reports on the strategic and operational roles of learning and development (L&D) professionals in Irish, UK European and US organisations including multinational corporations, small to medium enterprises, the public sector and not for profit organisations. This paper aims to investigate the contextual factors influencing L&D roles in organisations, the strategic and operational roles that L&D professionals play in organisations, the competencies and career trajectories of L&D professionals, the perceptions of multiple internal stakeholders of the effectiveness of L&D roles and the relationships between context, L&D roles, competencies/expertise and perceived organisational effectiveness.

The study findings are based on the use of multiple methods. The authors gathered data from executives, senior managers, line managers, employee and L&D professionals using multiple methods: a survey (n = 440), Delphi study (n = 125) and semi-structured interviews (n = 30).

The analysis revealed that L&D professionals increasingly respond to a multiplicity of external and internal contextual influences and internal stakeholders perceived the effectiveness of L&D professionals differently with significant gaps in perceptions of what L&D contributes to organisational effectiveness. L&D professionals perform both strategic and operational roles in organisations and they progress through four career levels. Each L&D role and career level requires a distinct and unique set of foundational competencies and L&D expertise. The authors found that different contextual predictors were important in explaining the perceived effectiveness of L&D roles and the importance attached to different foundational competencies and areas of L&D expertise.

This is one of the few studies to have investigated the L&D professional role in organisations from the perspective of multiple stakeholders using multiple research methods.

Brooker’s mini-series Dead Set displays numerous representations of British masculinity in crisis. Released just as the zombie narrative was regaining momentum, the series uses the threat of an apocalypse to expose British men as weak, cowardly and ultimately monstrous. Initially set within the confines of the Big Brother house, the characters have willingly come under scrutiny for the delectation of a scandal-hungry public. The men are seen to self-consciously perform their own brands of masculinity. However, when people quickly descend from figuratively devouring each other into actually devouring each other, these masculine ideals are left in tatters, and without them, the surviving men are in constant peril.

For the purposes of this chapter, I will look specifically at three characters within the series and how their representations adhere to the ideas put forward by Anthony Clare, among others – that contemporary masculinity is in a period of crisis. I also wish to uncover how representations of masculinity within the series reflect contemporary social and political concerns within British society – a distrust of state apparatus and the rise of a particularly malicious, right wing ideology are both prevalent here. The zombie has long been acknowledged as an allegory for society’s ills – but this chapter asks: what can those fighting (or failing) against the zombie threat tell us?

Gender inequity at senior ranks in Australian public sector universities has long been recognised as a major problem. Universities are attempting to address the problem, through policies for recruitment and retention of senior women. This paper describes what happened in one faculty in a large university that has such gender equity policies when three women were appointed to head departments. At the end of a year, all three were gone. The women experienced a masculine‐oriented management culture, with little experience of feminine management values. The women and the men had different perceptions of management roles and different perceptions of alternative job opportunities. Gender issues became more visible to these senior women, but remained invisible to the men. Suggestions to improve the retention of senior women include nominating a change agent to provide support and encouragement for senior women, more transparent organisational processes and structures, and changes in hiring practices.