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Increasingly, managers are harried by rapidly accelerating technological changes, globalization, and new competitors. How can they cope with the mercurial environments their firms are facing today? Should they stop wasting precious time thinking strategically and instead concentrate on action? Should they forget about careful pre‐planning and use their energy to try enough different approaches so some will surely succeed? Has strategizing as we know it become obsolete in today's chaotic environment?

This chapter intends to provide a reflexive discussion of the experience I loosely refer to as the ‘supervisory relationship breakdown’, which led me to withdraw from a Professional Doctorate in the penultimate year of completion. The event left an indelible impact upon me; a reminder of my blackness, the contrast between that and the ivory tower of academia and the emotional toil I endured as each incident unfolded, ultimately leading to my exit and the shattering of my emotional wellbeing. The term ‘supervisory relationship breakdown’ is a superficial reference to a complex entanglement of what I deemed to be dysconscious racism and attempts situated historically to control people of colour through education. I will explore how I as a black woman in academia believe I am perceived through a dysconscious racial lens, a lens shaped by a perception to maintain white privilege. I posit how a misalignment existed between who I am and who I was perceived to be by my doctoral supervisor. The space between this misalignment became filled with inequity, tension and oppression, culminating in the relationship breakdown. I present an ‘implosion’ of the relationship as a metaphor for the embodied affect having to withdraw from the doctorate had on me; it felt as though my ‘self’ – body, mind and spirit – were broken, in a state of collapse which I did not know how I would recover from. I conclude with support and renewed hope, I returned to academia and found an alternative approach for completing my doctorate.

This paper seeks to offer a profile of Peter Bullimore, one of the most dynamic lived experience speakers and trainers in the mental health world.

A profile of Peter is built up through an in‐depth interview by psychologist Jerome Carson. Areas covered include: his experience of hearing voices; his work in Australia and New Zealand; stigma; recovery; inspiring individuals in mental health; his personal illness and medication; the media; and changes and challenges.

Peter tells us that hearing voices are signs of a problem not an illness, and are often linked to trauma. He feels British work on recovery is in advance of that in Australia and New Zealand. He sees a day when it will no longer be necessary to use the term schizophrenia. Instead of recovery people should be thinking of discovery.

For too long the only voices that have been heard in the mental health field have been the professional voices. Peter's is one of many new inspirational voices to have emerged from the developing service user movement.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical review of the work of Tom Peters.

Notes a degree of narrative experimentation in the works of Tom Peters. Offers a narrative typology to describe this narrative change, suggests a number of reasons for this narrative experimentation and outlines topics for future research in this area.

The paper suggests that Peters' narrative experimentation reflects twin frustrations. Namely Peters' frustration with the short‐term orientations and innate conservatism of the US business élite and peripheralization in Corporate America.

The paper proposes an original narrative typology for the examination of Peters' work and suggests directions for future research.

The training world is getting quite regulated. It has its law‐givers and disciplinarians and pupils. Some would say it has bureaucracy. I want to defy a few rules by describing something that started by accident, is as yet incomplete and cannot be proved to have met the conventional objective. This is the Do‐it‐yourself Statistics School. It involves participation by certain students in the preparation and conduct of a course. By including them in the partnership it drastically alters the emotional climate in which the event takes place. (People who feel themselves to be non‐numerate don't have to switch off here: I am dealing with method and process, touching only lightly on content.)

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the role of a group facilitator when taking a dialogical stance. A special interest is facilitator’s processual responsiveness and its potential for supporting a dialogic approach to process facilitation.

Theoretically, the article is based on dialogue and dialectic relationship theory. Empirically, it is based on pragmatic analysis of excerpts from audio recordings of a two-day process facilitation with an organizational group called KUDIAS.

The analysis highlights the importance of processual responsiveness of the facilitator in terms of focused attention to the process as well as to the interpersonal relations between the participants in the process. Being processually responsive, the facilitator supports the process in becoming dialogic toward all participants’ perspectives and in creating a climate characterized by curiosity, wondering, exploration and recognition. However, facilitator’s processual responsiveness also requires the ability to balance the process between support and confrontation.

Processual responsiveness is developed and discussed theoretically as well as empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a group of men relate to food celebrities in the contemporary Swedish food-media landscape, especially celebrity chefs on TV.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 men in Sweden (22–88 years of age), with different backgrounds and with a variety of interest in food.

The paper demonstrates different ways in which the men relate to food celebrities. The men produce cultural distinctions of taste and symbolic boundaries, primarily related to gender and age, but also class. Through this, a specific position of “just right” emerged. This position is about aversion to excess, such as exaggerated gendered performances or pretentious forms of cooking. One individual plays a particularly central role in the stories: Actor and Celebrity Chef Per Morberg. He comes across as a complex cultural figure: a symbol of slobbish and tasteless cooking and a symbol of excess. At the same time, he is mentioned as the sole example of the exact opposite – as a celebrity chef who represents authenticity.

Scholars and policy makers must be careful of assuming culinary or social influence on consumers from food celebrities simply based on their media representations. As shown here and in similar studies, people relate to them and interpret their performances in a variety of ways.

This is one of the few studies that target the role of food celebrities in contemporary Western consumer culture from the point of view of the consumers rather than analyses of media representations.

An exploratory study examines the relationships between particular managerial practices and qualities of soft intelligence information provided by the sales forces of firms responding to a mail survey. The hypotheses explored were formulated from a review of the literature and anecdotal data. Among the findings are positive associations between managerial practices designed to improve the information provided by the salesforce ‐ such as training, involvement in decision making, recognition and performance evaluation ‐ and various dimensions of the information gleaned from the salesforce. This paper recommends the use of the salesforce as a source of marketing information, and identifies key managerial practices which may be used to improve the flow of information from the salesforce to the organisation's information system.

According to neo-institutional scholars, experts need to support decoupling, yet doing so may be more or less subjectively understandable for those who are employed as experts. The authors mobilize the phenomenological concept of the life-world as a lens for reconstructing how individuals give meaning to decoupling processes. Based on a hermeneutic analysis of a human resource management expert’s reflections on his activities, the authors highlight the subjective experience of decoupling as a process of solving tensions between an individual’s convictions and the relevances imposed by an organization. The authors conclude that a phenomenological lens enriches microfoundations debates by focusing on an individual’s learning within the framework of an imposed organizational reality.