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Begins by summarizing Stafford Beer's minimal model proposed in his report on the organization of Manchester Business School in 1970, and the conclusions made by Sir Douglas Hague, when Beer's model was used as a framework to examine current business school practices and a vision for the twenty‐first century. To facilitate learning in a “reality” which closely resembled situations in A‐space, a business simulator course was designed and its cybernetics is explained to show how Beer's ideas were actually used to teach Beer's ideas. Also delineates the experiences of the students' practical use of Beer's VSM. Continuing the theme to interplay teaching, research and consultancy, describes the concept, model and the implementation of Janus — The Centre for Systems Thinking and Organizational Transformation; a centre for those who wish to study, develop, apply and promote Stafford Beer's ideas and works.

This paper sets out to draw on the insights of “Stafford Beer, the whole man” as portrayed within the Stafford Beer Archive at Liverpool John Moores University.

After reviewing these seminal contributions, the authors seek to use evidence from published texts, restricted documents, and from personal conversations to present how he operated as a practitioner, reflecting on the craft of how he explored the nature of novel situations, performing the simultaneous roles of guide, philosopher and friend.

The authors attempt to present a perspective of Stafford Beer's (SB) particular contributions to the discipline of management science as an opportunity to the profession for renewal and development, in particular, around managerial cybernetics.

The final section presents the passion of the authors that the archive should be dedicated to a “living connection” as Stafford had wished.

This study articulately flags up SB's contribution to management science.

The purpose of this paper is to present a narrative history of the birth of human resource management in the New Zealand hotel sector. This historical development is analysed through the influence of changes in the national economic and employment relations context, the demise of national corporatist structures and individual and enterprise level agency. Thereby, the paper provides a new explanatory framework for the origins of human resource management in hotels and also presents this unique birth of human resource management as a microcosm of the wider social, political and economic “big bang” that fundamentally changed the course of employment relations in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s.

The data for this paper were gathered as part of a larger historical study of employment relations in the New Zealand hotel sector from 1955 to 2000. The sources for the study included semi-structured interviews and archival research, which were interpreted using manual thematic analysis.

The paper presents an original explanation of the birth of human resource management in New Zealand hotels by drawing on historical changes in national frameworks, corporatist approaches and individual agency, and thereby, it illustrates the uniqueness and intensity associated with the implementation of human resource management in New Zealand hotels.

This paper makes a significant contribution to the scant literature on the historical origins of human resource management. It also explains the historical and contextual embeddedness of various employment relations approaches in New Zealand hotels.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of financial factors on motivating college students to consider teaching in hard-to-staff rural schools. The role of perceived respectability of the profession was also explored.

This work relies on an explanatory sequential mixed-method design, that surveyed college students across all majors at a regional public university, then interviewed a subset of participants to improve understanding. Quantitative and qualitative results were compared and synthesized.

Results from an ordinal logistic regression demonstrate the importance of base salary, retirement benefits and respondents’ view of the respectability of the teaching profession as influential for their willingness to teach in the rural target school district. These findings were validated by the qualitative results that found perceptions of respectability had both a joint and separate influence with salaries. Results also demonstrate that most students were amenable to rural teaching and to lower starting salaries than their current chosen occupation, provided their individual minimum salary threshold was met ( x ¯ = 36 percent above the state average beginning teacher salary).

Few empirical studies exist that examine college student recruitment into rural hard-to-staff districts via a multimodal narrative. This study addresses this, focusing on college students across majors to explore both recruitment into the district and into the profession. This work is relevant considering the financial disinvestment in traditional public education and the de-professionalization of the teaching profession that has led to the recent season of teacher strikes in the USA.

This paper describes our experiences from a two‐year research study to introduce evidence‐based practice (EBP) through a set of electronic information tools into two Canadian health regions. The improvisational model of technological change by Orlikowski and Hofman (1997) is used to provide the conceptual foundations for understanding the pattern of evolution associated with the tools observed in these two settings over time. Key areas to consider when changing practice identified from this study are time availability, intended use, adequate training, clinical champions, work practice fit, system refinement, around‐the‐clock support and environment influence. Health organizations should also distinguish anticipated, emergent and opportunistic changes and improvise accordingly when introducing EBP information tools in a setting that is characteristically complex, dynamic and unpredictable.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the details of developments to research works in the distribution characteristics of the air gaps within firefighters’ clothing and research methods to evaluate the effect of air gaps on the thermal protective performance of firefighters’ clothing.

In this paper, the distribution of air gaps within firefighters’ clothing was first analyzed, and the air gaps characteristics were summarized as thickness, location, heterogeneity, orientation and dynamics. Then, the evaluation of the air gap on the thermal protective performance of fighters’ clothing was reviewed for both experimental and numerical studies.

The air gaps within clothing layers and between clothing and skin play an important role in determining the thermal protective performance of firefighters’ protective clothing. It is obvious that research works on the effects of actual air gaps entrapped in firefighters’ clothing on thermal protection are comparatively few in number, primarily focusing on static and uniform air gaps at the fabric level. Further studies should be conducted to define the characteristic of air gap, deepen the understand of mechanism of heat transfer and numerically simulate the 3D dynamic heat transfer in clothing to improve the evaluation of thermal protective performance provided by the firefighters’ clothing.

Air gaps within thermal protective clothing play a crucial role in the protective performance of clothing and provide an efficient way to provide fire-fighting occupational safety. To accurately characterize the distribution of air gaps in firefighters’ clothing under high heat exposure, the paper will provide guidelines for clothing engineers to design clothing for fighters and optimize the clothing performance.

This paper is offered as a concise reference for researchers’ further research in the area of the effect of air gaps within firefighters’ clothing under thermal exposure.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The official earthquake protection instructions for schools and kindergartens in Israel have recently been updated from the traditional “drop, cover and hold on” approach to the “flee outside to an open space” approach. This paper aims to describe the decision-making process, discuss the dilemmas behind it and suggest new insights for challenging current instructions in other countries.

The authors analyze human behavior patterns during earthquakes in general, and at schools in particular, while taking into consideration the environment (in terms of applying building codes and the level of earthquake risk in various zones), personal characteristics (age, gender and past experience) and earthquake characteristics (intensity and duration).

Five aspects should be taken into consideration when changing current earthquake instructions: the general official earthquake protection instructions, the structure and construction of schools and kindergartens, common behavior during emergencies, warning systems and the need to establish standardized protection instructions and guidelines for every school and kindergarten in the country.

Policymakers in other countries should critique current instructions to maximize citizens’ chances of survival and mitigate possible earthquake hazards, including by improving risk communication with the public.

The paper describes a national decision-making process which questions current official earthquake instructions at schools and kindergartens, based on evidence gained from current construction conditions, human behavior analysis and other countries’ experiences.