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The purpose of this paper is to examine the controversy surrounding the 2006 extension of the Macy brand to the Marshall Field's stores. Initial reactions, as well as on‐going resistance, to the re‐branding provide a means of understanding of the strength of retail brand, how it is established and whether “symbols and traditions” may be separated from retail brand per se.

The effort of Federated Department Stores (later Macy's Inc.) to rebrand Marshall Field as Macy's offers a unique opportunity to understand retail brand. This paper relies on news accounts for a chronology of events leading up to and following the Marshall Field's re‐branding as Macy's. In addition, analysis of postings to the customer‐originated fieldsfanschicago blog is used to understand, from the consumer's viewpoint, how retail brand is formed and to consider the strength of retail brand.

The paper concludes that retail brand may be as strong as product brand, that personal experience, as well as retailer‐controlled variables, is strongly associated with retail brand, and that retailer “symbols and traditions” are an integral component of retail brand.

This paper examines retail brand in the context of the extension of family brand. The use of blog posts permits a first‐hand account of how customers perceive retail brand and of how intense their attachment to such brands may be.

The purpose of this paper is to study the radical innovation process behind the adoption and implementation of building information modelling (BIM) for a specialty contracting small or medium enterprise (SME). This paper offers two distinct perspectives on BIM adoption and implementation, which are underrepresented in the current literature: the SME perspective and the specialty contractor perspective. It also attempts to bridge the gap between the growing literature on BIM adoption and implementation and the established literature on innovation by developing the notion of embedded contexts in the innovation process.

A mixed-method, longitudinal case study approach was used in this research project to study the evolution of the innovation process and its impact on the Organisation over time. The objectives of this research were to investigate and document the different factors mediating the BIM adoption and implementation process for the Organisation across various contexts, the mechanisms put in place to facilitate this process and the perceived impact within the Organisation.

The initial transition to BIM represented a radical innovation for the Organisation. Subsequently, a series of incremental innovations took place to further advance the Organisation’s BIM capabilities. This innovation process is influenced by different layers of embedded contextual factors, which can be mitigated by, among others, a clear strategic approach towards the innovation process. Furthermore, despite a limited sphere of influence, specialty contractors can leverage BIM within their own supply chain to reap significant benefits.

This paper offers an in-depth study of radical innovation within a specialty contracting SME. This study discusses the influence of four embedded contexts on innovation for a specialty contracting SME: the industry context, the institutional context, the organisational context and the project context. It also offers insight into the factors, mechanisms and their impact on the innovation process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the critical types of knowledge lost when employees depart companies in the oil and gas field.

The study adopts a grounded theory methodology. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with elite informants in the oil and gas sector to gain an in-depth insight into the research problem. ATLAS.ti was used for data analysis and coding.

In the oil and gas industry, employees generally have job rotation and work at various geographical locations during their career. The departing employees possess valuable types of knowledge depending on the role and duties they have performed over the years. These include specialized technical knowledge, contextual knowledge of working at different geographical locations, knowledge of train wrecks and history of company, knowledge of relationships and networks, knowledge of business processes and knowledge of management.

The study findings might only be applicable to the oil and gas sector.

This paper fulfills an identified gap on the identification of critical areas of knowledge loss when employees depart from oil and gas companies. The study adds to the existing body of literature on this underexplored area in the knowledge management literature.

While a radical innovation can be embedded in new products or new processes, most studies to date have concentrated on barriers to radical product innovations, with little insights available about the challenges for implementation of radical process innovations.

We theorize a set of barriers to radical process innovation based on a critical case study of an oil company. Our study employs data from 14 semi-structured interviews, one complete participant-observer in the process and access to all corporate documentation. The organization being studied was eventually unable to bring the new process technology to commercialization despite the technology having both technical feasibility and substantive cost savings potential.

We identify five groups of challenges that the company faced: (1) challenges in resource mobilization, (2) challenges in piloting strategy, (3) innovation leadership tensions, (4) tensions in managing shareholders' expectations and (5) product-process innovation tension (i.e. a unique situation when a company implementing a radical process innovation and simultaneously pursues the path to commercialize it as a product innovation).

Sustainable development is one of the major challenges in our era. Process innovations are crucial for achieving sustainability without changing the final product. By providing a list of challenges that executives face in the process of commercializing a radical process innovation, we can help them to achieve sustainability more effectively.

The paper responds to the call to increase our understanding of radical process innovations by utilizing a unique ethnographic research methodology of active participant-observation complemented by independent third-party face-to-face interviews.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the work-family interface of two non-traditional forms of expatriation. The paper contributes to existing research by comparing and contrasting the experiences of international business travellers and rotational assignees, pointing out the similarities in their experiences but also showing considerable differences in how the work-family interface plays out in these two groups.

In line with the exploratory nature of the research, the authors carried out a qualitative case study drawing on interview data with rotators and international business travellers (n=20). In order to get more in-depth insights into the experiences of these two groups of assignees, the authors also used the photo-elicitation technique, which corresponds with the recent recognition that the evolving nature of international assignments requires alternative methods of inquiry to enhance the understanding of the challenges faced by them.

The study points to four major factors affecting the work-family interface: time spent away, unpredictability of work schedules, limited ability to exercise control over it as well as limited availability of organisational support. The findings illustrate that while these factors impact international business travellers and rotators alike, their intensity varies considerably in the experiences of these two groups.

The research is based on a single case study and a small sample which needs to be considered when discussing the implications of the findings. Future research can valuably extend and build on the here reported observations.

A number of practical implications are discussed, notably pertaining to the ways in which organisations can mitigate the challenges encountered by international business travellers and rotators.

The papers focuses on two groups of assignees that are underrepresented in the expatriate literature despite their increasing empirical significance in international business.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of “learning” through what we have termed “integrated development practices”. These are common organisational practices that both enhance organisational effectiveness and contribute to organisational and employee learning.

The paper analyses the ways in which learning and being a learner were talked about and enacted with regard to one of the integrated development practices identified in a study of four different organisations – safety practices, and how learning and being a learner regarding safety were legitimate in one of the organisations. Data are drawn from semi‐structured interviews with members of a variety of workgroups in one major division of the organisation.

Interviewees' responses reflected that learning was fully embedded as an accepted part of a necessary function of the organisation. This use of a learning discourse is discussed in the light of findings from an earlier study on informal learning at work that suggested that learning and the identity of being a learner were sometimes resisted in the everyday culture of work.

Using the theorisations of practice of Schatzki and the lifelong education framework of Delors the paper discusses the implications of these findings to examine when it is acceptable to articulate learning as part of work and be identified as a learner at work.

Unwanted sexual attention in sport can disrupt youth's wholehearted engagement in the activity and threaten their sense of belonging. Remaining attuned to youth sport as a distinctive yet diverse field of practice, in this chapter, we explore the types of sexual violations youths experience across sport settings, the social and situational dynamics at play and how girls and boys make sense of their experiences. Based on a subset of data from a representative survey of high school students in Norway (aged 16–19, n = 7,482), we analyse 308 short textual descriptions from youths who reported exposure to sexual violations in sport in the past year regarding what happened, where the incident took place and who was involved. Our analysis identifies and conceptualises five types of sexual violation experiences: (1) sexualised foul play, (2) sexualised sideline commentary, (3) sexualised body shaming, (4) sexualised body focus and (5) sexualised attention at the gym. These violation types shed new light on the prevalence of and gender patterns in sexual violations in youth sport. Drawing on Jaeggi's relational perspective on social practice, we discuss how sexual violations in sport can affect both youths' relation to sport and youth sport as a field of practice. We suggest that sexual violations in sport can be viewed as gendered mechanisms of alienation that narrow the diversity of participants and further align youth sport with the values and practices of elite sport.

At its best, participation observation (PO) includes the researcher living inside a formal or informal organization long enough to actually observe first-hand how the organization makes sense of its environment, frames problems and opportunities, plans and performs actions, evaluates outcomes, rewards and punishes its members, and celebrates and commiserates sacred, climatic, and/or exceptional events. The core feature of PO is being there — the researcher's presence in the same context as participants as events happen and not relying mostly on participants retrospections about what happened and the causes and consequences of what happened. In some studies PO data collection occurs unobtrusively — the researcher does not inform the organizations’ participants that she is conducting a study of their thinking and behavior — for example, in The Tearoom Trade (Humphreys, 1970) the researcher becomes a “watch queen” (lookout watching for police) in a men's room in park while others engage in homosexual acts; in The Informant (Eichenwald, 2000) an executive in an international manufacturing firm becomes an undercover researcher (with hidden cameras and listening devices) to collect data showing his colleagues planning and doing illegal price-fixing deals with executives in other firms. In most studies PO data collection is obtrusive with the organizations’ members knowing that a researcher is present for the purposes of observing, describing, and explaining what is occurring in the organization — for example, in Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1943) the American researcher lived among the natives in the south Pacific island to describe rituals relating to the transformation of child to adult; in The Used Car Game (Browne, 1976) the researcher directly observed interactions of salesmen, customers, and sales managers for seven-to-ten hours a day for 15 months with all participants knowing that the researcher was “being there” to collect data to describe and understand their thinking and behavior. The intent for this chapter is not to present a full review of the PO literature; the focus here is to illustrate an obtrusive PO study in a formal organizational context in-depth. The main goals include (1) illustrating doing PO and (2) describing the value of PO research. This chapter serves to introduce the reader to relevant organizational PO literature and provides details of applying participant observation to the study of organizational behavior. The study applies an ethnographic approach to develop flow diagrams of the information processes and decision-making stages of corporate and plant executives in developing corporate purchasing agreements with suppliers. Participant observations of the processes to develop corporate purchasing agreements were conducted along with extensive personal interviews of plant buyers at seven plant locations of Epsilon Corporation — a multinational electronics firm with headquarter offices in New York City. The results indicate that valid and useful descriptions are possible of the information processes and decisions actually used to produce corporate purchasing agreements. Several diagnostic comments are provided to each of the four phases in the processes used to develop corporate purchasing agreements. A template for applying participant observation methods in case study research concludes the chapter.

Leadership plays a key role ensuring the achievement of desired outcomes in both formal and informal groups. Insufficient leadership in policing can result in significant negative consequences for agencies and their personnel. Despite the importance of effective leadership within police organizations little is known about the process of developing effective leaders and leadership behaviors. The paper contributes to the limited available empirical knowledge using data collected from police supervisors. The intent is to assess supervisors' perceptions of how leadership abilities might best be developed and to identify the barriers inhibiting such efforts.

Open‐ended surveys are administered to students attending the FBI's National Academy, a career development program for mid‐career police supervisors. Respondents report their experiences with and perceptions of leadership development. The purposive sample of respondents provides insights from supervisors representing police agencies of various sizes and types from around the world.

Respondents indicate leadership skills are best developed through a combination of education, experience, and mentorship. Developing more effective leadership is dependent on the ability to overcome barriers, both within the profession and within individual officers. Finite resources, macro and local aspects of police culture, and failures of leadership by current executives are all viewed as working against the growth of effective leadership practices.

Given the dearth of empirical research considering dimensions of police leadership, myriad implications for future research are identified and discussed.

The findings provide important preliminary insights into the experiences and beliefs of police supervisors.