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SCENE: A bright September morning in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York. There's a giant screen center stage and scattered TV monitors emitting a cold blue light. A short burly man steps up to the podium before about a hundred members of the Wall Street community and the press. The man is Hicks Waldron, CEO of Avon Products, and he's staged this two‐hour presentation to unveil a freshly minted corporate plan for the Avon Division, which accounts for about three‐quarters of the entire Avon company's sales.

“Planning a Turnaround at Avon” was the case study in the January issue of Planning Review. John Thackray's article analyzed Avon's new plan for Beauty Products, its largest division, accounting for three‐quarters of its sales. This follow‐up is based on the presentation by Hicks B. Waldron, chairman and chief executive officer of Avon Products, Inc., of the corporate plan to security analysts in New York on March 20. The analysts' reactions to the plan, excerpted from their reports to clients, are inter‐spersed throughout Waldron's report.

The large and growing literature dealing with leadership has not led to an obvious increase in either the quantity or quality of leaders, particularly transformational leaders. My cursory review of the related literature leads me to the conclusion that this lack is due to the ambiguity of the concepts of leadership and transformation.

Whether they're growing, downsizing, restructuring, or just trying to survive, today's organizations are struggling to sail through the “storms of change.” What's more, the management waters don't promise to be any smoother in the 1990s. So the stormy seas theme of this year's Planning Forum conference in San Francisco seemed most appropriate. In this review I will try to relate the insights from the sessions I attended to the theme of coping with change.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a unified understanding of materiality is possible, given that conceptual pluralism represents a key characteristic of materiality approaches in sustainability reporting.

This paper systematically reviews and examines materiality conceptualizations in sustainability disclosure research and practice, utilizing Gallie’s (1956) analytical framework of essentially contested concepts. The framework enables the separation of conceptual confusion from essential contestation. Whereas reaching conceptual consensus is possible in the former, the hurdles to conceptual agreement are insurmountable in the latter.

This paper reveals that the prevailing lack of consensus surrounding materiality is grounded in its essential contestation, not in conceptual confusion. This robustly supports the projection of conceptual plurality as materiality’s most probable future.

Building on the materiality concept’s essentially contested nature, this paper calls for future research that explicitly embraces the concept’s plural character and more interdisciplinary research.

As a unified understanding of materiality is unlikely to evolve, standard-setters should provide a clear definition of the underlying materiality concept, offer specific guidance on materiality assessment and issue joint documents that detail the similarities, differences and interconnections between their respective materiality frameworks.

Projecting plurality as materiality’s most probable future underscores the importance of users of sustainability reports understanding the materiality concept applied by the reporting entity and the respective consequences for identifying material sustainability issues.

From this paper’s novel insight that materiality is an essentially contested concept, this paper derives two overarching future research directions and offers a broad set of exemplary research questions.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework for workplace information literacy based on a case study at the Central University of Technology (CUT), Free State (South Africa).

The framework is based on a literature survey covering case studies from the private, public and academic sector and a case study conducted at the CUT, Free State (South Africa). A mixed methods approach was followed using questionnaires, individual interviews and focus group interviews. Descriptive statistics and qualitative data were collected.

The data analysis reveals a need as well as support for workplace information literacy. It addresses institutional buy-in, the need for alignment to the institutional strategy, inclusion of workplace information literacy in job descriptions, whether workplace information literacy should be optional or mandatory, whether it should address the needs of all staff members, the responsibility for a workplace information literacy programme, perceived benefits, etc.

The proposed framework can be used at the CUT, Free State. As a general framework it can also be used in other academic contexts as well as in the public and private sector.

Although several studies on workplace information literacy have been reported, the literature survey did not trace a suitable framework that can guide the design and implementation of workplace information literacy in academic contexts. This paper intends to contribute towards filling this gap.

This research is situated at a metropolitan university in Melbourne (Australia) where the authors work in initial teacher education programs within the same faculty. The purpose of this study is to raise awareness that collegial, collaborative and “co-caring” environments can foster an improved sense of belonging, acceptance and inclusion in the academy. They also argue that communities of practice may foster an improved sense of belonging that enhances empowerment and harmony among all staff in academia in pandemic times and beyond.

The authors draw on case study methodology as a qualitative approach to understand and illuminate the phenomena under study. Case study methodology provides an in-depth understanding of their trifocal voices, as it allows them to voice their stories through collaborative autoethnography. The authors use self-narratives to unpack their sense of belonging in academic spaces. Collaborative autoethnography (CAE) enabled them to work together as a team of women and as a community of researchers.

The findings foreground the responsibilities of casual staff while concomitantly articulating the challenges faced by both permanent and casual staff to create a “sense of belonging” in the academy. The authors found that social connection engenders a sense of belonging and inclusion within a space that is often beset by neoliberal ideologies of competitiveness and individual achievement. They articulate their stress, pressure and uncertainty as permanent and as casual academics working supportively to develop and maintain identity in very difficult circumstances. They share how they developed professional relationships which bring unforeseen benefits and personal friendship at a time of especially restrictive practices.

The paper includes three voices, a limitation in itself, thus generalisations cannot be made to other academics or institutions. Employing CAE offers the possibility of delving more deeply into the emotional complexities inherent within this method for further research. They recommend a sense of “co-caring” as a form of pastoral care in the “induction program” for all academics including casual staff. While this may not “strategically” fit in with many because of power imbalances, the journey of co-caring and sharing and building friendships within the academy has a limited presence in the literature and calls for further investigation.

The authors draw attention to the need for higher education institutes to recognise the role permanent staff play when working with casual academics.

The authors draw attention to the need to be inclusive and collaborative as a way to improve the divide and strengthen connections between permanent and casual academics at university worksites. This is imperative given the shifting demographics within Australia and its workforce. They also highlight issues of race in the academy.

This is an original work carried out by the authors. It raises concerns about a sense of belonging in the academy, job certainty and the place of people of colour as these issues may also be experienced by other full-time and casual academics.