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This case study aims to explore how coaching capability and leadership behaviors were developed at Ageas UK in order to improve business performance and create a cultural change at all levels of the organization.

Following its introduction in early 2010, the Full Potential Group “High performance through coaching” program continues to deliver highly‐pragmatic, experiential and business focused workshops across the Ageas UK management teams. The workshops incorporate a two‐day session together with a one‐day follow‐up six to eight weeks later.

With close to 150 of its management community having taken part in the program to date and receiving ongoing support from L&D to cascade and sustain the key principles, the return on investment at Ageas UK has been significant. Business performance gains from both a sales revenue and customer “upgrade” perspective have been considerable and managers are feeling more empowered and better able to lead, guide and support their teams.

The article shows that the key success factors for embedding coaching into Ageas' company culture and making it stick long‐term are: pro‐active support from the board and senior management teams; fully aligning the coaching program to the Ageas UK business strategy; creating a “full potential” transformational attitude and mindset of continual development and improvement; and executing a comprehensive sustainability plan.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.

This study applies theoretical perspectives from urban, environmental, and organization studies to examine if “smart growth” represents an ecological restructuring of the political economy of conventional urban development, long theorized as a “growth machine” (Molotch, H. (1976) The city as growth machine: Toward a political economy of place. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 309–332; Logan & Molotch, 2007); the purpose is to determine if there is a “smart growth machine.”

Nine smart growth projects (SGPs) in four cities in California and Oregon were identified and semistructured interviews were held with the respective developers, architects, and civic officials involved in their implementation process. Comparative, descriptive, and grounded approaches were used to generate themes from interviews and other data sources.

The findings suggest that an ecological modernization of urban political economy occurs through the coordination of entrepreneurial action, technical expertise, and “smart” regulation. Individual and institutional entrepreneurs shift the organizational field of urban development. Technical expertise is needed to make projects sustainable and financially feasible. Finally, a “smart” regulatory framework that balances regulations and incentives is needed to forge cooperative relationships between local governments and developers. This constellation of actors and institutions represents a smart growth machine.

The author questions whether urban growth can become “smart” using an original study of nine SGPs in four cities across California and Oregon.

Recent research and scholarship explore and attempt to understand why certain modern library organizations and workplaces suffer from systemic dysfunction. There is evidence that a history of ineffectual library administration, poor leadership, and lack of communication creates an environment which breeds incivility and toxic behavior, including occurrences of mobbing, bullying, and harassment in certain library environments. Yet, it's been observed that despite these destructive behaviors and ensuing trauma, some library employees choose to remain employed in, and even increasingly committed to, these same dysfunctional workplaces. The application of organizational commitment models, such as Meyer and Allen's, as well as the findings of librarian turnover analysis account for the practical reasons why library employees remain in dysfunctional organizations; examples include fear of negative consequences associated with resignation or a sense of duty to one's patrons, organization, or profession. These models and studies, however, do not explain the paradox of increased employee commitment and loyalty to traumatic and dysfunctional library workplaces.

To understand this conflicting behavior, which has yet to be examined in library literature, the authors apply the concept of Corporate Stockholm Syndrome (CSS). CSS, a type of trauma bonding with origins in psychology and business, serves as a foundation to explain why library employees remain in workplaces in which they've experienced dysfunctional behavior and related trauma. Reviewing documented cases of library workplace incivility and trauma, the authors will apply the CSS framework as an explanation for the increased level of library employee commitment to dysfunctional workplaces.

This paper proposes that the development of a layoff policy gives an organization a competitive advantage over organizations without such a policy. How an organization communicates concern to employees is often through procedures and policies developed by the human resource department. Survey questionnaires were mailed to 1,400 vice presidents of human resources that held membership and whose names were provided through the Society of Human Resource Management. Over half of the organizations surveyed (57%) did not have layoff policies. By type of organization, healthcare had the greatest number of policies in their organizations with 70% affirming their existence. The study concludes with the following five proposed reasons why layoff policies do not exist: (1) “It can't happen here” syndrome (2) The cover‐up syndrome (3) If you plan for it, people will panic, (4) Managers are trained to focus on growth and to avoid decline, (5) There would be loss of control, and accompanying organizational sabotage, and (6) More policies equal less humane treatment.

A READER kindly sent me a recent patent in which Xerox Corp claim a dramatic break through to prevent unauthorized photocopying. JANET SHAW of the Hertis industrial unit at Hatfield has summarized it for NLW:

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Federal and Supreme Courts heard several cases on the legal status of ships. During this period, Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story determined that a ship was a legal person that was capable to contract and could be punished for wrongdoing. Over the nineteenth century, Marshall and Story also heard appeals on the illegal slave trade and on the status of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, cases that raised questions as to whether enslaved peoples were persons or property. Although Marshall and Story did not discuss the ship and the slave together, in this chapter, the author asks what might be gained in doing so. Specifically, what might a reading of the ship and the slave as juridical figures reveal about the history of legal personhood? The genealogy of positive and negative legal personhood that the author begins to trace here draws inspiration and guidance from scholars writing critically of slavery. In different ways, this literature emphasises the significance of maritime worlds to conceptions of racial terror, freedom, and fugitivity. Building on these insights, the author reads the ship and the slave as central characters in the history of legal personhood, a reading that highlights the interconnections between maritime law and the laws of slavery and foregrounds the changing intensities of Anglo imperial power and racial and colonial violence in shaping the legal person.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.