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Group Support Systems (GSS) have been used and studied in the support of facilitated ideation sessions for years. The norm for these sessions has been for participants to work individually at GSS workstations. A review of applicable literature suggests that pairing participants at GSS workstations could result in higher quality ideas and participant satisfaction. This paper reports the results of a lab experiment that tested for differences between paired and unpaired facilitated GSS sessions. These results suggest that pairing participants can yield higher quality ideas from facilitated ideation without negative consequences.

THE popular image of Ireland is of a land where one can enjoy the perfect holiday. If you are a golfer, fisherman, rambler or if you just enjoy good food and of course the black nectar for which it is famous, then Ireland is the place to go, take the word of TV Chef, Keith Floyd. Ireland however, unlike many small countries, is not content to base its economy on tourism.

There is a growing perception that higher education increasingly follows what Cary Nelson calls the business or “Industry .. handbook of relevant strategies and techniques” of employee management, seen by many in the demise of tenure and the increase in part‐time hiring. As an academic/corporate convergence this trend, however, extends beyond higher education’s use of corporate employee management strategies. As higher education becomes a profitable venture, following business’s “handbook” becomes symptomatic of a profound blurring between corporate and academic entities that beckons a reassessment of higher education’s overall direction in light of its relationship with the corporate world. As we’ll see in the demise of tenure and the growth of the part time position, academia is increasingly following the corporate or “industry ... handbook of relevant strategies and techniques” of employee management (Nelson, 1997b). The presence of a corporate paradigm in academia is, however, not limited to employee management practices. As higher education becomes profitable through the use of new technologies, following the corporate “handbook” becomes symptomatic of a far more significant blurring between corporate and academic entities that, because of the drastic and fundamental changes it poses for academia, warrants that academia both reconsiders its internal structure and its overall degree of separation from the corporate arena.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

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.

The study reported on in this article examines how instructional leadership is exercised by superintendents in effective school districts. We employ concepts drawn from school effectiveness studies and from organizational literature on coordination and control in an attempt to understand how superintendents organize and manage instruction and curriculum in these effective districts. Specific instructional management practices are examined within a framework of six major functions, setting goals and establishing expectations and standards, selecting staff, supervising and evaluating staff, establishing an instructional and curricular focus, ensuring consistency in technical core operations, and monitoring curriculum and instruction. Based on interviews with superintendents from 12 of the most instructionally effective school districts in California and analysis of selected district documents, we present descriptions of district‐level policies and practices that these superintendents use to coordinate and control the instructional management activities of their principals. Similarities and differences in the patterns of control and coordination found in these districts are highlighted. The implications of the findings are then examined in light of recent findings regarding coupling and linkages in schools. The results of this study suggest that superintendents in instructionally effective school districts are more active “instructional managers” than previous descriptions of superintendents would have led us to expect. In particular, coordination and control of the technical core appears more systematic in these districts. The results do not, however, provide a uniform picture of how instruction is coordinated and controlled. A wide range of both culture building activities and bureaucratic policies and practices were emphasized by the superintendents in this study as they exercised their instructional leadership roles.