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As founders of First Interstate BancSystem, which held $8.6 billion in assets and had recently become a public company, and Padlock Ranch, which had over 11,000 head of cattle, the Scott family had to think carefully about business and family governance. Now entering its fifth generation, the family had over 80 shareholders across the US. In early 2016, the nine-member Scott Family Council (FC) and other family and business leaders considered the effectiveness of the Family Governance Leadership Development Initiative launched two years earlier. The initiative's aim was to ensure a pipeline of capable family leaders for the business boards, two foundation boards, and FC.

Seven family members had self-nominated for governance roles in mid-2015. As part of the development initiative, each was undergoing a leadership development process that included rigorous assessment and creation of a comprehensive development plan. As the nominees made their way through the process and other family members considered nominating themselves for future development, questions remained around several interrelated areas, including how to foster family engagement with governance roles while guarding against damaging competition among members; how to manage possible conflicts of interest around dual employee and governance roles; and how to extend the development process to governance for the foundations and FC. The FC considered how best to answer these and other questions, and whether the answers indicated the need to modify the fledgling initiative.

This case illustrates the challenges multigenerational family-owned enterprises face in developing governance leaders within the family. It serves as a good example of governance for a large group of cousins within a multienterprise portfolio. Students can learn and apply insights from this valuable illustration of family values, vision, and mission statement.

Should the enforcers of rules inform potential violators about how likely violations will be detected? In practice, there is some mixture of revelation and secrecy‐police inform potential speeders about new detection technologies, but not about other dimensions of detection. We explain the mix of revelation and secrecy using games of asymmetric information in which the detection level is modeled exogenously. Our analysis applies to various legal and social conflict areas such as terrorism, speeding, and parenting.

Recently I remarked that my collection of Caithnessiana is diminishing to the point of invisibility, but no longer had that been said than a copy of David Morrison's The idealist landed on my desk and reopened the whole question of what is happening on the literary scene in the far North. More, in fact than I had suspected. Some of it stems from atomic energy at Dounreay and the growth of Thurso as a dormitory for the Dounreay staff.

In a rapidly changing business environment, the need to constantly adapt is deemed essential to maintain competitive advantage. This requires an optimum balance of quantitative and qualitative measures to monitor progress and performance. This paper provides a framework of thought process that will guide practitioners in developing better qualitative measures and seeks to answer three essential questions: thought process 1 – what is the nature of reality? Provides the answer to the question, can the phenomenon be realistically measured? Thought process 2 – what are the processes used for constructing the measure? Provides answer to the question, are the processes appropriate and sufficiently influential? Thought process 3 – what usefulness and power does this measure provide? Provides answer to the question, is it powerful in a practical environment? The framework was applied to measurement in learning organization contexts and ten models were reviewed. Conclusions cover deficiencies in the models and suggestions on how they might be improved.

The purpose of this research is to provide academics and practitioners with an insight to the barriers involved in knowledge transfer, arising from the levels of learning in the organization (i.e. individual, team, organizational, and inter‐organizational).

An empirical research methodology, called the Delphi technique, was employed to investigate these barriers. Owing to the non‐threatening nature of the process, and its usefulness in obtaining a reliable consensus of opinion from a group of experts, it was deemed suitable for this research. The Delphi process was applied in two stages. In the first stage the major barriers in the transfer of knowledge in the levels of learning were obtained. Only the primary paths of transfer were considered, i.e. individual to team (and vice versa), team to the organization (and vice versa), and organization to inter‐organization. In the second stage Delphi process, the critical sources from which these barriers arise were derived.

A total of 14 sources from which the barriers arise were obtained. The significant impact of these sources on the levels of learning, as perceived by the Delphi participants, was derived.

This research provides useful insights for practitioners wanting to minimize barriers and optimize knowledge transfer across the organizations. It also serves as a useful base for researchers to expand further research into barriers of knowledge transfer.

This research is the first attempt made, using Delphi methodology, to analyze the barriers to knowledge transfer from a holistic perspective. It considers the levels of learning, providing academics with a base to consider other paths of knowledge transfer.

How can action research be made more rigorous? We discuss in this paper action research, positivism and some major criticisms of action research by positivists. We then examine issues relating the conduct of IS research in organisations through multiple iterations in the action research cycle proposed by Susman and Evered. We argue that the progress through iterations allows the researcher to gradually broaden the research scope and in consequence add generality to the research findings. A brief illustrative case is provided with a study on groupware introduction in a large civil engineering company. In the light of this illustrative case we contend that effective application of the iterative approach to action research has the potential to bring research rigour up closer to standards acceptable by positivists and yet preserve the elements that characterise action research as such.

The terminologies organizational learning and learning organization were once used interchangeably. However, in the mid‐1990s there was a bifurcation into two streams. Organizational learning became the descriptive stream and dealt mostly with the learning processes in the organization. This stream had its roots in social and cognitive psychology with a strong academic focus. Learning organization became the prescriptive stream with a strong practical focus. A broad theoretical framework is presented that links the two streams. In the implementation of learning organization prescriptions, enormous practical difficulties were encountered, making implementations less than successful. The barriers involved in transfer of learning to all levels in the organization (i.e. individual, collective, organizational, and inter‐organizational) and the absence of a link to the learning processes are identified as the major issues in implementation failures. It is postulated that these are the reasons for the gap between the two streams.

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.