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Universities engage people in a process of learning. During the past decade, there has been increased interest in assessing the quality of students’ learning. This paper presents the need for developing a method of systematically assessing disciplinary knowledge applied in a cross‐functional team environment. Partnering with business is stressed as a critical link in developing and assessing the learning skills needed to function in today’s knowledge‐based learning organizations. An integrative assessment process for a college of business is proposed.

The need for effective training of first‐line supervisors is well established. Well‐trained supervision is essential to our future as a country. A fundamental step in developing effective training is to develop a jobs needs assessment. In order to develop an effective needs assessment, it is necessary to know what the tasks are of supervisors. This study aims to develop a task list with a rating for job importance. It also aims to provide suggestions for training.

The study used the Delphi survey process methodology. An initial survey instrument was developed and pilot tested. The survey was modified and used for three Delphi rounds. A fourth round was initiated to triangulate the results.

The result of the panel was a task list of 49 tasks, with an importance to their job rating range from 1.9 to 3.7, based on 0 to 4. Using a Pareto concept of reviewing the top 20 percent or top ten tasks as sorted for importance to the job, seven of the top ten tasks were most closely related to interpersonal relationships.

This study provides suggestions for the type of courses needed for an effective supervisory training curriculum.

Few studies evaluate supervisory tasks from the supervisor's perspective. This study is unique in that it directly surveys supervisors as to their job tasks and the importance of the tasks to their job. The training recommendations focus on areas that supervisors could immediately apply to their jobs.

The complexity of organizational decisions requires the ability to integrate diverse facts, ideas, issues, and connections into more comprehensive integrative thinking for decisions. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the relationship between common sense and integrative thinking. Common sense, on the surface, seems to be incompatible with integrative thinking yet common sense can enrich integrative thinking. Recommendations are made for leveraging the strengths of common sense thinking in identifying salient (relevant) factor stage of integrative thinking. Suggestions for future research are identified.

The approach of this paper is to use literature‐based research to identify how common sense tensions can enhance integrative thinking.

Five suggestions are presented to leverage common sense thinking when identifying salient factors in a situation. When common sense is successfully integrated at the first stage of integrative thinking, it will enhance the thinking in the other three stages.

This paper stresses that common sense and integrative thinking are compatible. Avenues for future research are identified.

This paper explores a mental model for decision making that is focused on discovery and collaboration. The model consists of six components: self‐awareness, development orientation, systems perspective, emotional orientation, complexity dynamics, and generative conversation. As an interactive model, the components create a mental frame that enables the decision maker to achieve greater insight and develop creative opportunities that enhance the ability to see decision‐making as a complex process.

This paper makes the case for the use of real diaries as an alternative methodology in marketing research. It is argued that Qualitative Diary Research (QDR) in marketing and consumer research is an innovative way to capture rich insights into processes, relationships, settings, products and consumers.

To illustrate the utility of QDR this paper explores the phenomenon of text messaging. One hundred and twenty two “texters” were recruited to maintain personal introspective diaries for 1 week; recording, not only each of their incoming and outgoing text messages, but also the personal thoughts that each communication initiated. The paper then offers a frame narrative that attempts to analyse, interpret and re‐present the embedded diary narratives.

This empirical analysis illustrates that ODR is particularly suited to exploring processes, relationships, settings, products, and consumers. It is shown how the arrival of a text message and its actual content can create: consumer excitement when text messages arrive, consumer pleasure when constructing and deconstructing sent and received text messages, and provides a facility to lie and attract the opposite sex. The downsides of texting were also explored, such as how consumers loath getting either too many or too few text messages.

ODR is a useful way of capturing genuine “thick description”. The use of real diaries presents an exciting methodological alternative for research in marketing and consumer behaviour.

Pictures speak louder than words, they say, and certainly it is easier to look at one graph than pages of figures. Now that costs are coming down more and more people are using graphics. Here, through the eyes of one of the leading suppliers of graphics equipment, we look at the equipment available and what you can do with it, and follow up with details of some of the products on the market from a variety of sources.

Today, as we hurtle towards imminent planetary destruction in the age of the Anthropocene, we believe it may be instructive to try and understand if the ancient science of spirituality can prove useful in humankind's ability to change course, even at this late hour. We argue that such a paradigm shift is critically essential for human survival and that without the inner transformation proposed by this science, it may prove impossible to build a society based on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. This chapter draws from foundational texts and authoritative sources across multiple religious traditions, based upon which it outlines a brief sketch of the ancient science of spirituality. We begin with an account of the differentia specifica of this science, where we delve into what kind of science this is. Since it is centrally concerned with inner transformation, we briefly outline the theory of change embedded in this science and the kind of rejuvenation it enables, which makes it possible for us to clearly perceive the key elements and the structure of reality. We then spell out the impact this has on the nature of human action, continually teasing out implications for policy and practice in our time. We provide a few concrete illustrations of the same. Inter alia, we also show how many of these insights can be found even within modern scientific and philosophical traditions, thereby indicating possibilities of convergence and synthesis between ancient and modern science, following thereby the guidance of genuine spirituality.

The Philippines is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world as far as climate-related and other forms of disasters (e.g., earthquake and volcanic eruption) are concerned (World Bank and NDCC, 2004; UNISDR, 2008a, 2008b). In 2004 alone, 25 weather disturbances hit the country, of which four occurred successively in November and the first week of December. These triggered massive landslides and flooding in Southern and Central Luzon, leading to damages in lives and properties (Duque, 2005). With this the country is considered as one of the most disaster prone, ranking 12th among the 200 countries most at risk to natural hazards in the 2009 Mortality Risk Index of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR, 2009).

A growing body of research finds that gig economy platforms use gamification to enhance managerial control. Focusing on technologically mediated forms of gamification, this literature reveals how platforms mobilize gig workers’ work effort by making the labour process resemble a game. This chapter contends that this tech-centric scholarship fails to fully capture the historical continuities between contemporary and much older occurrences of game-playing at work. Informed by interviews and participatory observations at two food delivery platforms in Amsterdam, I document how these platforms’ piece wage system gives rise to a workplace dynamic in which severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ game strategies to maximize their gig income. Reminiscent of observations from the early shop floor ethnographies of the manufacturing industry, I show that the game of gig income maximization operates as an indirect modality of control by (re)aligning the interests of couriers with the interests of capital and by individualizing and depoliticizing couriers’ overall low wage level. I argue that the new, algorithmic technologies expand and intensify the much older forms of gamified control by infusing the organizational activities of shift and task allocation with the logic of the piece wage game and by increasing the possibilities for interaction, direct feedback and immersion. My study contributes to the literature on gamification in the gig economy by interweaving it with the classic observations derived from the manufacturing industry and by developing a conceptualization of gamification in which both capital and labour exercise agency.