Search results

Whatever the speed, or lack of speed of individual training boards in industry, the effect of the Industrial Training Act has been to stimulate an enormous interest in training in the North East.

How effective is training in government training centres? It is possible to take a fairly close look in the limited area of the North‐East of England to get an impression from the centres, the men themselves, the employers and trade unions of the growing acceptability of Ministry of Labour training.

With a view to introducing seminars, week‐end courses, and summer schools, the Cleaver‐Hume Group of Correspondence Colleges has opened a new centre at Aldermaston Court, a fine Victorian manor house in Berkshire.

One by one each industrial role in turn falls under the quizzical gaze of Minerva. Middle management has generally been able to escape, especially in the smaller firms. It was difficult to find time, opportunity, sufficiently specialized instructors or a location. Large establishments such as Shell have a place of their own, others have to find a hotel and try to create a diligent atmosphere surrounded by the flesh pots of the city or the clattering dishes and howling draughts of more rustic quarters.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

From a complexity leadership theory perspective, leadership stops being seen as residing in an individual, and come to be conceived as emergent from the myriad interactions among organizational members. However, in spite of this reconceptualization, organizations still have senior managers (e.g. the CEO) who are supposed to be leading, and thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore, then, who are these senior managers and what challenges emerge for them under a complexity leadership perspective.

This paper reviews first the literature on complexity theory and leadership, and then, conceptually develops an understanding of the challenges that senior managers might face under complexity.

The main finding and focus of the paper is that, from a complexity perspective, a paradox emerges regarding senior managers. On the one hand, senior managers might need to make sense of their limitations and the unowned essence of the processes that surround them. On the other hand, their subordinates might still insist on portraying senior managers as final causes of all success or failure.

This paper presents a novel way to re-conceptualize senior managers, under a complexity perspective, where they come to be perceived as trapped in a paradox of contradictory sensemaking processes: as they come to find out all that is outside of their control their subordinates insist on making them responsible for everything as if they had control.

This paper offers key methodological insights for scholars new to qualitative transformative service research (TSR).

The paper offers ten lessons on conducting qualitative TSR that the authors have gleaned, across more than 30 years (combined) of qualitative inquiries and engagement with other scholars conducting and publishing what may be now termed TSR.

The key lessons of conducting qualitative TSR work include: displaying ethics in conducting and presenting qualitative TSR; preparing for and understanding the research context; considering design, mechanics and technical elements; being participant-centric; co-creating meaning with participants; seeking/using diverse types of data; analyzing data in an iterative fashion, including/respecting multiple perspectives; presenting evidence in innovative ways; and looking inward at every stage of the research process.

The paper provides implications for addressing the vulnerability of both research participants and researchers with the aim of improving research methods that lead to improved service research and well-being outcomes.

Clearly, the complexity and importance of the social problems TSR scholars investigate – poverty, war, disaster recovery, inadequate healthcare – requires preparation for how to engage in transformative service research. Importantly, the paper fits with recent persistent calls within the broader literature of services marketing to: use service research and design to create “uplifting changes” within society and broaden the paradigmatic underpinnings of service research to include dynamic, process-oriented approaches, which capture the dynamic and relational aspects of service ecosystems.

This paper explores the symbolic meanings that children of elementary school age attach to souvenirs from different types of vacation destinations. Data from interviews and pictorial projectives illustrate the meaning of souvenirs for children, including how children skillfully use souvenirs in their everyday lives and how they interpret souvenirs as symbols of people, places, and experiences. More specifically, the interview data reveal the meanings attached to souvenirs which are possessed, including how souvenirs are clearly distinguished from other objects which are possessed and how they are used for their contemplation and action value, for their communicative properties, and to provide continuity across time and place. In addition, the data from pictorial projectives reveal the latent motives of souvenir acquisition as well as how different types of places lead to different types of souvenir choices. Thus, the paper demonstrates the many layers of meaning associated with souvenirs in both acquisition and consumption processes and provides evidence that the meanings between children, places, and objects are inextricably linked.

This chapter examines the case of threshold concepts, as an example of a theory being developed and applied within higher education research. It traces the origins and meaning of the term, reviews its application by higher education researchers and discusses the issues it raises and the critiques it has attracted. This case is of particular interest, as the idea of threshold concepts is little more than a decade old, yet in that time it has attracted considerable attention.