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An element frequently missing from organisations is that of team learning. While recognised as critical, attempts to capture and apply team learning often result in only partial success. This paper (based on work carried out within a major UK automotive manufacturer) explains a methodology for capturing team learning that brings together the contribution of individuals into a team context while maintaining a focus throughout the process on the need for innovative change.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a typology of a profession and to then assess the circumstances under which management could be classified as a profession against such a typology.

The current paper is conceptual. The research approach consists of formulating a typology of a profession based on the literature research methodology. The resulting typology is applied to assess management as a profession.

Although there have been efforts in recent literature and media commentary to position management as a profession, no thorough conceptually based analysis to rigorously analyze nor test this claim against the dominant arguments in the literature has been undertaken. The typology presents comprehensive research and analysis across disciplines to identify the circumstances under which management could be considered a profession.

The paper offers a complete typology upon which to classify a profession. It provides highly supported arguments to discern elements of a profession. The key limitation lies in capturing and organizing extensive concepts and views across diverse literature disciplines to refine a holistic perspective (i.e. accountancy, business management, ethics, psychology and sociology).

This conceptual typology enables the design of a highly operable assessment system. It considers requisite standards for professions. It also informs potential professional bodies of the obligations to which they and their members must adhere to achieve and retain the status of a profession.

A comprehensive typology indicating the interdependent requirements and obligations required by a profession has not been espoused in either popular business journals or academic journals across the discipline areas now covered by this research investigation. The contribution provides a comprehensive academic argument to answer the question: can management be considered a profession?

Narrow, managerially centered notions of organizational culture remain hegemonic, marginalizing richer, anthropological approaches as well as efforts to understand how the beliefs and practices of organizations are fundamentally shaped by the wider societal dynamics within which they are embedded. In this paper, the authors draw upon recent efforts to explore the interface of scholarship on practice and the institutional logics perspective to highlight the utility of a practice-driven institutional approach to the study of organizational culture that brings society back in. Empirically, the authors present a longitudinal case study of a Chinese private enterprise, and analyze how the unfolding dynamics of a strong community logic increasingly affected by a rising market logic, shaped the formation of political coalitions internally and externally as organizational members aimed to maintain truces between the push and pull of logics over a period of 22 years. Through an analysis of seven episodes that we conceptualize as “cultural encounters,” the authors find that a combination of compartmentalization and overall integration of logics contributes to provisional truces, and that people in the same cohort who share common geographic socialization are more likely to form allies. Our aim is to encourage future scholars to study how societal beliefs and practices work their way into organizations in a variety of explicit as well as more mundane, hidden ways.

Part-time employment is a vital portion of the U.S. labor force, yet research to date has provided only limited insights into how to successfully create and manage this sector of the workforce. We propose that these limitations are due, at least in part, to an inadequate explication of the levels issues inherent in this area. In this article, we present a summary framework of constructs at the economic, industry, organization, individual, and work levels that influence part-time work arrangements. We then specify a cross-level moderator model that examines how the number of hours worked by employees influences their attitudes and behaviors. We posit that this relationship is moderated by a number of contextual effects at multiple levels. Using this sample model, we demonstrate the way in which researchers examining part-time work arrangements can effectively address levels issues. Our article concludes with a discussion of the implications that this summary framework has for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

Although there are a number of hybrid tropes and cross-over conventions that relate to contemporary action cinema, broken down to its most rudimentary components, the genre places its cinematic hero in scenes of ritualised violence or conflict, with the intent of showcasing both athletic mastery and aesthetically pleasing physiques for interested and invested audiences. In as much as it is difficult to define the contemporary genre, the role of the action hero is clear in all permutations. Indeed, there is little question or query about who or what makes for a popular and long-standing action star. After all, names such as Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Statham have become inextricably linked to the genre in question. While there is much to consider here in relation to the muscles and power of these hard-bodied heroes in sweaty vests or form fitting t-shirts, there is another iteration of masculinity, a different and more agile physique, a more refined sartorial code, that has quietly overtaken these macho figures as the site of contemporary action, and that figure is Keanu Reeves. With this in mind, this chapter will examine the ways in which popular media reviewers foreground star image, acting, movement, the body and performance in order to position Reeves as an action star removed from the physical excesses of bulkier, slower and less agile men who continue to perform in the genre around him.

After their long deconstruction of the notion of culture, social sciences have set about deconstructing the idea of nature, considering it as a social representation with variations in time and in space. From this point of view, human reproduction is a particularly appropriate field of observation. Above and beyond the shared imaginary, in fact, nature does not (only) corresponds, at the empirical level, to biological data in human reproduction. As will we see in this chapter, what is thought to correspond to nature in relation to childbearing experience turns out to be something extremely sophisticated, with characteristics not unlike those of a cultural product. Based on the ethnographic research I carried out in one of the first maternity hospital in Italy to introduce natural childbirth, the chapter aims to add to the study of how nature is referred to in this model of birth, why is this category invoked and the extent to which its functions and contents have changed over time.

Employees have gradually adopted social media sites and their applications that have been associated with enhanced communication and collaboration at the workplace. However, social technologies have both positive as well as negative consequences. The current study examines the impact of loneliness on employees' psychological well-being (PW); subsequently, the mediating role of social media use intensity (SMI) at the workplace. It also examines the moderating role of gender and management status of employees.

The present study conducted an online and offline survey using a cross-sectional design. Data were collected from 206 working professionals from the IT industry in India. Structural equation modelling was applied to analyse data.

Results revealed that employee loneliness is positively associated with SMI. Employee's SMI was positively associated with enhanced PW. Unexpectedly, employee loneliness is positively and significantly related to PW. However, the moderating roles of gender and management status of employees were not supported.

The current study can help managers, policymakers and organizations better understand the role of employee social media use in the workplace. Using the insights and understanding offered by the study, social media can be effectively utilized in the workplace. The study recommends that organizations may allow the use of social media at the workplace. Social media resources may also be helpful in improving employee communication and digital literacy.

The current study is a pioneer work and contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between loneliness, SMI and PW. This study has essential theoretical and managerial contributions.

Purpose — This chapter provides an historical overview of assessments of research quality conducted by the UK funding councils in the period 1986–2008, with special reference to the assessments that have been carried out of departments in the library and information management (LIM) sector.

Methodology/approach — A literature review covering both LIM-specific material and more general sources discussing the assessment of research quality in UK universities.

Findings — There is clear evidence of an increase in the general quality of the research carried out by the LIM sector over the review period. This has been accompanied by a decrease in the number of traditional LIM departments submitting themselves for assessment, with these being replaced in the assessment process largely by information systems departments. The rankings over the review period have been dominated by a small number of departments with long-established research traditions.

Originality/value of the paper — While there is an extensive literature describing research assessment in general, and a few articles describing individual assessments in the LIM sector, there is no overview of the involvement of the LIM departments over the whole series of assessment exercises that has been carried out.