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The purpose of this paper is to examine a contextualized local government case study of the application of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in conjunction with the Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF) to highlight the importance of a good strategic fit between LSS and organizational objectives before implementation.

A local government council is used in a case study-based approach. Organizational artefacts and documents were used for data collection in conjunction with interviews from senior executives within the organization.

Results indicate that when used in conjunction with the ABEF, LSS provides focus on organizational learning practices embedded within the implementation of continuous improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to discourse regarding the effective application and implementation of LLS in local government.

LSS tools and techniques are known to local government, but are applied in isolation of the overarching LSS framework. This paper emphasizes the importance of comprehensive implementation of these tools, guided by the inclusion of an external contextualized framework (ABEF) in conjunction with the LSS to achieve sustainable continuous improvement.

Business excellence frameworks are widely used in the public sector as a reference/means for improvement. This paper highlights the importance of LSS in operationalizing strategic direction provided by such frameworks and providing the focus on learning practices critical for sustainable improvements.

Explicit barriers to international trade, investment, technology, and financial flows have been reduced considerably. As a result, “macro-liberalization” of international economic transactions has largely run its course. Now, attention needs to shift from international rules for governments to international rules dealing with the various aspects of the international operations of firms – what are called “micro-issues” in this chapter; these include, by way of example, cross-border mergers and acquisitions and international bankruptcies. Such international rules for the principal actors in international production and markets would complement (or replace) the unilateral rules that exist at the national level. International rules would set the direct parameters for certain aspects of the international activities of firms and hence provide the global governance for operating in the global production and trading spaces. This chapter exemplifies for a number of areas the state of rule-making for some micro-issues, analyzes the nature of this rule-making, and suggests a way forward. Developing international micro-regulatory frameworks of rules of the road for the various aspects of the international operations of firms in the globalizing world economy should be the new frontier of international commercial diplomacy.

A demographic time bomb is ticking in many school jurisdictions. Up to 70 per cent of present leaders in the private and public sectors will retire within the next five to ten years as the “baby boomers” move on. While succession planning has become a major initiative in the private sector, leadership succession in education tends to hew to old paths. Where are new educational leaders to come from? How should their succession be orchestrated? The traditional source of succession at the secondary level, the department headship, is no longer an attractive route for many teachers. Many potential leaders do not perceive the role of principal or assistant principal in a positive light. These roles are increasingly being associated with managing the standards/standardization agenda with which many professionals profoundly disagree. While it is premature to declare a leadership crisis in education, it is not too early to call on policy makers to attend to the growing need for succession planning at all levels in education. Based on an examination of change over times in four schools in Ontario, this article addresses issues of leadership succession in education and, more precisely, examines the influence of principals’ succession on the principals themselves and their schools.

Relatively few comparative studies have examined how perceptions across cultures might converge or diverge regarding careers in general and new venture careers in particular. Our research addresses this gap by providing a comparative study of career perceptions among undergraduate business students in three countries with different levels of experience with capitalism: Ukraine, South Korea, and the United States. Results suggest both surprising differences and interesting similarities between undergraduate students in the three countries with regard to how they perceive characteristics associated with entrepreneurial careers. Findings are discussed in the context of distinct differences and commonalities across cultures and implications for future research provided.

This paper aims to address the long-standing problem of suboptimal student team experiences for instructors and students by incorporating the student voice by co-creating a virtual team collaborative environment to improve team collaboration in the online classroom.

This paper presents a novel design science research approach and relates two elaborated action design science research (eADSR) cycles that design, implement and evaluate the student team experience in online courses requiring teamwork.

The outcome is a holistic view of a virtual team classroom environment specified with technologies and practices that may be employed to optimize the student team experience. The eADSR process yields non-obvious diagnoses and actionable steps for continually incorporating the ever-changing social aspects unique to students in addition to the evolving technological landscape.

This paper is valuable to faculty members interested in applying eADSR processes to incorporate the student voice to address pedagogical and learning challenges in the classroom. Additionally, it provides a DSR-based model that can be implemented in the classroom to improve student team collaboration as well as transparency for the instructor and the students in terms of team member contributions with the goal to alleviate student and faculty frustrations. This topic is particularly relevant in light of COVID-19 as students and faculty alike are thrust into new online classroom environments.

Employing eADSR in the classroom is a novel and unique approach to create a replicable model for virtual team collaboration that can be added to the classroom.

The case opens with Martha Stewart's 2005 release from prison following her conviction for obstructing an insider-trading investigation of her 2001 sale of personal stock. The scandal dealt a crippling blow to the powerful Martha Stewart brand and drove results at her namesake company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO), deep into the red. But as owner of more than 90 percent of MSO's voting shares, Stewart continued to control the company throughout the scandal.

The company faced significant external challenges, including changing consumer preferences and mounting competition in all of its markets. Ad rates were under pressure as advertisers began fragmenting spending across multiple platforms, including the Internet and social media, where MSO was weak. New competitors were luring readers from MSO's flagship publication, Martha Stewart Living. And in its second biggest business, merchandising, retailing juggernauts such as Walmart and Target were crushing MSO's most important sales channel, Kmart. Internal challenges loomed even larger, with numerous failures of governance while the company attempted a turnaround.

This case can be used to teach either corporate governance or turnarounds.

Students will learn:

• How control of shareholder voting rights by a founding executive can undermine corporate governance

• The importance of independent directors and board committees

• How company bylaws affect corporate governance

• How to recognize and respond to early signs of stagnation

• How to avoid management actions that can make a crisis worse

• How weaknesses in executive leadership can push a company into crisis and foster a culture that actively prevents strategic revitalization

How control of shareholder voting rights by a founding executive can undermine corporate governance

The importance of independent directors and board committees

How company bylaws affect corporate governance

How to recognize and respond to early signs of stagnation

How to avoid management actions that can make a crisis worse

How weaknesses in executive leadership can push a company into crisis and foster a culture that actively prevents strategic revitalization

Purpose – Although recent work has made significant contributions to our theoretical understanding of white fragility, more empirical work is needed to establish the social causes of this particular form of racial stress. Our chapter builds on previous research by assessing gender and socioeconomic variations in white fragility.

Methodology/Approach – Data come from the 2018 Survey of White Fragility, a convenience sample of 279 non-Hispanic white undergraduate students aged 18 years and over attending two large public universities in the southeastern and southwestern United States.

Findings – Results indicate that women tend to exhibit higher levels of remorse fragility (feeling sad, guilty, and angry). There were no gender differences in depletion fragility (feeling drained/exhausted, unsafe, attacked, and confused). Parental education was unrelated to levels of white fragility. Overall parental socioeconomic status was initially associated with lower levels of remorse and depletion fragility, but these associations were confounded by a general measure of nonspecific psychological distress.

Research Limitations/Implications – Research limitations include a nonprobability sampling design and low external validity.

Originality/Value of Paper – This study contributes to previous work by establishing gender variations in white fragility. We also reveal that socioeconomic variations in white fragility may be confounded by the broader social distribution of psychological distress.

To understand how people using community public mental health services conceptualize community and their place within it within the post-deinstitutionalization era.

Two hundred ninety-four service users completed structured interviews in two urban, outpatient, public, and community mental health facilities in the Northeast. Quantitative and qualitative responses to the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, Community Ladder version, were analyzed to understand perspectives on community.

Mean subjective community status ladder score among participants was five (SD = 2.56). Participants identified four broad categories of definitions of community: geographic community; community related to social definitions; contributing to society; and mental health service-user communities. Explanations for the location of their placement on the ladder (subjective community status) include comparisons to self and others, contributions to community, and social relationships. There was also a set of explanations that spoke to the intersection of multiple marginalizations and structural constraints. Finally, we explore relationships among understandings of community and perceptions of place within community.

Community integration is a critical concept for community public mental health services, but little research has explored how mental health service users conceptualize their communities and their roles within them. Understandings of community are crucial to appropriately support peoples’ needs within their communities. Furthermore, participants identify mechanisms that facilitate their personal community standing, and these are areas for potential intervention.

The purpose of this study is to examine how a school leadership team in a rural, high-poverty elementary school learned to lead continuous school improvement in a research–practice partnership.

This case study draws on qualitative research methods, improvement science and Deming's notion of a system of profound knowledge to identify how members of the school leadership team understood and approached their school improvement work differently as a result of engaging in continuous improvement processes in a research–practice partnership.

The findings illustrate how engaging in continuous improvement processes in the research–practice partnership enhanced the leadership team members' capacities to prioritize and solve problems, incorporate multiple and diverse perspectives in problem-solving efforts and establish a culture of increased risk-taking and ownership of teaching and learning outcomes. In sum, the members of the leadership team became the drivers of their own change processes.

The findings provide insight into how leaders in rural, high-poverty schools can build capacity within their schools to meet the demand for increased student achievement by leading collaborative, continuous improvement processes grounded in improvement science in research–practice partnerships.