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To what extent have personnel managers recaptured their enthusiasm for manpower planning, especially recruitment planning, in the light of projected demographic change in the 1990s? A survey conducted on behalf of the Institute of Personnel Management explores the issue. Its findings are presented and reviewed in the context of the general state of the art at the present time. Although in the private sector a number of major initiatives have been successfully launched in such areas as training and development and competitive restructuring, other areas of manpower planning find only limited support, and the public sector lags behind the rest of the field. There exist a few examples of comprehensive and systematic manpower planning.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are becoming a strategy of choice for organizations attempting to maintain a competitive advantage. Corporations spend billions of dollars annually in pursuit of this strategy; the success rate, however, is less than commendable. Research offers a number of potential determinants for this success rate. Receiving increased attention and research, organizational culture is one factor identified as a potential catalyst to M&A success. This article reviews related literature to identify some underlying reasons why organizational culture is an important factor in regard to the success rate of M&As. Specific emphasis is placed on cultural implications to consider prior to the merger or acquisition (event) and implications to consider subsequent to the event. Strategic alternatives suggested by researchers in organizational change, organizational strategy, and organizational development/ management research are also synthesized in an attempt to offer a comprehensive perspective on ways that organizations might improve the success rate of M&As.

Social media has been gaining importance in recent years as an integral part of entrepreneurs’ business and marketing strategies. At the same time, the entrepreneurial use of social media can lead to dark and negative consequences. This aspect has received less attention in the literature so far. The purpose of this study is to advice entrepreneurial practitioners to balance the sides of pros and cons as being an inherent reality to acknowledge the full scenario of business life and the interplay of diverse influences.

The qualitative interviews focused on the dark side experiences of micro-entrepreneurs on social media and on strategies to protect their private identities and businesses from those dark side effects. For the theoretical classification of dark side experiences, the framework of Baccarella et al. (2018) was used and adapted based on the experiences reported.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to provide an understanding of the negative experiences micro-entrepreneurs face on social media. The research showed the relevance of five out of the seven dark-side building blocks and identified time as a further influential aspect. Thereby, the authors learn to comprehend the negative sides of social media for micro-operated businesses. The findings highlight the need to understand entrepreneurial social media use with simultaneously negative hazards and economic and social challenges. Addressing the entanglement of the entrepreneurial and private selves of micro-entrepreneurs, the findings demonstrate entrepreneur’s attempts of distancing or cleaning the negativity from their private identities and their businesses.

This paper problematizes dark sides as critical elements in entrepreneurial practice, which are too often neglected when discussing entrepreneurial marketing in general and entrepreneurship in social media specifically. The self is always captured between two sides, including the problematic (“dark”) and the bright.

I am proud to be joining the many colleagues who appear in this volume, many younger but some more experienced in the marketing and the international business disciplines, honoring S. Tamer Cavusgil's retirement from Michigan State University. I am proud for many reasons, but mainly because throughout the years I have observed how Tamer's contributions to our professional and personal lives have shaped our growth as a fraternity of business scholars and teachers. I feel very fortunate to have grown as Tamer's colleague through the many papers we have published, the many doctoral students we have mentored, and the many service contributions we have made to the international business field during the past 30 years. I feel luckier, however, that I have come to know this remarkable person as a friend.

In recent years, organisations around the world have been seriously affected by a range of economic, political and social upheavals that have gathered momentum in most parts of the globe. The viability of the conventional (pyramidal) organisational structures is being challenged in conjunction with major shifts in the roles of mid and top managers. In many countries, the pace of the above socio‐economic events and uncertainties is happening at an unprecedented pace. Some markets are showing signs of potential gigantic expansions while others (historically prosperous) are on the verge of complete collapse (Dent, 1991). In responding to the socio‐economic challenges of the nineties, organisations (across the board) have resorted to dismantling the conventional pyramidal structure and adopting so‐called “leaner” structures (see Zeffane, 1992). The most common struggle has been to maintain market share in an economic environment increasingly characterised by excess labour supply (Bamber, 1990; Green & Macdonald, 1991). As organisations shifted their strategies from “mass production” to “post‐fordism” (see, for example Kern and Schumann, 1987), there has been a significant tendency to emphasise flexibility of both capital and labour in order to cater for the niche markets which are claimed to be rapidly emerging, world‐wide. This has resulted in massive organisational restructuring world‐wide.

The paper addresses the issue of contrasting constructions of social problems. Using “hate crime” as an example, we focus on portraits of the problem in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports and in the New York Times. The analysis illumines how fundamental contrasts in representations of hate arise from differences in the underlying, and institutionalized, sense-making practices of scorekeeping and storytelling. We conclude by discussing the larger implications of the findings for further development of the theoretical model of “dialogical constructionism.”