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Knowledge workers labor to meet their business goals with the support of practical information technology (IT) tools. IT advances can be organizational enablers, when aligned with business goals, and when selectively applied. Workplace leaders and their workers often experience a productivity paradox. This paradox forms an operational limit for current knowledge workers and organizational success. Performance management steps within a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) framework can help overcome workplace productivity paradoxes. The BSC frames and tabulates lagging and leading indicators of IT tools’ usage and soft skill engagements. These adaptive measures dashboard workplace progress and success for organizations of all sizes and in public and private sectors. Lessons can be learned from BSC deployment successes in several business sectors. Valued practices exist to pick / monitor / adapt organizational capability objectives, measures and HR initiatives. Can right IT tool(s) or application(s) help achieve aligned business goals? Yes. Certain IT applications can favorably frame learning and development (L&D) efforts and metrics for knowledge workers as most valuable players, or MVPs.How do knowledge workers and their business leaders manage and leverage these IT applications for employee L&D to improve organizational capabilities? How do they address and adapt to complex and chaotic business conditions, and manage disruptive technologies: a. Artificial Intelligence (AI), b. The Internet of Things (IoT), and c. Data Analytics? Prudent managers and workers can accommodate these conditions and disruptions with agile, productive BSC approaches to generate productivity-ware and to attain their aligned business goals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and evoke an old educational concept called “study”. This is learning which leads to love and love which leads to learning. It is a dynamic experience which engenders transformation whose telos is simultaneously endlessly knowable and unknowable. The paper argues that it unites humans with the world, the material world with the transcendent, speed with slowness and alignment with resistance, in a series of antinomic relationships which come together in the heart. Study, it is argued, should form the basis of true education and a truly sustainable relationship with the world.

The paper’s approach is informed by the Eastern Orthodox Christian theology of ecology, particularly its complex and holistic concept of the heart and perceiving with the heart. It revels in the antinomies fostered by this tradition.

The paper’s findings are inevitably provisional. They stress the need for beauty in educational practice and indicate that the form of study described may foster an individual sense of vocation, which can transform self and the world.

The paper hopes to contribute to a re-orientation in education, sustainability and ecology.

This chapter examines the relative absence of critique in inclusive education research, policy and practice, and in education more generally – and consider the consequences of doing without critique. It responds to Bruno Latour's (2004, p. 243) urgent call for progress towards “a fair position” and for the development of “new critical tools” to work positively and constructively towards social change. The potential for criticality is explored in relation to disability studies, disability arts and children's perspectives. Each of these sources is evaluated in terms of their affordance of criticality and for their potential to mobilise political action. They are also considered in relation to the epistemological shifts and altered power relations that are necessary to create an inclusive educational environment.

Georgian architecture dominates much of the urban vista of the British Isles and is also evident in many former British colonies. A product of the eighteenth century, it is an architectural style richly embedded in its social and political context. The defining feature of a Georgian building: a perfectly proportioned, standardized and symmetrical façade echoes the balance inherent in Pacioli’s double entry treatise. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the construction and widespread adoption of the standard Georgian house. It finds that eighteenth century builders’ price books (“estimators”), disseminating detailed materials and labour costing information on all components of house construction, inherently acted as norms or standards of cost behaviour. Essentially, it is argued, they constituted a form of human accountability which, located within a broader network of diverse actors, culminated in the diffusion of Georgian Classicism.

In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

This chapter presents data and analysis to conceptualise the role of the executive principal, and how the executive principal practises leadership in formal school partnerships in China. To achieve this, this research draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power, enriching it through interplay with Chinese notions of morality. This research is anchored in one innovative educational organisation – the Education Collective (EC). The EC is a large-scale and multi-level educational organisation formed by two or more schools or campuses guided by a common concept and bound by a contract. Education collectivisation has now become the mainstream model of running compulsory education in China. The head of the EC, often referred to as the executive principal, is the legal representative of each EC and is responsible for the entire collective.

Trans theory (also known as transgender studies) is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field in which activism, scholarship and lived experience are coalescing around questions of embodiment, personhood, and intersections of race/ethnicity/class/ability/gender/sexuality. Trans-themed research, whether explicitly located in trans theory or not, is a growing area of academic exploration. As a trans researcher and trans person, I am interested in two questions: how does autoethnography fit within trans and queer theory, and how can people who do not live in trans communities undertake ethical trans-related research? A symbolic interactionist perspective informs my understanding of trans theory and the social construction of identity and embodiment. I explore my own femme transmasculinity through autoethnography, and also consider my experience interviewing other trans people as part of researching masculinity. I suggest that researchers who are not trans (who are cisgendered, meaning they identify with the sex/gender they were assigned at birth) must accept that trans people have what Talia Bettcher (2009a, 2009b) terms First Person Authority over their embodiment, experience, and narratives. Having established this, I examine self-identification and intersubjective recognition in relation to my own experience of femme transmasculinity, asking what is femme incoherence and how does this relate to queer and trans theory/politics?

The purpose of this paper is to assess the efficacy of the policy measures to encourage young Singaporeans to pursue employment in the manufacturing sector while at the same time discouraging the sector’s traditional dependence on low-cost foreign labour. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the challenges faced by small and medium enterprises (SME) as well as the less than optimum impact the policy rhetoric has had on redirecting the aspirations of young people away from tertiary qualifications attainment and towards vocational skills development.

The paper draws on primary survey data of 222 manufacturing firms and in-depth interviews with 20 SME leaders in Singapore.

The paper argues that despite the government’s policy efforts to encourage the employment of young Singaporeans in the manufacturing sector, the impact has been negligible. Even with moves to increase the transaction costs of employing foreign workers, the findings indicate that SMEs have not changed their staffing policies. Indeed, the results lay bare the low cost-low skill/low productivity trap that most SMEs now find themselves in. The government’s efforts to discourage the pursuit of tertiary qualifications in favour of vocational qualifications are unlikely to succeed.

The value of this research is fourfold. First, it exposes the difficulty of policy overcoming path dependency. Second, it sheds light on the need for government to rethink its policy approach in how best to re-tool human capital for traditional industry sectors like manufacturing. Third, the results show that there is limited efficacy in simply increasing transaction costs and altering rhetoric to discourage attainment of tertiary qualifications unless vocational employment is adequately remunerated. And finally, the results indicate that firms in the manufacturing sector need to embrace new business models, practices and technologies that are reflective of the digital era to be able to attract youth.

Physical Education remains a contested concept across the world maintaining links in various ways and in varying degrees to education, sport and health. The close and historical links of these areas upon Physical Education have continued to influence both policy and practice and have impacted significantly upon areas such as inclusive pedagogy. This chapter firstly seeks to explain the unique landscape of Physical Education before considering specific issues of inclusion within Physical Education. A move towards inclusive pedagogies within Physical Education is then explained before lesson examples are offered for both the primary and secondary Physical Education practitioner.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.