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This paper raises the possibility that closure is a myth, both in the sense of a narrative guiding a quest and in the sense of a social fiction. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper examines parts played by public administration practice in quests with subtexts of death, love, and loss, and suggests that overlapping administrative and narrative fictions have their comforts and uses for grieving persons, for organizations, and for the social order.

The paper confesses ambivalence about the actual existence of closure in historical rather than fictional time.

Using the metaphor of “closing the books,” the paper situates particular public reckonings with human loss in the context of justice-seeking and other public sector companions of “closure,” but resists the narrative closure of the authoritative answer and the happy ending.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership succession in families in business. Although there is a vast amount of research on leadership succession, no attempt has been made to understand this phenomenon by using an intergenerational learning approach. By applying the Double ABC–X model, the authors discuss how resilience is developed through intergenerational learning during family leadership succession in business.

Based on a single case, the authors define pre- and post-event parameters of the business family under study and use the Double ABC–X Model as an analytical framework. Individual and pair interviews, as well as a family firm workshop, were undertaken following an action research approach using multiple interventions. The qualitative data were collected by reflective journals, field notes and observation protocols. Finally, the authors analyze the data according to a circular deconstruction strategy.

The authors find specific pre-event stressor parameters related to mutual mistrust, independent decision making and non-strategic transmission of power, knowledge and responsibility from predecessor to successor. The intervention based on the intergenerational approach during the post-crisis phase focuses on problem solving and coping within the new situation of co-habitation among the two generations. The intergenerational learning approach based on pile-up of demands, adaptive resources and perception is the source of family adaptation. Additionally, the power of the narrative to reflect past events and project the future seems to the point where the family starts developing resilience.

The way family businesses deal with critical and stressful events during leadership succession may lead to intergenerational learning, which is a source of resilient families. The authors apply the Double ABC–X model to understand family leadership succession in business and further develop it to explain how families develop resilience.

In the twenty-first century, the family has been turning towards a greater plurality of training paths, situations, family and parental arrangements. However, despite changes in legislation, values, representations and practices, the word family remains inexorably associated with the heterosexual bi-parental model. This paper aims to contribute to the knowledge of the family dynamics of non-heterosexual people, mainly concerning the process of transition to parenting, in relation to family changes in Portuguese society. To do so this study aims to analyze four in-depth interviews¹ with young adults, women and men who have a homoconjugality relationship and a project of parenting in mind.

Based on a qualitative methodology the study intends to discuss issues related to the challenge of heteronormativity, equality within the couple, projects and gender representations of parenthood and in particular what it means for the men and women interviewed, to be a father and to be a mother in a same sex couple and how they project themselves as fathers and mothers.

The study discusses all these issues always in relation to the biographical trajectories, the history and life as a couple and the structural and individual resources, such as school and professional qualifications. It also analyzes the main difficulties experienced in revealing their sexuality to the significant others and the difficulties / strategies they anticipate in relation to the parenting project.

The authors conclude that female interviewees show greater independence of a male figure in relation to their parental projects and anticipate less difficulty in their parental skills compared with the gay man interviewed.

To analyze the dynamics of parenting in same-sex couples, this study also points out to the need to construct a model of analysis capable of articulating structural factors, such as job insecurity and heteronormativity, biographies and individual resources and profiles of conjugal interactions.

The aim of this paper is to present a new framework for the evaluation of satisfaction in continually delivered business services (CDBS) contexts based on applicable theoretical perspectives and extant empirical research.

The paper first describes and justifies the importance of the CDBS context. Then, a literature review of CDBS satisfaction research over the past ten years is presented and utilized in conjunction with theoretical insights from expectancy disconfirmation theory and social exchange theory to develop conceptual definitions, a general conceptual framework, and research propositions.

The resulting conceptual framework focuses on global CDBS provider satisfaction as the outcome of three more specific satisfaction assessments: service satisfaction (driven by the actual performance of the service), economic satisfaction (driven by the customers’ economic outcomes from the exchange relationship) and social satisfaction (driven by the customers’ social outcomes and interactions in the exchange relationship).

The study is the first to develop a framework of satisfaction for the CDBS context and presents propositions to guide future satisfaction research. The conceptual framework leverages insights from two existing models of satisfaction formation: expectancy disconfirmation (which provides deeper insight on service satisfaction) and social exchange theory (which provides deeper insights on social and economic satisfaction). The integration of these two models results in a more comprehensive view of satisfaction formation in the CDBS context than by using either model separately.

Discusses QP4, the TQM programme developed by the US Air Force Logistics Command in the late 1980s, which enabled it to win the President′s Award for Quality in 1991.