Search results

The results of an attempt to conduct an employee attitude survey in a British police force are reported. The proposal failed to win approval at the joint consultation committee for four reasons: it would destabilise the system; it was unsuitable for the group concerned; it implied a possible threat to the role and status of some managers, and the consultative process itself permitted an expression of these objections. A number of general propositions which extend beyond the case of police management are made.

Business and management ethics have assumed a high profile in recent years. This has sometimes provoked a sceptical, even cynical, reaction from those who express doubt concerning the feasibility or relevance of teaching the subject. Addresses some common misconceptions and offers clarification. The general aims of ethics programmes are considered, and the importance of experiential learning, in addition to lecture‐based inputs, is stressed. Discusses the importance of feelings, emotions and interpersonal skills, as well as theoretical understanding, as components of the overall learning experience in relation to ethics in organizations. This is then related to the practice of management development. Addresses the difference between the rather dramatic, if rarely encountered, cases often used in ethics programmes, and the more routine character of the everyday ethical issues actually confronting managers for much of the time.

It is possible to say that an expert in any field of knowledge can be expected to know particular things and techniques. This can be said of a stone mason, a physicist or a midwife. The expertise consists of a notional core of knowledge and skills (i.e. applied knowledge). Such expertise arguably can be found in other experts in the same field, although there will be idiosyncrasies of approach and valuation and quite probably divergencies in what is considered “right” and “wrong”.

Ecological systems comprise interdependent human and other living beings, along with their life-giving natural environments. The sustainability of such systems has become a critical global concern, both generally and in relation to business practice. This chapter considers the cultivation of care among business students as one important way of fostering engagement with such concern, with particular attention given to a specific and under-attended area in business research and practice: that of human sustainability. In order to overcome potential limitations of diverse and often disparate streams of research on care, this chapter considers Mayseless’ (2016) integrative framework for understanding caring motivation, and builds upon the four points of intervention for cultivating care that were articulated within that framework. Extant pedagogical research within business and management is used to elaborate additional insights and methods for developing caring skills, caring values, caring teaching and learning communities, and a more extensive vision of care that includes those who might be unknown, different from or distant to us. The framework, insights, methods, and examples discussed in this chapter provide a foundation that can help guide future care-related, ecologically focused pedagogical research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to show that too often decisions concerning change are made on the basis of partial understanding, limited data and unreflective assumptions about people and organizations. In the discussion of the Socratic dialogue the aim is to uncover a useful method for ensuring more reflective decision making that involves active participation of employees on the receiving end of change.

Although dialogue is used in management processes today, it is contended that the Socratic dialogue is particularly useful in making sense of complex change processes. Data drawn from research conducted in two UK higher education institutions are used to illustrate how lack of knowledge and understanding often pervades and constrains change, and how techniques of Socratic dialogue can be used to secure higher levels of employee involvement and commitment to change.

It is argued that Socratic dialogue can be used as a practical tool to facilitate “participative” change and contend that further research is required to develop the use of this method as a qualitative research instrument for uncovering data on processes of change in organizations.

If practised consistently by organizational members, the Socratic techniques can lead to a more concrete understanding of the complexities of changing organizations. It is a collective process of change through critical questioning and, as such, it lends itself to further exploration on the part of both change managers and qualitative researchers for its uses as a diagnostic and research instrument.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of ethical decision making by managers employed in two major companies in the U.K. Forty managers from these large commercial organizations were interviewed about how ethical issues arise and are dealt with at work. This interview data was transcribed and a thematic content analysis was conducted in order to explore the various influences upon managerial ethical decision making. The analysis framework includes analysis at both an individual level, in terms of the role of individual characteristics such as personal value systems, and at an organizational level, in terms of the influence of organizational characteristics such as organizational culture. The paper then goes on to examine the extent to which this empirically-based account of ethical decision making is congruent with, or runs contrary to, some of the main theoretical propositions contained in the ethical decision-making literature. This provided only limited empirical support for the theoretical propositions described in the literature. In particular, the findings of the empirical work reported here suggest that while personal values may play a part in organizational ethics, the ethical decision-making process itself is subject to a much greater influence from the everyday demands and commercial pressures which managers perceived as being placed upon them in the types of organizations examined in this study. Thus, while supportive of the notion that values may be important in some respects, the study suggests that they are not necessarily that closely involved with the actual decision-making process. Rather the evidence gathered in this study indicates that they can exert an affectively-mediated retrospective effect. This possibility would suggest a reformulation of the role of values in the ethical decision-making process, while also calling for a greater emphasis upon the role of emotions. These are, however, only tentative findings and must therefore be subject to further empirical work before the precise way in which ethical issues arise, unfold and are dealt with in the workplace can be understood.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer reflections on conventional theories concerning causes and determinants of diseases. It also intends to examine both theoretical and empirical bases for adopting an Integrated Social-Ecological Systems (ISES) lens as a tool for understanding complexities related to drivers, determinants and causes of diseases.

We assessed the theoretical underpinnings of a range of historical and contemporary lenses for viewing infectious disease drivers and the implications of their use when used to explain both personal (i.e. individual) and population health. We examined these issues within the empirical context of the City of Dhaka (Bangladesh) by adopting an ISES lens. Within this study an emphasis has been placed on illustrating how feedback loops and non-linearity functions in systems have a direct bearing upon various aspects of infectious disease occurrences.

A brief triumph over microbes during the last century stemmed in part from our improved understanding of disease causation which was built using disciplinary-specific, monocausal approaches to the study of disease emergence. Subsequently, empirical inquiries into the multi-factorial aetiology and the ‘web of causation’ of disease emergence have extended frameworks beyond simplistic, individualistic descriptions of disease causation. Nonetheless, much work is yet to be done to understand the roles of complex, intertwined, multi-level, social-ecological factors in affecting disease occurrence. We argue, a transdisciplinary-oriented, ISES lens is needed to explain the complexities of disease occurrence at various and interacting levels. More theoretical and empirical formulations, with evidence derived from various parts of the world, is also required to further the debate.

Our study advances the theoretical as well as empirical basis for considering an integrated human-nature systems approach to explaining disease occurrence at all levels so that factors at the individual, household/neighbourhood, local, regional and global levels are not treated in isolation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) experience corporate social responsibility (CSR); the concept, the reasons for dealing with it, and its integration in everyday practices. Moreover, the paper aims to discuss how the alignment and misalignment of managerial perceptions are likely to affect corporate social performance.

The analysis is based on a case study that includes interviews with ten managers and survey data from 149 manager respondents.

The paper concludes that managerial perceptions of CSR are characterised by a great deal of heterogeneity. It shows that, even in an organisation with a long CSR tradition and formalised CSR policies, standards and procedures, managers hold different, and not necessarily convergent, views of CSR.

The results indicate that simple categorisations of firms' CSR activities fail to encompass the multitude of perceptions and viewpoints that actually exist in modern organisations. Moreover, the paper questions whether managerial alignment on CSR issues is a precondition for high corporate social performance.