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This article describes individual coaching and a program of 360‐degree feedback used with Menzies Distribution's senior‐management team, including the managing director and full executive board.

Details how 360‐degree instrument used included behavioral analysis of eight competencies across 18 skill sets. It asked managers to rate themselves on core competencies such as communication, leadership, adaptability, relationships, task management, production, development of others, personal development and problem solving. It then asked their peers, bosses and direct reports to rate them across the same competencies.

Reveals that managers across the business were good at getting the job done, were task focused and could be relied upon to implement, but they were weak in critically analyzing their systems and processes and then redesigning them for the better.

Argues that the business now has a management team that is ready, willing and able to react to and lead change.

Highlights how 360‐degree feedback was a necessary first step to get a clear picture of the talent across the business before any management‐development and coaching work could begin.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how 19 managers from the European and Middle Eastern divisions of multinational business consultancy Convergys built a badger‐watching platform during a training weekend, to assess and improve skills in leadership, motivation and performance management.

Details how the training was commissioned and delivered, and the benefits it brought.

Explains that the managers were split into four teams, responsible for catering, public relations, resourcing and entertainment. Each team had a functional responsibility, but the group as a whole was in charge of planning, designing and building the badger‐watching platform within 24 hours.

Claims that, overall, the managers were helped to see the company's key business objectives more clearly, and how their individual performance relates to these objectives.

Reveals that asking team members as a group to plot the way forward and set some rules for themselves was an effective way of fostering a common understanding and shared goals.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.

At the beginning of each academic term, thousands of students respond to community colleges' open-door invitation with the expectation of fulfilling their dreams of a higher education. When students walk through those doors, they are routinely asked to take basic skills tests in math, reading, and writing (Bailey, Jeong, & Cho, 2008). These new community college students soon discover that the results of these assessment tests will direct their pathway into college-level courses or developmental or remedial courses. According to Bailey, Jeong, and Cho, about 60 percent of incoming students are referred to at least one developmental course, and many are referred to multiple levels of developmental education before they can be considered ready for college. McCabe (2000) reported that 20 percent of African-American students enrolled in community colleges have seriously deficient skills, that is, they are placed in developmental reading, writing, and math and assigned to a lower level remedial course in at least one area. Only 5 percent of Caucasian students, however, come to community colleges with seriously deficient skills.

The paper aims to analyse bottom of the pyramid (BoP) customers’ (e.g. Bangladeshi farmers) use and appropriation of mobile telephony and to critically identify a suitable research strategy for such investigation.

Concentrated ethnographic immersion was combined with both methodological and investigator triangulation during a four-month period of fieldwork conducted in Bangladeshi villages to obtain more robust findings. Concentrated immersion was required to achieve relatively speedier engagement owing to the difficulty in engaging with respondents on a long-term basis.

The farmers’ use of mobile telephony went beyond the initial adoption, as they appropriated it through social and institutional support, inventive means and/or changes in their own lifestyle. The paper argues that technology appropriation, being a result of the mutual shaping of technology, human skills and abilities and macro-environmental factors, enables users to achieve desired outcomes which may not always be the ones envisaged by the original designers.

The paper contributes to two major areas: first, it identifies technology appropriation as an important and emerging concept in international marketing research; second, it suggests a concentrated form of ethnographic engagement for studying technology appropriation in a developing country context.

A good understanding of the dynamic interplay between users’ skills and abilities, social contexts and technological artefacts/applications is required in order for businesses to serve BoP customers profitably.

The paper presents a dynamic model of technology appropriation based on findings collected through a pragmatic approach by combining concentrated ethnographic immersion with methodological and investigator triangulation.

Research on the socialization experiences, professional development, and success of students and faculty have generally emphasized the importance and role of advisors as the support mechanism for graduate or doctoral students (e.g., Baird, 1995; Bargar & Mayo-Chamberlain, 1983; Gardner, 2009; Golde, 2001; Lovitts, 2001; Tinto, 1993; Zhao, Golde, & McCormick, 2005), rather than the role that mentoring and support can have for undergraduate students. King (2003) defines mentoring as a relationship that “suggests a level of personal interaction, nurture, and guidance that exceeds the requirements of ‘good enough’ research advising” (p. 15). King further states that “rather than being concerned solely with the student's completing the dissertation or developing technical competence, the mentor is concerned with promoting a broader range of psychosocial, intellectual, and professional development” (p. 15). King's definition should not be confined to just students at a doctoral level. If we assume that the decision to attend college occurs for both personal and professional reasons, then it stands to reason that providing a different level of support and mentoring should also enhance both the personal and the professional aspects the academic experience for those involved, regardless of academic level. Thus, the one tool that could have lasting and profound effects for the academic success of African American women that clearly seems to be lacking is mentoring.

The purpose of this article is to outline how far the empirical evidence supports the centrality of leadership in the process of improving underperforming schools.

This article draws on evidence from a contemporary, selected, review of the literature.

The findings show that leadership is the critical factor in the improvement of underperforming schools. Seven new themes, derived from the selected evidence, are presented that illuminate how leaders secure improvement in the most challenging of school contexts.

This review is not a systematic review of the evidence and does not claim to be. It provides a commentary based on selected contemporary evidence and therefore is not comprehensive account of all the relevant evidence pertaining to leading the improvement of underperforming schools. The evidence is derived from sources written in English; therefore, it is fully acknowledged that other sources, in other languages might exist but are not included or reflected.

The practical implications are clearly laid out in the form of seven key themes about leading the improvement of underperforming schools that are of direct practical use.

With so many schools in high poverty areas finding themselves in difficulty, this contemporary review provides new insights about the leadership approaches and practices that continue to make a considerable difference to underperforming schools.