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Survey evidence is used to identify the perceptions of management development held by operating managers and corporate human resource managers in New Zealand companies. The results show that global business changes have affected New Zealand managers in significant ways and that, in response, companies are turning increasingly to in‐house development targeted at middle and supervisory level managers. Operating managers reveal that they have been unprepared for some of the consequences of the recent deregulation of the economy. There are useful suggestions for management developers, in particular with regard to the content and delivery of management education.

Brings together the different strands of the divestment literature – industrial organization, finance, and corporate strategy – which have been developing over the last 20 years. Points to be increased resort to divestment by corporate managers and suggests that this adaptive activity should now be accepted as a normal phase of company development. However, such acceptance is made difficult by factors which fall within the domain of managerial psychology. Provides an overview which should be useful to practitioners confronting divestment decisions and to academics embarking on new research in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to study the consistency in the management of poor performance by a group of experienced managers working at the same level in a service organisation which had a formal performance management process.

A case study is developed using cognitive scripts to reveal how front‐line managers in a large service organisation dealt with the issue of poor performance. The nature of their scripts was also related to measures of the managers' experience.

The management of poor performance is still fraught with inconsistency even among an experienced group of managers. Those who had been managers longest were the most likely to act consistently in this area.

The research is based on the perceptions of the managers all‐operating at the same level and in one organisation and it is not possible to generalise across other levels or organisations.

The inconsistency of approach does suggest that organisations should at least review their procedures and facilitate the development of managers in this area.

The paper presents the managers' voice on this area of their work, a perspective that is essential for management development in this area.

This paper aims to focus on production offshoring and “backshoring” in a representative sample of 151 New Zealand manufacturers. It identifies how and why firms offshore; why many increase their offshoring while others “backshore”; and why most firms continue to compete internationally without offshoring.

Data collection used a two-wave postal questionnaire survey of 676 firms, with a usable response rate of 22.3 per cent and no indication of non-response bias.

Most exporters manufactured only from their New Zealand base, but 44 per cent had outsourced some production offshore in the period 2001 to 2011. Among the 67 offshored firms, 11 had then “backshored” to New Zealand. The main reasons for offshoring were lower labour costs and capacity constraints in New Zealand. “Backshoring” occurs when lower labour costs become offset by impaired capabilities in flexibility/delivery; quality; and the value of the Made in New Zealand brand especially among consumer goods producers. Stay at home firms reported fears of lowered quality; country loyalty; and their Made in New Zealand country of origin brand.

Offshoring begins tentatively but many firms then increase their offshoring to reap the benefit of lower labour costs. These reasons for “backshoring” mirror those given for keeping production in New Zealand and must be given careful consideration by firms considering offshoring.

There are few studies of offshoring by smaller manufacturers and none that have elucidated this as a process, one that is still avoided by many and can end in costly “backshoring” for others.

Small owner‐managed firms typically operate with levels of debt, much of it short‐term, which are higher than those found in large companies. This paper investigates the financing preferences of a cross‐section of small firm owners. The findings support the view that the financing decisions of small firm owners are based on a demand‐side packing order of finance types. The resulting financial structures reflect a desire to minimise intrusion into the firms and are not entirely the consequence of persistent deficiencies in the provision of finance to small firms.

To explore the relationship between managers' cognitive maps and their performance as managers at the same level in the same organisation.Design/methodology/approach – Field study involving 30 branch managers in a financial services organisation operating in New Zealand. A nomthetic approach was used to develop their cognitive maps. Features of these maps were then related to business‐unit performance.Findings – The managers who were higher performing have maps that were considerably simpler, using fewer concepts and fewer linkages.Research limitations/implications/future research – While limited to one organisation and to one level of management, there is evidence that cognition is related to managers' performance. Future research should explore how cognitive structures differ between managerial levels, and how these are related to appropriate measures of performance.Originality/value – One of few studies that have sought to map managers' cognition and organisation performance.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

There are many potential measures of performance for evaluating the success of a construction project. All address performance in three key areas: scope, schedule and budget. In a performance measurement framework where senior management wishes to minimise the numberof performance measures it employs, while ensuring maximal coverage or visibility into the programme, having a tool that captures each of the three areas would be ideal. Project managers have used Earned Value Management (EVM) for over 40 years to track actual schedule progress and actual costs against project plans. Earned Value Management has traditionally been applied to individual projects on which the manager is accountable for both schedule and cost variances. This paper proposes methods to apply EVM principles to allow: (1) analysis of portfolios of construction projects; (2) incorporation of the analysis into an innovative pay‐for‐performance human resources practice; and (3) use of regression analysis to develop baseline earned value curves. These extensions fit the needs of many government managers, who oversee a range of projects by multiple contractors, and whose cost risk is primarily due to schedule slips and change orders. Earned Value Management is described in the context of project oversight, and a dashboard system of performance measures is proposed for quickly assessing individual projects and portfolios. A method of generating standardised planned value curves is then specified, based on data from previous and ongoing projects. The paper concludes by showing how the US General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service is using these methods to analyse and oversee its portfolio of new construction and major repair and alteration projects.