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Work overload is an important and often singular objective for organizational interventions targeting nurse satisfaction and turnover in hospital settings around the world. The centerpiece of many such interventions involves the reassignment of nursing tasks to lesser licensed or unlicensed staff in order to provide immediate term relief to over extended professional nurses. These “Substitution Interventions” (SI) evolve from the diagnostic assumptions that “lightening the load” of professional nurses with more plentifully available “others” will provide, even in the absence of other changes, immediate relief to over-extended staff, reducing their growing sense of dissatisfaction and, thus, decreasing their desire or perceived need to look for another job. The purpose of this study is to critically examine the prevailing diagnostic assumptions that underlie “Substitution Interventions” (SI) and, propose and test in a sample of hospital care-givers (n=241) an alternative organization diagnostic model that may aid in understanding their propensity to fall short of management expectations.

This chapter is an exploratory study of business ethics as it relates to family firms; it primarily aims to explore virtue ethics as an alternative proposal for the ethical concerns that family firms face in their management, thus overcoming the limitations of relevant business ethics approaches and integrating them into an overarching paradigm. Ethics can be classified into three main streams: (1) deontology, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) virtue ethics. The former two approaches have been widely used in the realm of business and family firms for many years and they tend to instrumentalize ethics for business purposes. Yet, they are mostly powerless to explain and promote the ethical concerns surrounding the family firm’s culture. Virtue ethics regained philosophical interest in the second half of the twentieth century, shifting the focus of morality from “the right thing to do” to the “best way to live.” By bringing together two consolidated research fields, family firms and virtue ethics, this chapter contributes a rich perspective to current research in both fields and opens up new ways of answering many of the cultural questions that family firms bring to the table.

The purpose of this paper is to take a reflexive look at the cultural experiences of a group of overseas students studying at a business school in the North East of England. The paper uses Baudrillard's work on simulacra and simulation to challenge notions of second culture contact.

Using primary (i.e. interviews with 14 students and four staff) and secondary sources the paper investigates second culture contact truths associated with English higher education for a group of overseas students. To capture the richness of individual cultural experiences for these students and staff a qualitative approach in gathering empirical data is adopted.

First, it seems the mainstream literature that posits cultures as definable, distinct and measurable entities that can be acquired does not capture the complexity of cultural experiences as revealed by the individuals involved in this study. Second, the findings surface questions about the validity of what educators and students take for granted or perceive as “real” in regards to what it means to “be an English student” and the processes of “becoming an English student”. Third, the findings raise provocative questions about the process, content and context of curriculum to those responsible for developing and marketing international programmes.

Education as an international business means strategists, marketers and educators alike need to look closer at the way international programmes are developed, marketed and delivered both for viability and ethical reasons.

Engagement with Baudrillard's work on simulacra and simulation is a playful attempt to see higher education as third‐order simulacra. As an alternative lens in challenging second culture contact it offers interesting and novel insights.

Few studies examine how hiring discrimination can be an antecedent to the labor exploitation of immigrant workers. The main purpose of this paper is to advance the theoretical understanding of how the intersectionality of race and immigrant status affects differential hiring treatment, and how it affects job offers, job acceptance and hiring decision outcomes for immigrant job seekers.

The paper draws from theories on status and intersectionality, and literature on immigration labor and racial hierarchy, addressing the unequal power relations that underlie race and immigration status affecting the hiring process, to advance critical understandings of why immigrant job seekers accept positions where they may be exploited.

This paper provides a conceptual model to critically synthesize the complexity between race and immigrant status, and their effect on the experience of immigrant job seekers differently. Exploitation opportunism is introduced to better understand the mechanisms of hiring discrimination among immigrant job seekers to include the role of race, immigrant status, economic motivations and unequal power relations on the hiring process.

The framework for exploitation opportunism will help employers improve the quality and fairness of their hiring methods, and empower immigrant job seekers to not allow themselves to accept subpar job offers which can lead to exploitation.

The paper provides an original analysis of immigrant job seekers' experience of the hiring process that reveals the intragroup differences among immigrants based on race and status, and the decision-making mechanisms that hiring managers and immigrant job seekers use to evaluate job offers and job acceptance.

This study confirms and extends previous research by providing a detailed longitudinal examination of the strategic group and performance relationship in the hospital industry from 1983 to 1993. Based on a deductive approach using Porter's (1980) typology, we find that matching strategy to environment affects hospital performance, that the appropriate match between strategy and environment changed over the 1983 to 1993 time period, and that hospitals combining a low cost and differentiation strategy (i.e., a best‐cost approach) performed well during most of the time period examined. We also find significant movement between strategic groups, thus calling into question the degree to which mobility barriers affect between group performance differences. Finally, our research suggests the existence of multiple groups following the same strategic approach, a result that calls into question the view that groups within an industry are monolithic.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

During a UN Commission meeting in 1983, Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland came to state one of the most comprehensive definitions of sustainability: ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED Report, 1987). Since then, themes related to sustainability proliferated and passed beyond the ‘macro’ level by also adopting ‘mezzo’ and ‘micro’ levels as unit of analysis. To state this more specifically, a macro perspective reflects a community level point of view, while a mezzo perspective adopts organisation and institution level focus point, and a micro perspective adopts an individual level research view. Within this framework, the issue turns out to be a debate of providing sustainability to the community, to the institutions (‘business enterprise’ being one of them) and to the individuals. Such fragmentation is especially necessary in literature as it is the aggregation of research on multiple levels that will lead to seminal contributions in many respects. Literature suggests evidence of how devastating the outcomes could be when there is conflict among these different levels regarding the meaning and implications of sustainability (e.g. Baumgartner & Ebner, 2010; Linnenluecke, Russell, & Griffiths, 2009).

The Academy of Management held its 1988 annual convention at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, August 5–11. The setting was highly appropriate, since some of the topics presented and discussed clearly bordered on fantasy.

This article investigates the issue of diversification around the core business, namely concentric diversification. There have been many diversification failures reported over the last few decades. Little guidance has been available to firms who plan to diversify in order to grow. The literature relating to competitive advantage, sustainable competitive advantage, and concentric diversification is reviewed. A process is then presented to help managers make sound strategic diversification decisions, thus reducing the risk of failure.