Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present evidence to examine the possible psychopathy of Robert Maxwell, a notorious figure in UK business history.

This paper presents research which retrospectively applied a tool to measure whether leading figures in twentieth century business history could be classified as being corporate psychopaths. As background to this idea, psychopaths and corporate psychopaths are defined. A measure of corporate psychopathy is explored as an aid to identifying corporate psychopaths in business history. This measure is then used in relation to senior corporate executives who have been nominated as potential corporate psychopaths and to Robert Maxwell in particular.

The paper concludes that at least some ethical scandals and failures such as those at The Daily Mirror have been characterized by the presence of CEOs who scored highly on a measure of corporate psychopathy. Maxwell’s fraudulent raiding of corporate pension funds crossed ethical and legal borders. Furthermore, Maxwell’s fraudulent looting of those pension funds crossed generational boundaries; stealing from older people’s pension funds and thereby leaving younger people/investors with less to inherit. Maxwell also had an international business empire and so his fraud had effects which crossed geographic borders. The paper concludes that using an historical approach to the study of potential corporate psychopaths illuminates what types of organizational outcomes corporate psychopaths may eventuate.

The paper is the first to use an historical approach to the study of potential corporate psychopaths.

Discusses the 27 papers in ISEF 1999 Proceedings on the subject of electromagnetisms. States the groups of papers cover such subjects within the discipline as: induction machines; reluctance motors; PM motors; transformers and reactors; and special problems and applications. Debates all of these in great detail and itemizes each with greater in‐depth discussion of the various technical applications and areas. Concludes that the recommendations made should be adhered to.

Understanding the mechanical and thermal behavior of materials is the goal of the branch of study known as fractional thermoelasticity, which blends fractional calculus with thermoelasticity. It accounts for the fact that heat transfer and deformation are non-local processes that depend on long-term memory. The sphere is free of external stresses and rotates around one of its radial axes at a constant rate. The coupled system equations are solved using the Laplace transform. The outcomes showed that the viscoelastic deformation and thermal stresses increased with the value of the fractional order coefficients.

The results obtained are considered good because they indicate that the approach or model under examination shows robust performance and produces accurate or reliable results that are consistent with the corresponding literature.

This study introduces a proposed viscoelastic photoelastic heat transfer model based on the Moore-Gibson-Thompson framework, accompanied by the incorporation of a new fractional derivative operator. In deriving this model, the recently proposed Caputo proportional fractional derivative was considered. This work also sheds light on how thermoelastic materials transfer light energy and how plasmas interact with viscoelasticity. The derived model was used to consider the behavior of a solid semiconductor sphere immersed in a magnetic field and subjected to a sudden change in temperature.

This study introduces a proposed viscoelastic photoelastic heat transfer model based on the Moore-Gibson-Thompson framework, accompanied by the incorporation of a new fractional derivative operator. In deriving this model, the recently proposed Caputo proportional fractional derivative was considered. This work also sheds light on how thermoelastic materials transfer light energy and how plasmas interact with viscoelasticity. The derived model was used to consider the behavior of a solid semiconductor sphere immersed in a magnetic field and subjected to a sudden change in temperature.

Purpose – The overall purpose of this chapter is to discuss what is known about serious forms of bias violence, obstacles to studying bias violence, and how alternative theoretical and methodological approaches can advance our understanding of bias violence in the twenty-first century.

Design/methodology/approach – Following a review of the literature, the applicability of identity fusion theory for explaining bias violence is considered and applied to the anti-racial mass shooting at an historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Data come from an innovative open-source project known as the United States Extremist Crime Database.

Findings – Drawing from identity fusion theory, information from open-source data on the Charleston church shooting suggests that the perpetrator was a highly fused individual who perceived African Americans as a threat toward his social identity group and committed an act of extreme behavior (i.e., bias homicide) as a means for stabilizing his self-views.

Originality/value – This chapter builds upon prior studies of bias violence by demonstrating how (1) publicly available open sources (e.g., court documents and media reports) may be systematically compiled and used as reliable data for studying serious forms of bias violence, and (2) the use of social psychological theories, specifically identity fusion theory, can help to explain the role of personal and group identities in discriminatory violence.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

The chapter develops a typology of eight different expected employee communication roles based on literature in public relations (PR), corporate communication and related fields. As PR professionals are increasingly taking on a coaching and training role, and communication technology has made employees more visible and approachable, employees more and more take on active roles in the communication with external publics. While PR professionals’ roles are conceptualized fairly well, no framework exists that describes the many communication roles that employees play in contemporary organizations. In the chapter, it is found that employees externally (1) embody, (2) promote, and (3) defend the organization. In addition, employees use communication to (4) scout for information and insights about environmental changes, and (5) build and maintain relationships with stakeholders. Internally, employees use communication to (6) make sense of information, (7) initiate and stimulate innovation, and (8) criticize organizational behaviour and decisions. The typology highlights that employees increasingly fulfil the tactic communication roles as producers and executers of corporate communication as social media have made them more visible and approachable. The communication roles require considerable tactical skills and resources on the part of employees, which they may not always possess sufficiently. PR professionals can play a coaching role in terms of helping employees frame content and communicate in a manner appropriate for the organization, the context and the media. The chapter can help PR professionals and scholars understand the changed role of PR professionals, as well as the changed relationships between organizations and their environment, in the context of dissolving organizational boundaries.

According to a report just issued by Dr. ARTHUR NEWSHOLME, the Principal Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, it appears that a majority of the staff of the Medical Department of the Board have been engaged in assisting to establish as favourable sanitary conditions as possible at the training centres for the new troops so that the risks associated with the concentration and feeding of large numbers of men under temporary conditions should be reduced to a minimum.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to explore the use of employer branding as a key strategy in talent management, in an effort to retain employees in the context of the Irish hotel industry.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter was part of a wider body of research, and combines this discussion with a sequential mixed-method approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 hotel general managers in Cork City/County, and these were combined with 417 employee questionnaires conducted in the same hotels.

Findings: This chapter finds that hoteliers in Ireland are aware of the necessity to tackle the area of employee retention, are conscious of the importance of positive employer branding to aid in decreasing employee turnover, but that many are just at the genesis of their journey in the area of talent management. Indeed, many hotels have not yet implemented a talent management plan into their organisation and need to be more innovative in their approach to talent management through positive employer branding.

Practical implications: Employees strongly believe that those hotels which possess a positive employer brand have more committed employees, while those with negative reputations in terms of their employment affect an employee’s intentions to leave the business. Therefore, employers must put strategies in place to enhance their employer brand if they are to attract and retain employees.

Social implications: The chapter makes recommendations to hotel managers as to how employer branding can be utilised as part of their overall talent management strategy to increase employee retention in a challenging employment market, improving overall performance, and leading to sustained competitiveness. The areas of talent management, employer branding, and employee retention are interlinked, and it is imperative that hotels implement strategic initiatives in these key areas.

Originality/value of paper: This chapter contributes to the overall talent management area, offering further guidance to operators who are embarking on this strategic direction. It supports the link between talent management and employer branding.

Evaluation of an individual's qualifications and performance is an integral part of entering and progressing through the ranks of most organizations. Yet, there are indications that women in management are hampered by sex bias in evaluation situations (e.g., Heilman, 1984; Schein, 1973; Terborg, & Ilgen, 1975; Walsh, Weinberg, and Fairfield, 1987). Therefore, sex bias may be adversely affecting the personnel decision‐making processes and procedures that are often critical for establishing and maintaining a career in management.

This paper discusses video ethnography as part of a multimethod study of the introduction of information technology to streamline pathology test order entry in hospitals and its effect on the work of pathology laboratory scientists. The paper opens with an overview of video research in health care settings. After acknowledging the limitations inherent in video data, the paper offers a description of how video footage served to enhance insight in three ways. First, the footage enhanced the researchers’ own appreciation of the significance of particular facets of the data, which led them to reassess information collected through interviewing, focus groups and research field notes. Second, the footage enhanced the pathology laboratory scientists’ appreciation of the problems they experienced when incorporating the new information technology into their daily work practice, by enabling them to articulate these problems to outside researchers. Third, by being watched (by the video camera) and by watching themselves perform their work they were enabled to redesign their practices. The paper suggests that, as a result of interactively performing their work in front of the camera, the scientists came to apprehend their practices ‘from under a different aspect’. The paper concludes that by allowing video ethnography as a research method to remain underdefined and emergent, the modality of engagement and uptake shown by participants in the video research can be considered as a further enriching aspect of video ethnography as a research process.