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The purpose of this paper is to describe the need to go beyond relationship management to embrace the techniques of value management with details on why and how CRE managers should pursue this as a professional goal.

This article discusses the experiences of the author working across multiple global corporate accounts. The article advances the discussion on how to strategically align and advance the performance of CRE departments to support business change for corporate competitive advantage.

As CRE managers strive to elevate their strategic relevance to the organization, they are challenged to go beyond relationship management. They are challenged to become value managers, capable of implementing corporate strategy anywhere and with anyone in the organization.

Further research is warranted into the perspectives of senior management on the contribution of CRE to the business planning process. CRE managers are often viewed as functional experts and may be overlooked as candidates for involvement in corporate management development programs.

CRE managers, in charge of business alignment, must turn a professional corner by focusing more on driving corporate value. A career choice is required to invest in the business and financial acumen needed to sit credibly at the planning table with senior management. The career path of the in‐house CRE manager is one of a general business manager, referred to in this article as a “value manager”.

CRE managers are challenged to adopt the behavior, attitude and skill set of general business managers to arrive at solutions to business challenges. These challenges are cross‐functional in nature and often do not start nor end with real estate or, by extension, facilities. Thus, the role of relationship manager needs to evolve into a value manager, who possesses the skills of business planning, business case development, and cross‐functional project management.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a practice guide for where to apply six sigma process improvement methodology to the corporate real estate function.

Based on years of direct experience provide practical guidance on how to get started and to overcome resistance that process improvement is not for service organizations like CRE.

World‐leading CRE departments are addressing cost pressure and performance expectations using process improvement, and the method of choice is six sigma. A methodology that emerged from mechanized manufacturing might seem ill‐adaptive to CRE and similar service cultures. Yet, with guided implementation and disciplined use, six sigma yields tangible results in service environments.

Documenting and benchmarking process improvement results across CRE departments; surveying the level of business adoption of six sigma methodology compared to the level of CRE adoption within the same company and how this leads to business misalignment

World class benchmarks will be set in the future by CRE organizations that adopt six sigma process improvement methodology.

A provocative discourse furthering the cause six sigma within an industry that famously resistant to change.

This study presents an analysis of the evolution of advertising's portrayal of women in motorsport. The construct of source credibility is examined and used as a framework to better understand the limitations and opportunities of female athlete endorsers in general and female racing car drivers in particular. The advertising images of pioneer drivers Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher are discussed and compared to that of Danica Patrick, a media star in the Indy Racing League (IRL). Patrick has been successful in capitalising on her expertise and attractiveness to enhance her image and endorse products. Attitudes towards using sex appeal to sell products are presented and discussed.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

This research note provides some practical advice on accessing financial reports on the internet and the collection of associated data for subsequent analysis. It will be of use to practitioners, academics, students and other researchers embarking on this kind of analysis for the first time. Suggestions are put forward to accelerate the effective collection of data.

Recognizing the demand for a reliable subjective instrument to gather information on walking to occupational activities on the neighbourhood scale, this paper outlines the Neighbourhood Walking to Occupational Activities Questionnaire (NWOAQ) recently developed at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde. The approach follows reliable techniques in the design of questionnaires including the analysis of currently available instruments, interviews with the potential case study participants, and the use of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). It describes the testing of NWOAQ, following a ‘mixed method' adopted to sample the population of three case studies in Basra City, in Iraq (Al-Saymmar, Al-Mugawleen, and Al-Abassya). Cronbach's ‘Alpha Test' (Cronbach, 1951) was conducted on three significant variables selected; ‘the perceived environment' variables; the ‘constructs of the TPB' variables; and the ‘walking outcome' variables. This displayed different alpha levels, which were; 0.76; 0.74; and 0.87, respectively. Based on CAT, the level of internal consistency that would render a group of indicators reliable should be no less than 0.60.

Purpose – Exploring children's perspectives on participation in social research provides sociologists with new insight into how to include children's voices and perspectives effectively in sociological studies of childhood.

Design/methodology/approach – Child-centered interviews were conducted with 20 children between the ages of 5 and 12 as part of a larger research project.

Findings – Findings from interviews, artwork, and researcher field notes suggest that the children interviewed enjoyed the experience of participating in child-centered social research, maintained serious attitudes toward their inclusion in social research and wish to be active participants in future research involving kids.

Practical implications – Suggestions are offered for future research studies of this population and recommendations are made to encourage American sociologists to consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in research endeavors.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

This paper aims to explore the challenges and opportunities for expediting critical reflection in management education and development to highlight particularly how critical reflection has been facilitated within the context of a professionally focused doctoral programme.

The paper draws on empirical research conducted for a broader project, focusing here on two awaydays for DBA supervisors (n=25 in 2005 and n=16 in 2006) and a UFHRD workshop in 2007 (n=12) for members involved and/or interested in doctoral programmes in HRD, where the empirical research findings were presented and discussed. The paper presents selected findings from the perspective of staff through their own critical reflections, drawing on the data from the two awaydays and the UFHRD workshop. Detailed handwritten notes were taken and transcribed, in addition to flipchart material provided by the participants. These qualitative data are analysed using thematic analysis. The quotations presented are as accurate as possible (verbatim) and any ambiguous notes have been deliberately excluded.

Emerging findings include the need to clarify the concept for both staff and students, and embed critical reflection from the beginning of the programme and throughout written assignments. Insights into how staff perceive critical reflection within a DBA programme are offered, including how staff might assume (incorrectly) that advanced practitioners arrive with a high level of maturity to engage in critical reflection, and yet advanced practitioners “worry” about critique and perceive it as negative and/or failure.

It is acknowledged that the subjective experience of student participants is not central to this discussion, and, whilst a limitation of this paper, this presents an avenue for further research.

The paper presents a critical and reflexive account from a facilitator's perspective and offers practical suggestions for incorporating critical reflection within a DBA programme.

Given the dearth of literature of facilitating critical reflection in the context of professionally focused doctoral programmes, this paper makes a small and initial contribution to this field.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that student-led case studies are an important way to learn about mental health problems and to highlight this by presenting a case study of the comedic genius Spike Milligan.

Celebrities live their lives in the public eye. In recent years, many have talked about their struggles with mental health. This paper is based on a student-led case study of the celebrity Spike Milligan.

This case study suggests one previously under-emphasised issue and argues that Spike Milligan’s wartime experiences may have led to post-traumatic stress disorder. Second, that he may have developed neuro-inflammation, through contracting sandfly fever during the war. This could have been an additional trigger for bipolar disorder.

While this is a single case study, it draws on a wide variety of research sources to back up the arguments advanced.

Student-led case studies provide a way of engaging students more actively with mental health problems.

Mental illness is complex, if not more complex, than physical health problems. Case studies of celebrities like Spike Milligan can help develop a public understanding of mental illness, as they already have a working knowledge about the person.

The case study illustrates how Bipolar 1 disorder is a complex and unique condition and that every individual’s illness has different predisposing characteristics. It suggests that student-led case studies are a helpful learning tool.