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Strategists are supposed to be experts in prioritizing, planning, and putting things in perspective. But things go wrong. Projects take longer than expected. Fires flare up. Projections fizzle. Suddenly there's too much to do. Everything is an emergency. All your previous plans are flashing “system overload.”

A company's increasing global presence, unfortunately, seems to coincide with the increasingly vague role many foreign‐subsidiary managers get to play. Foreign‐subsidiary managers of global companies are losing authority and control over production decisions, which are being transferred to headquarters' product divisions, according to a report from the Conference Board in New York. In the past, these executives exercised considerable decision‐making autonomy over all operational activities.

This paper analyses the incremental housing process developed at Villa Verde, a housing project designed by the Chilean architecture firm Elemental, whose director Alejandro Aravena received the Pritzker Prize in 2016. This project is conceived within a social housing framework and designed as an affordable “half-house” to be incrementally extended by the owners.

This paper is based on research undertaken in August 2017 with data obtained through site surveys, trace analysis, interviews with 32 residents and photographic surveys. The researchers mapped the modifications made by all households at Villa Verde in the four years after occupation.

The strategy of designing a formal framework for informal additions has generally been successful with most houses undergoing substantial expansion to a high standard of construction. The paper raises concerns regarding the settlement's urban design, response to local climate and the quality of shared open space. We also find evidence of over-development as informal additions extend across front and rear yards that are in some cases fully enclosed.

This project is critiqued within the context of a long series of architectural attempts to harness the productive capacities of self-help housing. Villa Verde engages the freedom to build in a self-organised manner within a formal framework. But what will stop these additions from escalating into a “slum”?

The main purpose of the study was to investigate practices relating to informed consent for radiological procedures.

All Health Boards in Scotland (15) were included in the survey and 62 hospitals were contacted. A questionnaire was developed and sent to superintendent radiographers and radiology managers. Quantitative data were entered in to SPSS‐PC for analysis.

A response rate of 95.2 per cent (59/62) was achieved. A total of 15 hospitals described having a trust policy document on consent and six hospitals reported departmental policies. The majority of hospitals used consent forms for interventional procedures, but not for conventional procedures, although two hospitals obtained informed consent for intravenous urography, and one for barium enemas. All departments (n=25/25) using consent forms required the patient to sign the consent form and 20 departments retained the form. Nine departments placed these in the patient's medical records.

The survey demonstrated considerable diversity in hospital practices regarding informed consent for radiological procedures. The findings have significant implications for clinical governance, especially regarding risk management. Some staff may be putting themselves at risk in an increasingly litigious society. The transferability of this Scottish study needs to be established through surveys in other parts of the UK.

The study reports diversity in practice when gaining informed consent for radiological procedures and the lack of standardisation for this process.

No previous UK empirical studies on informed consent for radiological procedures has been published.

The immediate financial and operational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education have resulted in short-term responses focused on reducing costs. This has included decreasing the size of the permanent workforce, pausing senior executive pay and replacing face-to-face with online teaching. The impact of these changes on employees who provide education, research and student support has been significant. To enable higher education to respond effectively to future complexity requires a more strategic approach designed to build employees commitment. The extent of change requires a move away from the current control-oriented, individualist and hierarchical administrative management approach that characterises higher education, towards a more collaborative leadership approach. Based on a case study of Australian higher education, the chapter unpacks how, in combination, the elements of an ecological view of leadership, actioned through multiple double-loop feedback based on the six tenets of a distributed leadership approach, can underpin a collaborative leadership approach designed to build employee commitment.

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.

The majority of knowledge management theory and practice literature is based on, and relates to, western and Japanese business environments and related assumptions. A number of generic knowledge management cross sectional studies based on Chinese organizations have taken place; however there is a lack of in‐depth critical studies which are culturally grounded and which focus on a particular aspect or domain of knowledge management in Chinese organizations, as opposed to applying western or Japanese knowledge management models and concepts. Hence the paper seeks to make a contribution by carrying out a critical study in knowledge sharing within Chinese organizations that explores the role of culture in relation to the knowledge‐sharing process, where the people‐based aspects of knowledge sharing are likely to be influenced by the prevailing culture. The aim of the paper is to explore the role of knowledge sharing at multiple organizational levels within Chinese service‐based organizations.

Five consulting firms are analyzed within the multi case study, to explore knowledge sharing at multiple levels, where existing literature and preliminary research has shown that consulting organizations in the service sector are more likely to have advanced their understanding of knowledge sharing as a source of innovation and competitiveness. The research methods included interviews (n=40), focus groups (n=10) and observations made during four visits, each of several weeks, to the companies. The five organizations were Chinese owned and at a similar growth stage and hence the effects of external cultures or organizational specific cultures were secondary to that of the prevailing Chinese culture.

The findings show that cultural interpretations of knowledge sharing practices can help in explaining Chinese conceptions and applications of knowledge sharing at multiple organizational levels. Moreover these cultural influences suggest that non‐Chinese conceptions of knowledge sharing can in some circumstances result in misleading approaches being used in attempting to promote knowledge sharing in a Chinese context and that the strong group culture is a key vehicle for knowledge sharing as opposed to individual idea generation.

The findings show the need for further research in comparing Chinese and western organizations in relation to collaboration knowledge sharing where the case organizations have had different levels of exposure to western culture. Much more in‐depth case‐based research is needed to explore these contextual issues and to develop theoretical propositions.

The extrapolation of western and Japanese‐based knowledge sharing concepts and practices to Chinese contexts without an examination of Chinese culture and its impact on organizational culture may produce sub‐optimal results. A more culturally grounded approach, where knowledge sharing practices are indigenously grounded, is suggested.

There is a paucity of multi‐level knowledge sharing studies which seek to both address cultural considerations and systematically inquire into the development of knowledge sharing in Chinese organizations from a cultural perspective. The findings from this study can help inform western‐Chinese business collaboration through improved understanding of the cultural effects on knowledge sharing.