Search results

Biofouling of marine vessels results in significant operational costs, as well as the bio-security risk associated with the transport of marine pests. Biofouling is particularly rapid in sea-chest water intakes due to elevated temperatures and circulating flow. Inspection challenges are exacerbated, as sea chests are difficult to inspect and clean. This paper aims to present a method that utilises the flexibility and low-batch capabilities of additive manufacture to manufacture custom sea-chest inserts that eliminate circulating flow and increase the uniformity of shear stress distributions to enable more constant ablation of anti-biofouling coatings.

An automated design procedure has been developed to optimise sea-chest insert geometry to achieve desirable flow characteristics, while eliminating the necessity for support material in FDM manufacture – thereby significantly reducing build cost and time.

Numerical flow simulation confirms that the fluid-flow approximation is robust for optimising sea-chest insert geometry. Insert geometry can be manipulated to enable support-free additive manufacture; however, as the threshold angle for support-free manufacture increases, the set of feasible sea-chest aspect ratios decreases.

The surface of revolution that defines the optimal insert geometry may result in features that are not compatible with additive manufacture constraints. An alternate geometry is proposed that may be more useful in practice without compromising anti-biofouling properties.

Marine sea-chest biofouling results in significant negative environmental and economic consequence. The method developed in this paper can reduce the negative impact of sea-chest biofouling.

Marine sea-chest biofouling results in significant resource consumption and emissions. The method developed in this paper can reduce the negative impact of sea-chest biofouling.

The method presented in this paper provides an entirely original opportunity to utilise additive manufacture to mitigate the effects of marine biofouling.

The purpose of this paper is to begin the process of exploring the intersection between entrepreneurship and HRM by developing an understanding of the nature of HRM in growth‐oriented small firms.

A survey of 600 small Australian businesses, conducted by CPA Australia in March 2002 to explore employment issues, is analysed by the authors.

The analysis shows that growth‐oriented small firms are more likely than non‐growing ones to use formal HRM practices where that means that they are written down, regularly applied or assured to take place.

The data are a single snapshot of small firms in time (March 2002) and therefore, while non‐growing small firms can be identified amongst the sample, it is not correct to assume either that they have not grown in the past to reach their current size (with the exception of the single person firms) or that they will not grow in the future. Moreover it is not known whether the growth, which the growing small firms indicate they undertook, was or is sustained.

The result suggests that small firms seeking growth should reconsider their HRM practices in light of their business plans to ensure that there is a good “fit”.

The authors examine small firms in Australia, which are much smaller than their international counterparts, to see whether conclusions from overseas studies are relevant.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what owners of small firms are looking for from new employees. The aim is to pursue this in light of the debate around formality and informality of small firm HRM, exploring the extent to which the small firms studied had formalised HRM practices.

The data reported here were collected in discussions with the owner(s) of 27 small firms in the Latrobe Valley region of South East Victoria, Australia. These firms were participating in the federal government‐funded small business assistance program and data were gathered through a series of visits and discussions with the owners over the period of the assistance program.

It was found that in those firms where they had formalised HRM practices, which linked directly to their strategy, employers were more able to “sell” their vision for the business to potential employees.

Research has shown that there is a positive relationship between small firm growth and the formalisation of HRM policies. However, this paper is based on discussions with people who were taking action to acknowledge and address issues affecting their business and so their experience may not be generalisable to other small businesses.

This paper makes an original contribution of exploring the area of HRM in small firms and is hopefully a reminder to small business owners that HRM issues and small business advisers can play a critical role in the structure of their HRM practices – helping them to decide whom they want to recruit and how to go about it.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how resort managers respond to employment legislation (Law No. 02/2008).

The qualitative case study data from seven self-contained tourist resorts in the Maldives were used to investigate the managerial responses to employment legislation.

Resort managers’ responses ranged from passive compliance to active resistance, with decoupling through opportunism as the dominant strategy used to circumvent the legislation. Some human resource management (HRM) practices emerged from resort managers’ interactions with external stakeholders and employees. Strategic responses and HRM practices were driven by a search for legitimacy or efficiency and sometimes both. The findings show that there are differences between strategic responses and HRM practices by organisational subfield, local resorts and international hotel chains. The resorts’ market orientation also influenced resort managers’ responses and HRM practices.

The findings of this paper have limitations because it was limited to a single industry/sector and to a particular piece of legislation. However, it demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between institutional context and HRM.

This paper shows that responding to employment legislation entails a high level of interplay between the institutional environment and HR actors, and between stakeholders (e.g. employees) and HR actors. It demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling institutional requirements with the preferences of different stakeholders and organisational interests. HR actors actively make sense of institutional requirements and modify HRM practices to accommodate stakeholders’ varying perspectives and preferences. This suggests that in countries such as the Maldives, uneven institutional coverage (e.g. incomplete employment legislation) allows room for organisations to innovate – for better or worse.

Persistent change has placed considerable pressure on organizations to keep up or fade into obscurity. Firms that remain viable, or even thrive, are staffed with decision-makers who capably steer organizations toward opportunities and away from threats. Accordingly, leadership development has never been more critical. In this chapter, the authors propose that leader development is an inherently dyadic process initiated to communicate formal and informal expectations. The authors focus on the informal component, in the form of organizational politics, as an element of leadership that is critical to employee and company success. The authors advocate that superiors represent the most salient information source for leader development, especially as it relates to political dynamics embedded in work systems. The authors discuss research associated with our conceptualization of dyadic political leader development (DPLD). Specifically, the authors develop DPLD by exploring its conceptual underpinnings as they relate to sensemaking, identity, and social learning theories. Once established, the authors provide a refined discussion of the construct, illustrating its scholarly mechanisms that better explain leader development processes and outcomes. The authors then expand research in the areas of political skill, political will, political knowledge, and political phronesis by embedding our conceptualization of DPLD into a political leadership model. The authors conclude by discussing methodological issues and avenues of future research stemming from the development of DPLD.

This paper aims to show how organisation theory can be used to understand the controversy between the shareholder and the stakeholder perspectives. Rationalistic and open system theories may enhance research on corporate governance by offering well-defined concepts and by specifying core relationships.

This paper applies descriptions of the two perspectives in organisation theory as a “method” for illustrating how they are linked to and support the shareholder versus the stakeholder perspectives.

The controversy stems from the fact that the shareholder and the stakeholder perspectives address different relationships. The shareholder perspective captures two relationships that accord with rationalistic organisation theory: shareholders are managing the managers and the organisation, and managers are managing the corporation on behalf of the owners. The stakeholder perspective focuses on three relationships that are not concordant with system theory: managers are managing the shareholders (i.e. the symbolic management of stockholders), managers are managing the corporation (i.e. general management theory) and managers are managing the stakeholders.

Organisation theory provides suggestions for more fruitful definitions of the often-used concepts of direction, control, administration and influence. These terms may be substituted with the well-defined concepts of management, power and control.

Proponents of organisation theory find it theoretically difficult to deal with the topic of corporate governance, if they do at all. When they do, they do it only perfunctorily.

Organisation theory may strengthen research on corporate governance if we insist on both theoretical clarifications of major relationships and on the use of more strictly defined concepts.

The paper investigates factors that contribute to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) surviving major exogenous shocks. Global crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have increasingly heightened scholarly interest in post-crises responses. However, studies that compare the relative responses to external shocks and the outcomes for SMEs operating in different institutional settings are limited. We examine the relative degrees of success European and African SMEs experienced in avoiding the worst consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We use the resource dependency theory (RDT) with variants of institutional theory since the RDT has been shown in practice to have greater explanatory power when used in this way. We augment our framework with a feminist theory dimension. To test our hypotheses, we apply regression analyses using cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES), which include responses from private enterprises in 26 European and eight African countries. We construct our data by combining the COVID-19 follow-up surveys with relevant firm-specific characteristics from the WBES conducted in 2020–2021 using firm-specific unique IDs. After removing the firms with missing observations, the sample number of SMEs is 15,178.

Our empirical findings support the theoretically posited positive effects of innovativeness, institutional connectedness and governance capability on SMEs’ survival in the face of external shocks. Further, we confirm the importance of firm-specific characteristics (financial status, size and age) for SMEs’ survival. Female-owned SMEs are more likely to suffer during COVID-19, especially in Africa. The results are more nuanced when we consider industry specificity and heterogeneity of government support.

Our article helps answer the theoretical (and policy-relevant) question of whether SMEs that are resilient to major exogenous shocks may share certain characteristics despite operating in different institutional environments. If that is so, then it may be that lessons from one continent may have at least some relevance for the other. Our approach’s broad value lies in its capacity to test the degree to which established bodies of theory developed in the Northern Hemisphere may be deployed in Africa, well beyond the contexts which provided their initial empirical basis. This paper also contributes to the literature on the effect of environmental-change shocks on entrepreneurship performance outcomes.

This paper aims to explore how neo‐liberalism shapes income support policy and lone mothers' experiences in Canada and the USA.

A critical comparative analysis is undertaken of how Canadian and US governments take up sociological concepts of risk, market citizenship, and individualization, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the design and administration of neo‐liberal income support policies directed at lone mothers. Specifically, the contradictory life circumstances that Canadian and American lone mothers experience when they access income supports that are designed ostensibly to construct/reconstruct them as citizens capable of risk taking in their search for employment and self‐sufficiency are compared.

The paper finds that the realities for poor lone mothers are remarkably similar in the two countries and therefore argue that income support policies, particularly welfare‐to‐work initiatives, underpinned by neo‐liberal tenets, can act in a counter‐intuitive manner exposing lone mothers to greater rather than lesser economic and social insecurity/inequality, and constructing them as risk aversive and dependent.

The economic and social implications/contradictions of neo‐liberal restructuring of income support policies for lone mothers is revealed.

This paper contributes to broader scholarship on the gendered dimensions of neo‐liberal restructuring of welfare states in late modernity.

Some scholars have claimed that CEOs make decisions, while boards of directors control these decisions by applying the concepts of decision management and decision control. These concepts were suggested more than 30 years ago and are still applied in corporate governance research. They are now challenged on the basis of scholarship on corporate governance and management.

Corporate governance addresses the authority and responsibility that boards of directors and executives have. Management theory addresses planning and control in corporations.

The relationship between the owners (the boards of directors) and the top managers is hierarchical. This paper concludes that owners or boards of directors make decisions on main and strategic goals. Decisions cannot be controlled, but the implementation and outcomes of plans can. The latter is managers’ responsibility. The terms “decision management” and “decision control” are undefined and do not describe what takes place in organizations.

This paper does not contain any new empirical data.

Management theory offers clear definitions of decisions, decision-making and control. The concepts of decision management (initiation and implementation) and decision control (ratification and monitoring) neither properly describe who makes major and strategic decisions nor how and who controls the consequences of these decisions.