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Flexible feeding is an emerging alternative to traditional part feeding methods. This alternative greatly enhances the versatility of a manufacturing workcell by using a robot manipulator and sophisticated sensing devices such as machine vision, thereby significantly reducing both cost and set up time. This article explores the benefits of a new model in PC‐based robot control, which makes the development of flexible feeders and similar applications much easier than using traditional robot programming environments. It also explores how a programming paradigm based on a well‐defined model of the workcell greatly simplifies both the logic of the application and the calibration of the physical machine.

This study aims to examine the antecedents of company secretaries’ behaviour and their relationship and effect on intended whistleblowing with the role of neutralisation as a moderating factor on an individual’s ethical decision-making in whistleblowing.

Using a modified version of the theory of planned behaviour as a framework and a quantitative research approach, a Likert-type scaled, self-administered questionnaire was conducted on a non-probability sample, totalling 208 company secretaries, currently working for various consultancy, audit and secretarial firms in Malaysia. The data obtained were analysed through structural equation modelling.

Findings indicated that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, ethical obligation as well as self-identity were found to be predictors in a company secretary’s intended behaviour to whistle-blow. However, neutralisation was proved not to be a contributing factor in whistleblowing between intention and behaviour.

The quantitative measures of intention and behaviour are incompatible based on their levels of specificity or generality. Also, there may be an existence of social desirability bias among the respondents, indicating the need for a wider sample.

The study offers valuable knowledge by providing organisations and regulators with several insights into improving the company secretaries’ whistleblowing behaviour, including the need to strengthen whistleblowers’ support and alleged malpractice investigation and analysis systems. It also enables company directors and regulators to implement whistleblowing policies as an internal control mechanism, thus realising an individual’s intention to highly engage in whistleblowing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first research that has empirically tested the relationship and effect of antecedents of company secretaries’ whistleblowing intention and behaviour using a modified version of the theory of planned behaviour, thus adding to the stock of literature on this topic and showing that “neutralisation” had an insignificant effect on the possibility of fraudulent reporting.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

Purpose – The introductory chapter to this special issue highlights contemporary scholarship on networks, work, and inequality.Methodology – We review the last decade of research on this topic, identifying four key areas investigation: (1) networks and hiring, (2) networks and the labor process, (3) networks and outcomes at work, and (4) networks and institutional dynamics.Findings – Social networks play an important role in understanding the mechanisms by which and the conditions under which economic inequality is reproduced across gender, race, and social class distinctions. Throughout the review, we point to numerous opportunities for future research to enhance our understanding of these social processes.

This paper aims to explore the true sources of innovation that revolutionized two sports industries – skiing and tennis, tracking the flow of ideas and power of technology brokering through the eyes of the innovator, Howard Head.

Using a focal innovation action-set framework, the authors unite heretofore-disparate pieces of information to paint a more complete picture of the innovation and technology brokering process. Primary source material from Head’s patents, personal memoirs and journals and documented correspondence between him, his brother and his colleagues are augmented with secondary source material from periodicals, media excerpts and the academic literature.

Head stands as an exemplar example of a technology broker, both through his serial practice of recombinant innovation and his savvy exploitation of resources. Results discredit the Great Man Theory of Innovation, while emphasizing the importance of exploiting social capital to realize opportunities.

This paper is the first to offer detailed insight into the technology brokering and innovation processes that revolutionized the tennis and skiing industries. It is novel in that it is one of very few papers to challenge the Great Man Theory of Innovation propagated by many textbooks and mass media, explores the process of technology brokering from the broker’s perspective rather than organizationally and uses focal innovation action-set methodology to complement a historical biographical sketch of innovativeness relative to sports equipment and machines.

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.

Technological development creates technological imperative for organisations. The most recent is dedicated to digital technologies with a strong influence on the way of managing and organising. To gain a better understanding of the latest business practice, the authors use a multilevel perspective and apply the historical analysis method. Specifically, this chapter explores organisational design (OD) of the future through the evolutionary perspective (spanning across the four industrial revolutions) and brings into focus how technological imperatives modified organisational structure, coordination mechanisms and people/job practices. By reflecting on the historical changes in OD practices that happened throughout different phases of industrialisation, the authors analyse how building blocks of digital OD shape managerial and employee behaviours, thus unleashing the performance potential of digital technologies.

In the late 1970s, the much beloved tradition of Asilomar began. But then, of course, it was not even located at Asilomar. Rather it was a much smaller event that was held at Pajaro Dunes. Nonetheless, it featured what ultimately became the traditional blend of informal sessions that mixed students and faculty from around the University. The most memorable conference of that time featured working papers by Jeff Pfeffer and Jerry Salancik, John Meyer and Brian Rowan, and Mike Hannan and John Freeman. Each of these pairs of authors presented fledgling work that would go on to become keystone statements for three highly influential theories: resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), “new” institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977).