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Training in clerical work has largely been neglected in the past, even by those employers who fully supported training for other employees. With the establishment of the training boards it was hoped that the situation would be remedied, but clerical jobs are diverse and employers' attitudes to the training of clerical staff hard to change. Derby College of Further Education introduced the Certificate in Office Studies, the two‐year day‐release course for clerical workers, right from its inception in 1965. The course has always been well supported, having an enrolment last session of over one hundred students in each year of the course. The nature of the COS, extending over two years, still left ample scope for the development of a shorter, more intensive and practical course, which would help the young entrant settle more rapidly into his commercial employment. The emphasis, in this context, is on the word rapidly. At this stage we were aware of the need to make new clerical workers effective in a short time and that this required some form of block‐release. As the various schemes for block‐release courses have been proposed, we have welcomed them and implemented them.

To critically compare three future weather year (FWY) downscaling approaches, based on the 2009 UK Climate Projections, used for climate change impact and adaptation analysis in building simulation software.

The validity of these FWYs is assessed through dynamic building simulation modelling to project future overheating risk in typical English homes in 2050s and 2080s.

The modelling results show that the variation in overheating projections is far too significant to consider the tested FWY data sets equally suitable for the task.

It is recommended that future research should consider harmonisation of the downscaling approaches so as to generate a unified data set of FWYs to be used for a given location and climate projection. If FWY are to be used in practice, live projects will need viable and reliable FWY on which to base their adaptation decisions. The difference between the data sets tested could potentially lead to different adaptation priorities specifically with regard to time series and adaptation phasing through the life of a building.

The paper investigates the different results derived from FWY application to building simulation. The outcome and implications are important considerations for research and practice involved in FWY data use in building simulation intended for climate change adaptation modelling.

The paper is based on the presumption that sustainable organisational performance cannot be achieved without continuous organisational development as well as continuous development of the employees. The paper is of the opinion that, in a company or any other organisation, creating the conditions for knowledge development is of utmost importance. These conditions should enhance innovation processes fostered by employees. The paper aims to investigate this premise.

The basic idea for the research in the paper arose from the findings that proved that organisational structures do substantially facilitate creativity processes. The main part of the paper focuses on researching team cohesion and obtaining information on interpersonal relationships as a starting‐point for new knowledge to emerge.

The main finding of the qualitative case study, conducted on 172 employees of a certain manufacturing company, are that interpersonal relationships in smaller groups of people are of better quality than those in larger groups.

As a consequence of research on the company involved in the case study, suggestions in terms of improving knowledge management were made and concrete measures were taken.

While research on digital dangers has been growing, studies on their respective solutions and justice responses have not kept pace. The agathokakological nature of technology demands that we pay attention to not only harms associated with interconnectivity, but also the potential for technology to counter offenses and “do good.” This chapter discusses technology as both a weapon and a shield when it comes to violence against women and girls in public spaces and private places. First, we review the complex and varied manifestations of technological gender violence, ranging from the use of technology to exploit, harass, stalk, and otherwise harm women and girls in communal spaces, to offenses that occur behind closed doors. Second, we discuss justice-related responses, underscoring how women and girls have “flipped the script” when their needs are not met. By developing innovative ways to respond to the wrongs committed against them and creating alternate systems that offer a voice, victims/survivors have repurposed technology to redress harms and unite in solidarity with others in an ongoing quest for justice.

Research data publishing is today widely regarded as crucial for reproducibility, proper assessment of scientific results, and as a way for researchers to get proper credit for sharing their data. However, several challenges need to be solved to fully realize its potential, one of them being the development of a global standard for links between research data and literature. Current linking solutions are mostly based on bilateral, ad hoc agreements between publishers and data centers. These operate in silos so that content cannot be readily combined to deliver a network graph connecting research data and literature in a comprehensive and reliable way. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Publishing Data Services Working Group (PDS-WG) aims to address this issue of fragmentation by bringing together different stakeholders to agree on a common infrastructure for sharing links between datasets and literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents the synergic effort of the RDA PDS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure toward enabling a common infrastructure for exchanging data-literature links by realizing and operating the Data-Literature Interlinking (DLI) Service. The DLI Service populates and provides access to a graph of data set-literature links (at the time of writing close to five million, and growing) collected from a variety of major data centers, publishers, and research organizations.

To achieve its objectives, the Service proposes an interoperable exchange data model and format, based on which it collects and publishes links, thereby offering the opportunity to validate such common approach on real-case scenarios, with real providers and consumers. Feedback of these actors will drive continuous refinement of the both data model and exchange format, supporting the further development of the Service to become an essential part of a universal, open, cross-platform, cross-discipline solution for collecting, and sharing data set-literature links.

This realization of the DLI Service is the first technical, cross-community, and collaborative effort in the direction of establishing a common infrastructure for facilitating the exchange of data set-literature links. As a result of its operation and underlying community effort, a new activity, name Scholix, has been initiated involving the technological level stakeholders such as DataCite and CrossRef.

In contrast to prior studies examining burnout in academic employees, this paper explores how academic employee agency mitigates burnout risks in the context of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and how this agency facilitates research productivity and influences well-being in the face of changes in learning and teaching practices.

The authors use collaborative auto-ethnography (CAE) in the higher education (HE) sector to probe how an employee productivity group supported the group's members during the pandemic.

Thematic analysis revealed four emerging themes: burnout, beneficial habits for research productivity, blocking-out-time and belonging. The authors' findings suggest that by acknowledging and legitimising employee-initiated groups, feelings of neglect can be combatted. Purposeful employee groups have the potential to create a therapeutic, safe space and, in addition to the groups' productivity intent, diminish the negative effects of a crisis on organisational effectiveness.

This paper contributes to the literature by utilising a CAE approach to provide greater insight into how academics enact agency by creating digital research workspaces, attending to the spatial dimensions of well-being especially during turbulent times.

The cultural dimensions of the Hofstede and Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) studies are often used to capture cultural differences and operationalize them in academic research, corporate business, and teaching. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if this context is appropriate for the Indian information technology (IT) offshore services industry; that is, if Indian culture can be measured with group-referenced items, averaged, and explained by discrete dimensions.

The authors devised items based on the GLOBE study, and conducted empirical research with 291 employees of two services sourcing providers in Pune and Bangalore, India. The authors then scrutinized the data set on item and dimension level using statistical methods, such as interrater agreement, t-test, arithmetic mean, and standard deviation.

An interpretation of the analysis posits that cultural assumptions based on dimensions and means are problematic in the context of the Indian IT offshore services industry. The two digit exact values of the GLOBE study (and similarly the ordinal scale by Hofstede) suggest a level of accuracy and absoluteness which could not be replicated in the empirical research. Therefore, one authors should be very careful referring to Indian national culture when conducting intercultural awareness programs and coaching international teams who are engaging with India.

The GLOBE study omits to report basic statistics of questionnaire development. Through this replication study in India, the authors provide empirical evidence that the construct validity of cultural dimensions and the concept of national/group averages may be flawed.

The purpose of this paper is to map the key challenges that quality management faces in order to meet the demands of CSR. The paper focuses on ISO 26000 – a newly emerging international standard for social responsibility – and discusses synergies (and divergences) between quality management (and ISO quality management and environmental management standards) and CSR as they emerged during the process of ISO 26000 development.

This paper draws conclusions from the resolutions and working materials produced by ISO Committee on Consumer Policy, the Strategic Advisory Group on Social Responsibility and ISO/TMB/WG SR – a working group in charge of the development of ISO 26000. To add the quality management dimension to the discussion, the evidence is further expanded from the ISO documents by revealing the arguments posited by nominated experts during the development of ISO 26000.

The paper finds that the quality field can significantly contribute to the deployment and uptake of the corporate social responsibility agenda yet needs to reinvent and rejuvenate in key areas such as management systems; integration of strategy, operations, technology, CSR and quality; incorporation of corporate governance; and improvements in third‐party certification and internal auditing practices.

The research in the paper is limited to the linkages between quality management and CSR stemming from the development of ISO 26000. Other CSR standards and tools are not included. However, as ISO 26000 is a global initiative, this paper provides a view from the perspective of one of the most significant initiatives in recent years.

The paper informs quality practitioners about the recent developments in international standardization of social responsibility and draws the linkages between quality management and corporate social responsibility that will enable them to adopt the CSR agenda and ISO 26000 in the future.

This is one of the first papers that deals with the linkages and synergies between ISO 26000 and quality management. By doing so, key areas are also offered that practitioners and academics should further explore in order to demonstrate the contribution of quality management to CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the stiffness reliability of harmonic drive (HD) considering contact pairs wear.

In terms of theoretical calculation, the contact pairs wear of HD are calculated based on Archard wear formula and the relative motion characteristics of contact pairs. According to the motion trajectory of flexspline teeth, the teeth backlash and the number of meshing teeth, the meshing stiffness and overall stiffness of HD are analyzed considering the wear and its randomness of contact pairs. Combined with Monte Carlo Simulation, the stiffness reliability evaluation method considering contact pairs wear is proposed, and the result of this method is verified by the stiffness reliability result deduced from the stiffness degradation measurement data.

Considering contact pairs wear, during operation, the teeth backlash increases, the number of meshing teeth decreases, the meshing stiffness decreases, ultimately leading to a gradual decrease in the overall stiffness of HD. When only one type of contact pair wear is considered, the influence of flexspline and circular spline contact pair wear on HD stiffness reliability is greater. Compared with the stiffness reliability evaluation results obtained from the stiffness degradation data in the literature, the mathematic expectation of stiffness degradation failure life distribution obtained from the proposed method is relatively bigger.

The stiffness reliability evaluation method of HD considering contact pairs wear is firstly proposed. The stiffness reliability evaluation result from theoretical calculation is verified by the stiffness reliability results deduced from HD stiffness degradation measurement.