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The purpose of this paper is to outline an innovative method of delivering staff development in an higher education (HE) setting. The paper evaluates the processes behind the “Focus on Inspiring Teaching” week and outlines its initial impact on staff.

This is a descriptive case study which highlights how an immersive staff development event can be used to enable HE teaching practitioners to utilise more inspiring approaches to teaching and learning. The paper draws on questionnaire evaluations (n = 43).

The paper highlights how staff development events can be used to foster communities of practice for teaching staff. For this to be successful, staff needs to be committed to reflecting on their own practice and be sufficiently engaged to partake actively of staff development events. By establishing these communities, inspiring practice in teaching can be developed with successful outcomes. The paper outlines a model for staff development which could be established in other HE settings.

Immersive staff development events are effective in achieving sustainable impact. To achieve success effective leadership and a team of committed teaching staff are needed. Success was also fostered by not making sessions compulsory whereby the staff could opt in for sessions to fit around teaching schedules.

This paper will be of interest to those working in staff development and training and academic managers. It indicates how immersive staff development can have a positive impact on staff practice to bring about improvements to the student experience.

The purpose of this research is to trace the evolution of the claims used for advertising food products in Italian magazines, by analysing the content and structure of the claims, the target audiences and the elements that have the greatest influence on the presence of the claims in food advertising.

On the basis of the research conducted by Pratt and Pratt (1995), revised and adapted to the Italian food context, the authors designed a matrix of 1,316 advertisements, which were selected based on the analysis of 67,340 advertisements and using the reference to the food sector as a discriminator. The advertisements were extrapolated from a sample of six Italian magazines, so as to determine the extent to which the various demographic groups in Italy are exposed to print advertising for food, beverages and food supplements. The authors examined the frequency of the relevant advertising forms over a period of four years, from January 2014 to December 2017.

The results revealed the main types of claims used in the four-year period, as well as the statistically significant differences between the different magazine panels, as concerns the frequency and the types of messages. Moreover, a strong relationship between the number of advertisements in the magazines and the time of the year was also ascertained, as well as significant gender variations.

This study introduces the trends and dynamics of the Italian printed advertising for food to the relevant scientific literature. The results yielded by this research have added further implications and contributions to the existing studies, as concerns claim diffusion based on type, gender and seasonality, and the authors also provide important insights to various socio-economical stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of cooking skill interventions (CSIs) targeting adults to improve dietary intakes in public health nutrition settings.

A scoping review of the literature was used to identify and assess the quality and effectiveness of Australian single-strategy CSIs and multi-strategy programmes that included cooking for independent healthy people older than 16 years from 1992 to 2015.

There were only 15 interventions (n=15) identified for review and included CSIs as single strategies (n=8) or as part of multi-strategy programmes (n=7) over 23 years. The majority of the interventions were rated as weak in quality (66 per cent) due to their study design, lack of control groups, lack of validated evaluation measures and small sample sizes. Just over half (53 per cent) of the CSIs reviewed described some measurement related to improved dietary behaviours.

There is inconclusive evidence that CSIs are effective in changing dietary behaviours in Australia. However, they are valued by policymakers and practitioners and used in public health nutrition programmes, particularly for indigenous groups.

This is the first time that CSIs have been reviewed in an Australian context and they provide evidence of the critical need to improve the quality CSIs to positively influence dietary behaviour change in Australia.

This chapter introduces the tourism–disaster–conflict nexus through a comprehensive review of the contemporary social science literature. After reviewing conceptual definitions of tourism, disaster and conflict, the chapter explores various axes that link through this nexus. The linkages between tourism and disaster include tourism as a trigger or amplifier of disasters, the impacts of disasters on the tourism industry, tourism as a driver of disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction strategies in the tourism sector. Linkages between tourism and conflict include the idea that tourism can be a force for peace and stability, the niche status of danger zone or dark heritage tourism, the concept of phoenix tourism in post-conflict destination rebranding, tourism and cultural conflicts, and tourism’s conflicts over land and resources. Linkages between disaster and conflict include disasters as triggers or intensifiers of civil conflict, disaster diplomacy and conflict resolution, disaster capitalism, and gender-based violence and intra-household conflict in the wake of disasters. These are some of the conversations that organise this volume, and this introductory chapter ends with a summary of the chapters that follow.

This study aims at determining the factors that favor a systematic approach to deal with complex operational and strategic problems. Management literature on problem-solving makes a clear distinction between either fixing a problem temporarily by eliminating its symptoms or solving it by diagnosing and altering underlying causes. Adopting a cognitive perspective of the dual-processing theory, this study labels these two approaches intuitive problem-solving and systematic problem-solving (SPS). While the superior effectiveness of SPS in fostering organizational learning is widely documented, existing literature fails to provide an overview of the conditions that support the adoption of SPS.

This paper presents a systematic literature review to shed light on the main supporting factors of SPS in operational as well as strategic domains.

Seven supporting factors of SPS (namely, nature of the problem, time availability, information availability, collaborative culture, transformational leadership, organizational learning infrastructure and environmental dynamism) are first identified and then discussed in an integrative model.

This work is an original attempt to inclusively address organizational, environmental and problem nature-related factors that favor SPS adoption. By determining the SPS supporting factors, this study highlights why many organizations fail or struggle to implement and sustain SPS over time.

Performance management can play an important role in the implementation of strategic change, by aligning employees’ mindsets and behavior with organizational goals. However, the ways in which employees react to change efforts aided by performance management practices are far from straight-forward. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding employees’ reactions to strategic change as a consequence of their occupational identities and their performance management outcome. We further apply the framework to an empirical study of a strategic change initiative in a school organization that was supported by a new performance management practice. We show how variations in perceived identity threat translate into four distinct patterns of emotional and behavioral reactions, where only one represents whole-hearted change acceptance. The study contributes to our understanding of individual- and group-level heterogeneity in reactions to strategic change, and also to a more nuanced conception of identity threat.

This paper aims to explore how accountants manage the processes of identity (re)construction after identity crisis, resulting from increasing pressures and regulatory requirements, considering both introspective and the extrospective issues.

The study drew on an integrated framework drawing on Luigi Pirandello’s views about identity crises and the search for individual coherence and possible representation strategies. It used an ethnographic approach based on photo-elicitation, conversations and documentary sources to explore the identity reconstruction processes of Italian Commercialisti.

Several conditions caused an identity crisis among Commercialisti, including regulatory requirements, public administration demands and increasing power of IT providers. Commercialisti reacted to these circumstances by re-constructing their image through strategies designed to impress both themselves and others.

The paper has implications for the accounting profession in general and in Italy, suggesting that further pressure may result in rapid change efforts among accountants. It provides a broader and more systematic understanding of the threats to the role of accountants and suggests how they can manage complexity to create new opportunities. It also encourages accountants to focus on alternative roles as a possible new strategy that few have tried.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the understanding of identity crisis issues and related representation strategies in the accounting profession. Unlike past contributions, it made a full assessment of both the dynamics of an identity crisis and the micro-level responses to it, in a new, non-Anglo-Saxon context.