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The purpose of this paper is to inform the policies of sheltered housing providers with regard to preventing isolation amongst residents and generating practical support between them, particularly in the current period of reduced funding for housing support.

The paper reports a postal survey of 120 residents across eight estates, focus groups on these and eight other estates and survey responses from 326 estate managers.

Childless residents are especially vulnerable to lack of support, depending on friends or on paid care. Those estates with a rich array of organised social activities generated more support and friendships amongst neighbours than those with few activities. Managers perform an important service in generating and supporting social activities, but their role is diminishing and restricted by short hours on site. Residents’ groups need capacity-building support to organise more by themselves. Cross-generational contacts are particularly valuable but residents need help to access them outside of their own families.

Certain forms of group activity which are the most valuable in terms of promoting mental stimulation and exercise are rarely organised by residents’ groups without staff support.

How to generate mutual aid between residents is an important objective for housing providers in a period of reduced funding for staff time and of severe constraints on social care budgets.

Sondologics, a manufacturer of video, audio, and gaming accessories products, was experiencing pricing and distribution problems in its channels. Numerous retailers were complaining about unfair price competition from unauthorized retailers, i.e., gray marketers, on standalone websites or Amazon's Marketplace, offering discounts of up to 30% off list price.

The company estimated that about 10% of its retail volume in the United States was being generated by unauthorized retailers. Compounding the problem, gray marketers and authorized retailers alike were selling at below-list prices, which violated the Sondologics MAP (minimum advertised pricing) policy.

Sondologics was considering numerous initiatives to address the MAP and gray-market problems, including retaining a third-party service to monitor pricing and distribution in the channel. Students are asked to develop recommendations that would promote sales while protecting the name-brand image and price points of Sondologics' products.

There are a significant number of life-sentenced prisoners in Scotland who are over tariff (i.e. past their punishment part expiry date) and who appear to have difficulty in making the transition towards community reintegration. The factors involved in their repeated returns to closed conditions are not adequately understood. The purpose of this paper is to explore this issue using a qualitative approach in order to understand the experience of life-sentenced prisoners in this position, and the psychological barriers that compromise their progression to less secure conditions and the community.

In-depth interviews were conducted with eight life-sentenced prisoners who met the criteria for the research. All were significantly over tariff and all had multiple failed attempts at progression to less secure conditions. Interviews were recorded and transcripts were analysed using theoretical thematic analysis.

The analysis produced three identifiable supraordinate themes, each with subordinate themes. The supraordinate themes included: shaming self-identify, perception of the community as daunting, and disempowerment. The ability to generalise the findings outwith the participants of this study are acknowledged.

This has provided further understanding as to the complexity of the issue, and the ways in which it manifests into behaviour. Initial (albeit tentative) recommendations for intervention and service provision can therefore be identified.

The results are discussed against the implications for service provision in Scottish prisons, and identify the areas for further research that will help to inform the forensic practices in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the notion that non-financial reporting is mainly about impression management or is only a superficial response to the hegemonic challenges posed by the sustainability movement. It focuses on the most recent development in sustainability reporting (integrated reporting) as an example of how accounting for financial and non-financial information has the potential to expand the scope of accounting systems, promote meaningful changes to reporting processes and provide a broader perspective on value creation.

The research focuses on an African eco-tourism company which has its head office in South Africa. A case study method is used to highlight differences in the presentation of an integrated business model according to the case entity’s integrated reports and how individual preparers interpret the requirement to prepare those reports. Data are collected using detailed interviews with all staff members involved in the preparation process. These are complemented by a review of the minutes of the company’s sustainability workshops and integrated reports.

A decision by the case organisation to prepare an integrated report gives rise to different forms of resistance which limits the change potential of the integrated reporting initiative. Resistance does not, however, preclude reform. Even when individual preparers are critical of the changes to the corporate reporting environment, accounting for financial and non-financial information expands the scope of the conventional accounting system which facilitates broader management control and promotes a more integrated conception of “value”.

Integrated reporting should not be dismissed as only an exercise in corporate reporting and disclosure; it has a transformative potential which, given time, can enable new ways of managing business processes and articulating value creation.

This study answers the calls for primary evidence on how the requirement or recommendation to prepare an integrated report is being interpreted and applied by individual preparers. The findings add to the limited body of interpretive research on the change potential of new reporting frameworks. In doing so, the research provides theoretical support for developing arguments which challenge the conventional position that integrated reporting is little more than an exercise in impression management.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an emic view of how one researcher negotiated complex relationships in teacher education research and learned to employ the principles of the relational cultural theory (RCT) to create a research design aimed at building and sustaining relationships with participants.

The authors offer illustrative qualitative data examples from teacher education research to highlight complexities in research relationships, essential elements of the RCT, and the affordances RCT can offer qualitative researchers invested in similar work.

By engaging pre-service teachers and ourselves as mutually engaged in this process, the authors put into practice a sense of community and relationship building the authors hope pre-service teachers will practice with their future students.

This paper provides a qualitative research design employing tenets of the RCT which centers relationships as critical to the research process. The authors offer affordances and limitations to using the RCT in research.

Several affordances are offered to researchers interested in engaging in similar work.

This paper offers an original perspective of how one researcher in teacher education negotiated complex relationships and learned to employ the principles of the RCT within these to build a research design aimed at widening research and practice in teacher education through productive and lasting relationships.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.