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The purpose of this paper is to use parking behavior as a direct measure of delayed gratification, a cultural trait recognized by scholars as contributing to people's economic success. Backing into a parking space requires more time and effort, but it will enable the driver to exit more easily, safely, and quickly in the future. The author argue that people who park their cars back-in embody a culture of delayed gratification, and societies with a higher back-in parking rate tend to have better economic performance.

The author tested the hypothesis using parking and economic data from the BRIC countries, Taiwan, and the USA.

Results show that there is a strong positive relationship between back-in parking and labor productivity gains. The author also found that back-in parking positively correlates with economic growth, savings rate, and educational attainment.

This is the first study that uses parking behavior to predict economic performance. The feasibility of collecting parking behavior data across countries provides a new and viable way to overcome the limitation of relying on attitudinal or experimental data to measure the culture and behaviors of delayed gratification. The author therefore call for a collective effort to establish a “Global Parking Index.” Such an index will help us better understand parking behavior and how it may relate to socioeconomic performance such as learning, saving, and investing.

The purpose of this paper is to describe three threshold experience cases where individuals avoid and disobey hierarchy and rules in order to satisfy their own values and aspirations.

Observations of the author as a participant observer, employee, and academic researcher are reported and analyzed.

In each of the three cases, the formal hierarchy was reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition was uncertain and outcomes were thrown into doubt. These were liminal situations which involved uncertainty, ambiguity, doubts, and fear as a result of the suspending of organizational structure. The circumstances in which disobedience is most likely to occur are: lack of transparency; conflict between point of view of leaders and individual perception; demands that seem to be unreasonable; individual role in conflict with authoritative expectations.

Organizational hierarchy and mandates are designed to produce achievement of management goals. There are, however, circumstances where individual resistance is required in order to achieve desired results.

Erving Goffman has been variously interpreted as a symbolic interactionist, a structural functionalist, or an a-structural power-game theorist. However, when considering Goffman’s affiliation with the human ecology (HEC) of Robert Park and Everett Hughes, one is able to shed new light on Goffman’s relationship to the aforementioned sociological paradigms. This chapter will demonstrate that his Darwinist underpinnings and overall implicit evolutionary perspective allowed him to develop a dramaturgical theory that explicates how actors are able to understand, predict, anticipate, accommodate to, and influence others while pursuing one’s own or own group’s interests, through one or more of role “taking,” “playing,” and “making.” Furthermore, Goffman elaborates upon Park’s use of dramaturgy, following him in making more room for competition and inequalities in status and power, and offering new dimensions and categories for specifying when and why different adaptive strategies will be used, within different types and degrees of accommodation. Ecological dramaturgy is the term we give to these interdependent lines of social action within stratification contexts. Such structural concerns ultimately separate Goffman from the more subjective and less deductive elements of traditional symbolic interactionist thought. We argue that Goffman’s much neglected ecological and evolutionary-minded approach to role-taking and its inspired analysis of competitive interactive processes provide a missing link in better understanding his complicated intellectual heritage.

Reports on a two‐year collaborative research project on encouraging creativity and organizational implications by Roffey Park Management Institute and partners. Briefly discusses the first findings of the study. Describes emerging themes of the project before discussing the results of a self‐managed learning study.

The purpose of this paper is to meet Dr Madan Kataria, the founder and creator of Laughter Yoga.

This case study is presented in two sections: a transcribed autobiography of Madan Kataria, followed by a ten-question interview with him.

The popularity of Laughter Yoga (LY) has spread from a handful of people since 1995 to a global movement with tens of thousands of people who commune in person and online, laughing for the health of it.

This is a personal narrative, albeit from someone who has been at the forefront of using intentional laughter for well-being for 30 years.

LY promotes an array of physical, psychological and emotional health outcomes that does not rely on humour or jokes to stimulate laughter. It is a beneficial resource suited for use in vulnerable population groups, including people experiencing depression or anxiety.

The LY methodology is suited to people of all ages and abilities, enhancing mental health, decreasing stress levels and growing social connections and community through the universal language of laughter.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first case study and interview with Dr Kataria that delves into his personal background, outlining his motivation and experience behind founding LY internationally.

Just‐in‐time (JIT) production methods were popularized by the excellent results achieved by Japanese industry. When it became evident during the 1970s that the Japanese were gaining markets previously dominated by Americans, there was considerable interest in learning how Japanese industry operates. Then, during the early 1980s, Toyota’s highly effective JIT production system had a particular appeal to Americans who were trying to understand Japanese production methods. While Taichi Ohno, creator of Toyota’s production system, credits Henry Ford as the originator, it is now known that Ernest Kanzler, one of Ford’s subordinates, played a major role in developing JIT production methods. This article reports Ford’s and Kanzler’s contributions and explores the possible influence that Frederick W. Taylor may have had on the development of this approach at the Ford Motor Company.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unintended consequences of managing inclusion and diversity and how these unintended consequences relate to organisation members’ mediation between work tasks and practices of inclusion and diversity.

The study uses critical diversity and inclusion studies as the theoretical context and a Danish municipal centre responsible for parking patrol as the empirical context. The researcher has conducted interviews and participant observation in this organisation and particularly analyses the “making up” of abstract categories of employees and the mundane “making of” employees in the light of diversity and inclusion practices.

The analysis shows that parking attendants are “made up” as an increasingly professionalised brand and that the inclusive policy of diversity becomes part of this brand. However, the study also shows that in spite of this external brand, local and internal practices of inclusion and diversity create categories of people that employees may avoid or resist and some that carry unfulfilled promises of inclusion. Moreover, an internal image of the parking attendant as a person on the edge of the labour market persists internally in spite of the effort to brand this person otherwise externally.

The paper applies the notion of “making up” people, to accommodate critique of the social constructionist approach, that is common to much critical research on diversity and inclusion. Furthermore, the paper agitates for “bringing work back in” to the study of diversity and inclusion and does this by focusing on the work of parking attendants. Given that this work is formally unskilled, the organisation represents an example of a workplace that represents a gateway to the Danish labour market, which makes the management and organisation of inclusion very pertinent. The paper provides new perspectives, particularly in terms of the unintended consequences of inclusion in organisations.