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In March 1999, postcard advertising company Boomerang Media introduced ‘School‐Cards™’ into 300 secondary schools across the UK. Today, these cards are available in 1,000 schools reaching approximately 1.4 million secondary pupils. These free postcards provide information of interest to pupils, ranging from educational, social and cultural messages to teenage products and issues. A small proportion of cards is available for advertising or sponsorship, within strict guidelines. Any form of commercial activity within schools is a contentious issue. Yet the popularity of SchoolCards™ suggests it is possible to win the support of schools and advertisers, whilst benefiting and appealing to the fickle teenage audience. This paper describes how the School‐Cards™ scheme was developed, from concept to implementation, analyses postcards' effectiveness as a communication tool and suggests considerations for companies seeking to promote their brands within schools.

Staffing is one of the most influential human resource (HR) activities and is the primary method of hiring and retaining human resources. Among staffing’s several activities, recruitment and selection are one of the most crucial activities. It is possible to rehire former firm employees using the talent management strategy known as “boomerang recruitment”. The boomerang recruitment trend has tremendously grown because many employees who believe they are qualified for the position now wish to return to their old employers. According to data, boomerang employees can be 50% less expensive than conventional ways of hiring. The purpose of this study is to identify the generic critical factors that play a role in the boomerang hiring process based on the literature review. Next, the objective is to determine the relative weight of each of these factors, rank the candidates, and develop a decision-making model for boomerang recruitment.

This paper focuses on the grey-based multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology for recruiting some of the best candidates out of a few who worked for the organization earlier. The grey theory yields adequate findings despite sparse data or significant factor variability. Like MCDM, the grey methods also incorporate experts' opinions for evaluation. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is also done to show the robustness of the suggested methodology.

Seven (7) recruitment criteria for boomerang employees were identified and validated based on the opinions of industry experts. Using these recruitment criteria, three candidates emerged as the top three and created a pool out of six. In addition, this study finds that Criteria 1 (C1), the employee's past performance, is the most significant predictor among all other criteria in boomerang hiring.

Since the weights and ratings of attributes and alternatives in MCDM methods are primarily based on expert opinion, a significant difference in expert opinions (caused by differences in their knowledge and qualifications) may impact the values of the grey possibility degree. However, enough attention was taken while selecting the experts for this study regarding their expertise and subject experience.

The proposed method provides the groundwork for HR management. Managers confronted with recruiting employees who want to rejoin may use this model. According to experts, each attribute is not only generic but also crucial. In addition, because these factors apply to all sectors, they are industry-neutral.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply a grey-based MCDM methodology to the boomerang recruitment model. This study also uses an example to explain the computational intricacies associated with such methods. The proposed system may be reproduced for boomerang recruiting in any sector because the framework is universal and replicable. Furthermore, the framework is expandable to include new criteria for different work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain what organizes the marketing of retail sustainability.

Theoretically, this paper takes a marketing-as-practice approach and makes use of practice theory to conceptualize the marketing of sustainability. Methodologically, an ethnographic study of three Swedish retail chains and their marketing work has been conducted. Interviews with management, observations made at the stores of these three retailers and various marketing texts and images produced by these retailers form the material analysed.

This paper illustrates three different ways of marketing and enacting sustainability. It shows that sustainability is framed differently and, indeed, enacted differently in order to fit various ideas about who are the responsible consumers. The argument is that rather than consumer demand, supply pressure or media scandals, the marketing of sustainability is in each of the cases studied configured around a specific notion of the responsible consumer. What sustainability work is marketed, through which devices it is marketed, and how it is framed is guided by an idea of whom the retailers’ responsible consumers are, what their lifestyles are, and what they will be interested in. Images of responsible consumers work as configuring agents around which retailing activities and devices are organized.

The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the marketing of sustainability and offers a new explanation about what it is that influences the various approach to sustainable marketing taken by retailers.

The aim of this study is to shed light on the talent management practices in the unique context of seasonal work in professional kitchens. Acknowledging that in the context of seasonal work in the hospitality industry it is rather difficult to rely on mainstream strategic talent management practices (e.g. training and development), the authors draw on resource orchestration, an extension of the resource-based view and propose a conceptual model of talent management tactics that could potentially increase seasonal employees’ likelihood of returning to the same employer.

Given the uniqueness of the context of this study and the dearth of prior relevant research, this study uses a grounded theory approach. Specifically, this study analyses and draws conclusions from 25 interviews with employees in commercial kitchens.

This study develops a “talent orchestration model”, which places emphasis on management of talented employees across three dimensions: structuring, leveraging and developing talent.

Extant literature in human capital management focusses mostly on the development of human capital, but the results place more emphasis on using or leveraging human capital.

This study moves beyond the well-researched context of hotels and focusses on talent management behind closed doors as in the case of kitchen chefs and, drawing on resource orchestration, this study further examines talent management practices with shorter time frame targeted on seasonal employees.

Draws on the author’s own experiences as managing director of the Irish supermarket chain, Superquinn, highlighting the “boomerang” principle of bringing the customer back. Presents three main tasks for creating a customer‐driven organization: getting every team member working to meet customer needs; developing a marketing department superior in size and performance to that of competitors; and rewarding customer loyalty. Discusses how each of these can be achieved successfully, leading to a growing business and increased profitability.

Can market-based regulation based on consumer pressure and ‘independent monitoring’ serve as the basis for transnational corporation regulation? In an increasingly integrated global economy, many scholars and policy makers fear that mobile capital may force a ‘race to the bottom’; can independent non-governmental organizations and ethical consumers provide a counterweight to cost-cutting pressures? This paper compares three of the best known examples of transnational monitoring – the Sullivan Principles in South Africa, the Rugmark social labeling program in India, and the Commission for the Verification of Codes of Conduct's monitoring experiences in the apparel industry of Guatemala – to consider some common features of transnational monitoring.

Social movement scholarship convincingly highlights the importance of threats, political opportunities, prior social ties, ideological compatibility, and resources for coalition formation. Based on interviews with Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists involved in two transnational coalitions in Israel/Palestine, this chapter illustrates the emergence of transnational coalitions, particularly those that cross polarized ethno-national divides, depends not only on such facilitators, but also, and critically, on the belief that such diverse cooperation is strategic. I argue these unique coalitions intentionally formed with individuals and organizations situated in different national communities out of a strategic decision by the Palestinian initiators, given the closed political opportunity structure they faced domestically, to enlarge the scope of conflict by drawing in new people and communities who may have some leverage on the Israeli government. Consequently, this chapter also makes clear that partners in the Global South make intentional choices about who to partner with, and that the agency is not solely linked with their more privileged partners in the Global North (cf., Bob, 2001; Widener, 2007). Finally, it illustrates that coalition partners are recruited not only because of social ties, prior histories of interaction, ideological similarity, and shared organizational framing, but also due to key considerations including perceptions of what the ethno-national diversity, varying networks, and differing privileges make available.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the flow of funds and growth variables for Latin America during the period of 1973–2000. To do so, we present a four equation econometric model that represents the traditional Monetarist and Keynesian perspectives. We also examine the hypothesis that the region can grow through gains from trade, through investigating trade as a source of growth from both computational general equilibrium (CGE) and Cournot-Nash equilibrium standpoints. Analyzing several scenarios, we determine that liberalization and reduced protectionism are superior strategies for Latin America.

The Indian technical education has experienced an exponential growth since 1995. However, the technical education system was not able to sustain it and the enrollments, particularly in engineering, fell down considerably. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the growth of Indian technical education from system dynamics (SD) perspective.

Technical education is a complex system in which the outcome of a decision comes with a third order delay. SD is an appropriate tool to analyze the causal structure and behavior of complex systems. This study developed an analogy from the physics of a boomerang to do the comparative assessment of “sudden overshoot and collapse” phase in the growth of Indian technical education. Further, it compared the technical education growth with the Gartner hype cycle. The growth model of Indian technical education was developed using SD software STELLA (version 10.0).

The model was simulated for five different policy scenarios. The outcome of the SD analysis shows that the “goal-seeking behaviour,” which produces stable growth without hampering quality, is the best proposition amongst all scenarios considered in the study. It identifies policies which will enable long-term stability in the Indian technical education system as well as policies which will lead to perpetual instability in the system.

The study conducted will encourage researchers to use SD in analyzing complex systems for sustainability and in the selection of appropriate policies.

The paper uses boomerang analogy for analyzing the growth in engineering enrollments and highlights the presence of “the boomerang effect,” a term coined by the authors for sudden overshoot and collapse behavior, in the causal structure which is injurious to the education system.

The present article focuses on crises that arise from provocative advertisement images and products and introduces the shooting star crisis. Moreover, it aims to shed some light on the interconnection between the boomerang effect, crisis, crisis management and workforce diversity.

By examining the cases of two leading organizations of the fashion industry that found themselves involved in crises and how they confronted them, it seeks to explore whether investments in workforce diversity is a solution for these problems.

Sometimes provocative products and images that intend to spark customers' imagination can backfire and initiate a crisis. Based on the findings, organizations that admit their wrongdoing and react promptly to their stakeholders' demands tend to overcome a crisis relatively faster than organizations with passive behavior. By understanding the need for a proactive approach, fashion organizations can evade future crises and avoid creating products or images that can be perceived as racist and invoke public outrage. Additionally, the study revealed that workforce diversity initiatives can mitigate a crisis and its aftermath.

Its novelty is that it deals with the interrelationship between boomerang effect, crisis, crisis management and workforce diversity. Moreover, it introduces a new type of crisis, the shooting star crisis, in order to capture new crises that emerge in modern era, as a result of the extensive power of modern social media.