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Effective management and utilisation of plant history data can considerably improve plant and equipment performance. This rationale underpins statistical and mathematical models for exploiting plant management data more efficiently, but industry has been slow to adopt these models. Reasons proffered for this include: a perception of models being too complex and time consuming; and an inability of their being able to account for dynamism inherent within data sets. To help address this situation, this research developed and tested a web‐based data capture and information management system. Specifically, the system represents integration of a web‐enabled relational database management system (RDBMS) with a model base management system (MBMS). The RDBMS captures historical data from geographically dispersed plant sites, while the MBMS hosts a set of (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average – ARIMA) time series models to predict plant breakdown. Using a sample of plant history file data, the system and ARIMA predictive capacity were tested. As a measure of model error, the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) ranged between 5.34 and 11.07 per cent for the plant items used in the test. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values also showed similar trends, with the prediction model yielding the highest value of 29.79 per cent. The paper concludes with direction for future work, which includes refining the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and developing a Knowledge Based Management System (KBMS) to interface with the RDBMS.

The finance and accounting processes tend to be mistakenly viewed only as necessary functions of month‐end closing and historical focus. When finance becomes recognized as a value‐adding process ‐ creating and focusing information to facilitate achieving the goals and objectives of the corporation, its impact on the bottom line will be fully realized. The key to revising this view of finance is to change the focus and processes of the finance and accounting functions. The author describes the changes in these functions that can be more supportive of meeting future business challenges.

Managerial job changing is becoming an increasingly important issue in managerial careers. Due to reasons such as global competition, mergers, acquisitions, corporate downsizing, and cost‐cutting, fewer executives believe that the organisations that they start their careers with will be the organisation that they retire from. Executives who changed jobs in 1987 through five worldwide executive search firms reported their expectations about job change (Worldwide Executive Mobility, 1988). Of the less senior executives, about three‐fourths expected to change companies again within the next ten years. Salary was one potential outcome for these managers. The median raise associated with a job change was about thirty per cent. Advancement was another possible outcome. Top executives had typically held five different jobs and had worked for three different companies in the previous fifteen years. Increased job responsibility was also a potential outcome, although for some job changers job responsibility decreased. A third of U.S. executives changed jobs without changing titles but a third of those who changed job titles moved to jobs of a lower rank. Forty‐three per cent of managers outside the U.S. changed jobs without changing job titles and a quarter of the job title changes were to lower rank.

As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have pointed out, the US TV serial Supernatural owes much of its success to the way it combines horror with family drama, strengthening the affective involvement of viewers in the lives of its protagonists, the monster-hunting Winchester brothers. The notion of home – presented variously as a domestic, feminine space from which the Winchesters and their compatriots are excluded; a mobile and contingent space of masculine bonding; and a hybrid space which allows for self-expression outside prescribed gender norms, but which also holds the potential for danger – is central.

Heather L. Duda has pointed to the ways monster hunters are excluded from the normative institutions of their societies, and this is certainly true of the Winchesters, who live in their family car and are unable to maintain ‘normal’ homes. Later seasons give them a home in the form of an underground bunker, not designed as a domestic space, but nonetheless a place where their hypermasculine behaviours can be relaxed. This chapter examines the tensions that emerge in this apparent move from a traditional narrative of the home as feminine space under threat to something more ambivalent, where masculine identity itself may be in danger.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

This study investigated possible moderating effects on the relationship between job satisfaction and nurses' intention to quit. Using data collected from 327 registered nurses in three large private hospitals, moderator regression analysis revealed significant main and moderating effects for employee age. When the effects of education, employment status, and marital status were controlled, the main and moderating effects of age on the relationship between job satisfaction and nurses' intention to quit remained significant. Alternative explanations of the results are discussed, along with implications of the findings for nursing turnover research.