Search results

The chapter briefly reviews the eight volumes in my Legend series – organizational buying behavior, consumer behavior, product and new product management, marketing strategy, market segmentation, global marketing, marketing research and modeling, and the future of marketing. In addition, the chapter highlights the three driving forces of much of my research: (a) the real world challenges facing corporations and organizations, (b) the search for new methodological developments, and (c) the continuous challenge of the prevailing marketing concepts and approaches. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the evolution of marketing in the past five decades and my wish list for the discipline and my future activities.

Emergency remote teaching is not the same as a systematic, carefully thought out, and designed online learning system. Emergency remote teaching is best perceived as merely a first step towards migrating into a fully fledged, and carefully designed, virtual or online mode of study. Notwithstanding, this chapter provides a theoretical explanation that justifies the relevance and importance of emergency remote teaching in higher education practice, in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related discontinuities. It asserts that emergency related teaching is justified by the urgent need to maintain continuity of teaching and learning and to avoid knowledge and skills decay. A systematic approach to evaluate the effectiveness of emergency remote teaching involves measuring variables across four dimensions; that is, context, input, process, and outcomes. Weighting these dimensions is necessary to ensure that context, input, and process are prioritised above outcomes because the essence of the teaching model, when implemented, is to get it in place swiftly in order for teaching and learning to continue. The effectiveness of emergency remote teaching is best assessed on the basis of its speedy set-up and implementation to maintain continuity of teaching, not on student outcomes. The chapter investigated the approach that a sample of colleges and universities have followed to evaluate their model of emergency remote teaching and contrast it with theory. The approach found in practice was not aligned to best practice. Based on the evidence, the chapter proposes an evaluation framework that institutions can adopt specifically for evaluating emergency remote teaching practice.

Purpose – To discover and unravel the contribution of women to innovation and invention. This chapter builds upon a book published in 2003, called, Ingenious Women. The purpose of the book was to discover the invisible women inventors and patent holders operating between 1637, when the first patent was awarded to a woman, and the outbreak of war in 1914. For the purpose of this essay, the time frame has been extended to the present.

Methodology – Historical patents are used as the main research base, supported by searches of other relevant databases, directories and specialist archives (census records, registered designs, company records, museum collections) as well as specialist literature.

Findings – The research illustrates that women and men were often part of a wide network of discoverers and innovators and were able, by using the latest technologies and materials available, to resolve problems both large and small.

Research limitations/implications – This categorisation on patent databases or directories and searches were by female first names or by object type. his categorisation highlights the historical assumption that women are not inventors. Although this search method highlighted hundreds of women, there must be many still undiscovered.

Practical implications – Not all the ideas went into production and some have now become obsolete. Others continue to be produced and have formed the basis of successful companies. Many women became entrepreneurs and developed businesses based on their inventions and some, as widows, successfully ran their deceased husbands' companies.

Social implication – The women in this hidden history often had to navigate a path through social attitudes and legislative frameworks. They are all an example to women today that anyone, regardless of gender, can be innovative and entrepreneurial. What is crucial is that the ideas being developed are unique and have a purpose.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relevance of the intersections between work and personal life. Measures introduced to slow the spread of COVID-19 have included an increase of working from home and the temporary closure of schools and child-care facilities, leading to a lighter workload for some and a heavier workload for others. These consequences are likely to affect employees’ work–life balance (WLB), although the impact may differ across groups of employees depending on the nature of their work, family and personal demands and resources. This mixed-method study examined how Dutch government employees perceive their WLB during the pandemic and how differences in what employees are experiencing can be explained. In May/June 2020, an online survey (N = 827) and an interview study (N = 17) were conducted at a government organization whose employees were obliged to work from home partly or exclusively. Results indicate that demands changed when working entirely from home and resources became more important to maintain WLB satisfaction. Being able to manage boundaries across life domains and find a new routine also appeared to be crucial for WLB satisfaction.

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

Influenced by postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, cultural studies and humanities researchers have critiqued ways that old age plays out in lived realities – including effects of ageism and power loss in both private and public spheres. Generally, older people are perceived negatively and as less powerful than younger people. Age tends to trump most other social identity dimensions in negative ways so that aging is an eventuality that many people the world over dread or fear.

In recent years, age has been treated as a social, political and economic issue that draws from anxiety and fear associated with the advancing life course. Some nations outlaw age discrimination in the workplace, but others do not. So, while improved sanitation, diet and health care means that many people live longer, they still face enduring negative stereotypes about aging processes. Chapter 8 sharpens the focus on social identity marked by age and dimensions that overlap with age – in the larger social milieu and in organizational contexts. Several theoretical ties bind this chapter’s exploration of age and aging, including critical/cultural studies, feminism, critical gerontology, and postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives. To explore research on aging and identity, this chapter is divided into subthemes: sociocultural perspectives on and theorizing about aging, age categories and birth cohorts, aging effects for organizations, aging effects for employees, and age with other social identity intersectionalities.

The chapter discusses pedagogical models of digital learning in the United Kingdom with a focus on online and blended learning, rolled out as a case study in one university. The chapter appraises the effectiveness of the model that implemented and foregrounded the evidence in the wider literature on models of digital learning in higher education. The chapter provides thematic analysis and methodological opportunities for the improvement of practice and presents a set of implementation implications and pitfalls to avoid for higher education institutions in Africa. Furthermore, a number of trends regarding the blending of learning and communication synchrony in digital learning have also been identified.