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This paper aims to address the nature of docility in organizations, its practical role in attention scarcity and knowledge diffusion in complex organizations and the management implications for organizational learning and innovation to improve knowledge management.

This paper examines knowledge organizations from the perspective of human resource strategies, their role in information abundance and attention scarcity and techniques to enhance docility mechanisms at different levels of the organization to increase innovation and performance.

This paper, in reviewing the organization literature on attention scarcity, addresses the shortage of studies linking the need for docility – the desire to learn from workers and the desire to teach – in personnel practices of knowledge firms, where intense social interaction, social feedback and social learning are the norms.

Knowledge management – scanning, creation, coordination, interpreting, transfer and integration – may well be the basis of competitive advantage, based on human resource strategies to mobilize explicit and tacit knowledge via docility mechanisms, including mentoring, teamwork, coaching and deep collaboration.

Decades ago, Herbert A. Simon introduced this new concept, docility, which is now central to knowledge organizations that face information abundance and attention scarcity. Knowledge organizations require tools of docility to align human resource strategies to both strategic management and operational functions to enhance teaching and learning in design structures that are time-constrained.

The purpose of this article is twofold: to identify the characteristics of research on organisation and management in Arab countries and to find out whether research results support the culture‐free hypothesis or not. A thorough search of sixteen journals, research monographs, books and theses produced only 35 empirical studies. Most of these studies were exploratory, descriptive, and used small convenient samples. Although some findings supported the culture‐bound hypothesis, major conceptual and methodological weaknesses in these studies throw doubt upon the validity of their results.

The purpose of this paper is to address the core concept of docility in Simon’s learning theories and elaborate docility as a missing link in organizational performance structures. In his book, Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 with three subsequent editions, Herbert A. Simon introduced a new concept to the emerging field of organizational theory, docility.

In Administrative Behavior, Herbert A. Simon introduced to management and organization theorists the concept of docility. Simon adopted the concept and meaning from E.C. Tolman’s (1932) classic work, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, and his novel views on learning processes and key concepts like purpose (goals), thought processes (cognitive psychology) and cognitive maps. This paper elaborates on docility mechanisms and the implications for social learning in organizations.

This paper addresses this lacuna in the organizational literature, and the implications for current theories of organizations and organizational learning.

Docility is a tool to link individual learning with organizational learning in complex environments and changing technologies.

The paper traces origins of Simon’s docility and learning theories.

Traditional North American supplier‐manufacturer behaviour functions on a channel control model with a competitive bid posture dominating the relationship. The arrival of Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in North America and Europe, however, is forcing suppliers to reconsider previous decision rides in dealing with manufacturers within a more cooperative mode because of the unique Japanese processes. The focus here is on comparing organisational buyer behaviour in North America and Japan. As North American firms become suppliers to the Japanese, knowledge of this behaviour becomes increasingly important. Implications are presented for understanding Japanese influences in the organisational buying process through utilising a generalised model from the marketing literature. In addition, a framework for examining the participation and coping behaviour of North American firms is presented.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This paper aims to develop and psychometrically assess an individual’s perception of their work unit’s psychological sense of community (PSOCw) scale. This new scale is designed to capture the unique characteristics of a contemporary work unit that might include current practices such as hot-desking and workers located in physically separate locations.

This paper develops and then psychometrically accesses a new scale designed to better capture the psychological sense of community in a contemporary work unit.

The managerial implications for the PSOCw scale that is a psychometrically sound measure of work engagement, civility and collegiality in a work unit allow managers to audit a work unit based on these three dimensions and then take corrective actions to enhance the work unit’s sense of community.

The present study adapts previous work on PSOCw to a contemporary work environment where members of a work unit are often in physically separate locations and largely connect virtually.

Young men and women dominate different niches of science education in Australia, but how this divide varies between university and post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) is not well understood. Therefore, I compare courses in both sectors to assess if the male–female gap at later stages of education mirrors adolescent career plans and subject choices made in secondary school. Multinomial logistic regressions estimated on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (Y06) illustrate the extent to which the gender divides in secondary and post-secondary education correspond with one another. Y06 started with the 2006 Australian Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Each year until 2013, a nationally representative sample of youth, who were nearly 16 years old in 2006, reported their schooling and work experiences. I find that Australian women rarely specialise in physics, engineering and technology (PET); in contrast, they dominate the life sciences. While post-secondary science is segregated by gender everywhere, the disparity within VET is much deeper due to a large share of PET enrolments. VET students, who come from modest socio-economic backgrounds and have less academic success at school, learn in more segregated environments than their university peers. This analysis suggests that gender divides will be particularly hard to close within post-secondary VET, even if schools succeed in eradicating gender differentials in students’ career aspirations, science performance, self-concept and choices of science subjects.

A learning community has been developing in a distributed environment amongst the members of the Centre for Enhancing of Learning and Teaching (CELT) located in the Bathurst, Goulburn and Orange campuses of Charles Sturt University. This group is known by the acronym of GDMOB, with the purpose of the community to facilitate the professional development and learning of its members. To facilitate the learning ICT has been employed to enhance, through an improved sense of community and social presence of the more isolated members of the group, the learning of the members of the community. It is the intent of this paper to explore and identify factors that contribute to the successful implementation and use of ICT to enhance learning and the construction of a sense of community.

The methodology used in this study was that of a case study with a questionnaire that used the reflections of members within the GDMOB and personal reflections of the authors, both of whom are active members of the community. The data were interpreted using an insider's perspective. The reflections of the members of the community were gained through the execution of an anonymous survey, through free form discussion as a collective group, and through observations of the interactions of the group.

Three key factors have been identified in this study that contribute to the successful implementation and use of ICT to enhance learning and the construction of a sense of community; communication, culture and purpose.

This research is limited by the small size of the community being investigated, though it is argued that the ideas that emerge can be relevant to larger groups. This aspect needs further investigation.

The paper reviews an emerging community of practice and provides reflections on the experience of moving from interactions that were purely face‐to‐face to a distributed and virtual community environment.