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This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.

Community-police relations have gained increasing public attention during the past decade. The purpose of the present study was to better understand the relationship between perceived community support and police officer burnout and engagement.

Data were gathered via online survey from 117 officers from a city police department in the Southeastern United States.

Community support was negatively correlated with burnout and positively correlated with engagement. Moreover, multiple regression analyses showed that community support explained significant incremental variance in most dimensions of burnout and engagement, above and beyond demographic factors and community stressors. Qualitative results showed that police officers had mixed perceptions of how they were viewed by the general public, with more negative than positive responses. However, officers felt more positively perceived in their own communities, but concerns were raised that national events affected the perceptions of officers even in positive relationships with their communities. Finally, officers felt that public perceptions impacted their job satisfaction, job performance and personal lives.

The results have practical implications for how to encourage positive interactions between officers and their community, with recommendations for both law enforcement leaders and civilians.

This study is one of the few that highlights the officers' perspective on how public perceptions affect their work. This is important in understanding how to maximize quality community interactions while minimizing conditions that would increase burnout.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the life and work, both fiction and nonfiction, of the American author Upton Sinclair, for the purposes of better understanding his impact on management theory and practice.

Critical biography is a historiographical approach that analyzes aspects of an individual’s life events and the context that surrounds those events to better understand the contributions of an individual. In this case, this paper analyzes Sinclair’s biography, his work-related fiction and nonfiction and his interactions with business leaders and management thinkers of the day, including scientific management founder Frederick Winslow Taylor, auto industry leader Henry Ford and safety razor magnate King Gillette.

This paper identified four themes which are related to management and workplace history that pervade his fiction and nonfiction writing and link these events to the events of his life as well as the context of the times.

Although others have cited certain aspects of Sinclair’s work for specific purposes, this paper presents a systematic review of Sinclair’s broad oeuvre and its relevance to management and workplace history using a critical biography approach.

This study aims to explore the attitudes and perceptions of Chinese coffee consumers towards robot baristas, considering the proliferation of automated entities within China's coffee sector.

Employing the extended Technology Acceptance Model 2 as its theoretical framework, this research conducts in-depth interviews with 30 Chinese coffee consumers. The laddering technique is utilized, supplemented by video simulation. Thematic analysis is subsequently employed to scrutinize the data.

The findings delineate six pivotal themes encapsulating Chinese coffee consumers' perceptions of robot baristas – Perceived Introvert Friendliness, Perceived Novelty, Perceived Intellectual Discrepancies, Perceived Efficiency and Reliability, Perceived Emotional Disconnection, and Perceived Labour Market Disruption. Moreover, six motivational themes are identified - Social Status Boosting, Openness to Experience, Ease of Use, Tech-Driven Affordability, Reliable and Uncompromising Quality, and Resistance to Overbearing Service.

The study is limited by its focus on a specific cultural context. Future research could explore cross-cultural perspectives.

The findings of this study offer guidance on how to market and position robotic barista services to appeal to consumer preferences and drive adoption.

Understanding consumer perceptions of robotic baristas has broader social implications, particularly in terms of labour market disruption and the potential impact on traditional coffee professions. Businesses can navigate the social implications of automation more effectively and foster greater acceptance of technological innovations within society.

This study offers insights into the inclinations of Chinese coffee consumers, thereby facilitating informed decision-making and the formulation of effective strategies to expedite the adoption of robotic service.

In early 2014, recent Stanford University graduate Tyler Shultz was in a quandary. He had been working at Theranos, a blood-diagnostic company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford-dropout wunderkind, for almost a year. Shultz had learned enough about the company to realize that its practices and the efficacy of its much-touted finger-prick blood-testing technology were questionable and that the company was going to great lengths to hide this fact from the public and from regulators.

Theranos and Holmes were Silicon Valley darlings, enjoying positive press and lavish attention from potential investors and technology titans alike. Just as companies like PayPal had revolutionized the stagnant payments industry and Uber had upended the for-hire transportation sector, Theranos had been positioned as the latest technology firm to substantially disrupt yet another mature sector: the medical laboratory business. By the start of 2014, the company had raised more than $400 million in funding, and had an estimated market valuation of $9 billion.

Shultz's situation was exacerbated by the fact that his grandfather, the highly respected former US Secretary of State George Shultz, was on the Theranos board and was one of Elizabeth Holmes's biggest supporters.

But Tyler Shultz worried about the customers he was convinced were receiving highly unreliable and often inaccurate blood-test results. With so much at stake, Shultz wondered how he should proceed. Should he raise his concerns with the firm's investors? Blow the whistle externally? Report to industry regulators? Go away quietly?

This case and its subsequent four brief follow-up cases are based largely on interviews with Tyler Shultz, and outline the dilemma he faced and the various steps he would take both to extricate himself from his unsavory position and let the public know the full extent of the deception at Theranos.

Five optional handouts are available to instructors to further discussion after the case has been debriefed. The handouts serve as additional decision points for the students if your class time permits.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

This study examined differences related to gender and racial/ethnic identity among academic researchers participating in the National Science Foundation’s “Innovation-Corps” (NSF I-Corps) entrepreneurship training program. Drawing from prior research in the fields of technology entrepreneurship and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, this study addresses the goal of broadening participation in academic entrepreneurship.

Using ANOVA and MANOVA analyses, we tested for differences by gender and minoritized racial/ethnic identity for four variables considered pertinent to successful program outcomes: (1) prior entrepreneurial experience, (2) perceptions of instructional climate, (3) quality of project team interactions and (4) future entrepreneurial intention. The sample includes faculty (n = 434) and graduate students (n = 406) who completed pre- and post-course surveys related to a seven-week nationwide training program.

The findings show that group differences based on minoritized racial/ethnic identity compared with majority group identity were largely not evident. Previous research findings were replicated for only one variable, indicating that women report lower amounts of total prior entrepreneurial experience than men, but no gender differences were found for other study variables.

Our analyses respond to repeated calls for research in the fields of entrepreneurship and STEM education to simultaneously examine intersecting minoritized and/or under-represented social identities to inform recruitment and retention efforts. The unique and large I-Corps national dataset offered the statistical power to quantitatively test for differences between identity groups. We discuss the implications of the inconsistencies in our analyses with prior findings, such as the need to consider selection bias.