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This comparative study of American and Italian family-owned firms focuses on two key aspects of family business management: succession and governance. This study also explored the impact of generation on these variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the field of change leadership at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The meta-framework presented in this study is a review of the field of change leadership over a 16-year period. The authors reviewed hundreds of peer-reviewed refereed journal articles and books.

The authors identify the key themes in the study of change leadership through the lens of content and process frames of reference.

The authors identify how these new perspectives of change leadership change the way we think about/approach the field of change leadership.

David Hartstein started KaBloom in 1998 with the goal of creating “the Starbucks of Flowers.” He successfully built brand recognition for the gardenlike shops, but problems plagued the young organization. Nearly three years and one recession later, KaBloom failed to live up to Hartsteinʼs forecast of exponential growth. This case has been designed for a graduate-level course in entrepreneurship/innovation. Students can compare franchising with other business models, examine the impact of organizational structure and leadership styles on business effectiveness, relate issues of supply chain management and logistics to environmental changes, and recognize the impact of innovation on business sustainability.

Purpose – To be the first study to consider the difference between men's and women's perceptions of most important mentoring functions. Design/methodology/approach – Survey recipients identified the three most important things that mentors can do for their protégés. Two independent coders categorized the behaviors listed by the 637 respondents. Findings – There was little difference between men's and women's perceptions of important mentoring behaviors. Women more than men reported championing and acceptance and confirmation behaviors to be in what they consider the top three for importance. Additionally, the lists respondents generated under‐represented the mentoring behaviors commonly identified in the extant literature, whereas some of the behaviors most frequently identified are not well represented in the mentoring literature. Research limitations/implications – Respondents were graduates of a top‐tier MBA program, although from multiple years. Future research should examine perceptions of mentoring behaviors by employees with different educational backgrounds and across cultures, particularly to explore perceptions of mentoring behaviors where cultural and gender stereotypes are present. Practical implications – The design of mentoring programs and fostering of cross‐sex mentoring are discussed in lieu of managing protégé expectations and educating mentors about actual expectations versus the expectations they might associate with the other sex. Originality/value – The findings here extend existing research by first asking men and women to generate a list of what they perceive to be the three most important mentoring behaviors and then showing that, for MBAs at least, there is little difference across the sexes.

Amidst the perpetual evasiveness of a general succession model, successor commitment has been identified as an important factor. The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent female successor commitment displays particular characteristics and which insights this sheds on successor commitment theory.

Based on a review of the relevant literature, propositions concerning female successor commitment are developed. Qualitative case study data are used to explore the applicability of the multidimensional successor commitment model.

Normative commitment was only observed in female successors at a time of crisis or when no other successor was available. It was found to be a dynamic concept and the data indicated a general shift towards affective commitment. A combination of calculative and affective commitment was found when the female successor chose a career in the family business, to be able to combine career and child care responsibilities, indicating the need to include personal cost in the antecedents for calculative successor commitment.

The findings suggest amendments to consider for the successor commitment model and the calculative commitment type in particular. The most important implication for future research is the development of assessment tools to be able to measure and quantify different types of commitment and their relative strength, in order to be able to make inferences about co‐occurrence and change.

The paper takes a female perspective to explore the successor commitment issue and thereby allows identifying issues hitherto invisible to the successor commitment discussion.

This special issue seeks to examine mentoring relationships and offer new perspectives and frameworks, suggesting exciting avenues for future research on mentoring and career development.

In the last two decades, the workplace has been dramatically transformed. Individuals traditionally had careers entrenched in organizations, relying on the paternalistic firm for career development. Increasingly now, individuals are enacting careers outside organizational boundaries, defining career success on their own terms rather than by the organizational measures of salary and rank. Rapid technological change and globalization have intensified the decoupling of individual careers from organizations, putting more emphasis on individuals for their own career development and creating an even greater need for mentoring.

Although much research has been done on the impact of mentoring on subjective and objective career success, there are still many unexamined and under‐explored aspects of mentoring. This collection of ten articles tackles some of these areas, providing new insights and offering new avenues for research and practice.

These articles are authored by individuals from a variety of disciplines (e.g. organizational behavior, psychology, health care), and countries (e.g. USA, UK, Nigeria), with each article bringing a unique lens to the study of mentoring and careers. Individually, each article makes a contribution to the better understanding of how mentoring has evolved and is enacted today. Together, this collection of articles provides important insights that it is hoped encourage even further research into the complexities of developmental relationships and their impact on career development.

The classics will circulate wrote a public librarian several years ago. She found that new, attractive, prominently displayed editions of literary classics would indeed find a substantial audience among public library patrons.

This study aims to examine how exposure to female models in advertisements can create identity tensions in senior women and how they manage the comparison and develop different adaptation strategies to deal with these tensions.

This research is based on a qualitative approach involving 27 in-depth interviews with French women aged 60 to 79. Photo-elicitation with choice of models as reference points by respondents was used to capture comparison strategies with regard to models.

Interviews with senior women confirm that identity tensions due to appearance arise in the context of ageing, particularly when senior women are faced with advertising models. Three reactions of senior women to identity tensions are described, namely, avoiding comparison to protect the self, engaging in comparison despite its resulting devaluation of the self, proceeding to a positive comparison that reinforces their identity. This paper finds that comparison modalities are specific to each strategy.

This research opens the way to further investigation, especially with regard to understanding social comparison mechanisms in an advertising context for senior women targets.

This paper raises awareness of the effects of senior women’s exposure to advertising on their self-perception in the context of ageing. It provides practical guidance to advertising professionals on the use of models in ads when targeting senior women and helps marketing managers in their communication strategies.

This research reveals pronounced identity tensions in relation to appearance among senior women in the context of advertising exposure. By providing more diverse models, advertising representations could help to improve the identity perceptions of senior women.

Very few studies have hitherto investigated identity effects on senior female consumers of female model usage in advertising.