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In this, the second part of a two‐part paper (Part I, Personnel Review, Summer 1977, pp 21–34) a survey of instances of work system design (WSD) experiments will be continued. As described in the Introduction to Part I, cases chosen for inclusion report the economic and human results of actual physical or structural innovations in a set or series of human tasks which, taken together, form some meaningful technical whole. The term ‘experiment’ is used in both Part I and II to refer loosely to change or manipulation of actual work activities, and not necessarily to well controlled laboratory experiments. In fact, most cases reported here are ‘natural’ and very few are carefully controlled.

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.

We investigate the relative roles of key components of earnings change in explaining the value relevance of earnings across different life‐cycle stages of the firm. We hypothesize that firms in different life‐cycle stages take different strategic actions: change in sales is emphasized in the growth and mature stages, while in later stages, profitability is emphasized. Because payoffs to such strategies vary across the life‐cycle, the stock market reaction to the success firms have in employing these strategic actions is likely to vary across the life‐cycle. To test our hypotheses, we disaggregate changes in earnings into three key components: earnings change from change in sales, earnings change from change in profitability, and an interaction term comprising both sales change and profitability change. Our findings are consistent with our hypotheses: when firms are in the growth stage, the value‐relevance of change in sales is relatively greater than that of change in profitability. In the mature stage, the value relevance of change in profitability increases, relative to that of change in sales. When firms are in stagnant stage, the value‐relevance of changes in profitability are relatively greater than that of change in sales. Collectively, the results demonstrate a shift in the value relevance of earnings components from a growth emphasis early in the life‐cycle to a profitability emphasis later in the life‐cycle.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a succinct overview of academic research that has examined audit firm rotation both in the USA and in other countries.

The authors outline the unresolved nature of academic research on audit firm rotation, review recent literature, discuss why academics have been unable to resolve this issue and offer suggestions for improving subsequent research in the area.

Overall, the collective evidence is inconclusive at best; with earlier studies generally finding mixed results and more recent studies indicating that audit quality generally goes through two distinct phases during the auditor‐client relationship, the “auditor learning” and “auditor closeness” phases.

Given the importance of the issue, this article provides an overview of academic research that has examined audit firm rotation, discusses why academics have been unable to resolve this issue, and provides suggestions on how academics and practitioners can work together to enhance the quality of future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the views of Greek Life-Long Learning Centers (LLLCs) trainers, who worked as educational managers and took on informal mentoring roles in the context of counseling guidance and their trainees (who are adults’ trainers), on the effectiveness of mentoring in the post-Greek Debt Crisis era.

The authors performed a quantitative analysis using the SPSS software package’s simple random sampling. The bibliographic review, the identification and specialization of the research objectives, as well as the study of the participants’ unique characteristics, were used in the construction of a research tool.

The majority of participants confirmed the importance of mentoring as a human resource strategy. Regarding its effectiveness in the field of the Greek LLLCs, there were several discrepancies in the perceptions of trainers and trainees, as well as specific malfunctions in its implementation.

The research omitted certain qualitative features and was conducted in a relatively limited geographical context.

Given the lack of similar studies in the field of the Greek LLLCs, this study illustrates the reality of the mentoring function in the training field of adult trainers, after the onset of the Greek economic crisis, while also highlighting realistic ways to improve the effectiveness of these organizations and conduct future, larger-scale research.

We conducted a national study of the Collegiate Leadership Competition (CLC), which since inception in 2015, has included over 75 higher education institutions. The CLC brings students together in collaborative institution-based teams to compete with other teams in competitions to achieve goals and practice effective leadership skills. Our goal was to assess leadership capacity growth over the course of a four-month team practice period through the daylong inter-team competition and evaluate participant leadership assessed several months later. Results suggested students made significant and sustainable gains in leader-self-efficacy and short-term gains in leadership skill and motivation to lead. Our results also indicated the team’s coach played a significant role in student leadership development.

Leadership development programs for students in educational settings are proliferating in number and design. Curricular programs range from academic minors and certificates to doctoral programs in a variety of academic homes (e.g., education, business, healthcare). Co-curricular programs often take the form of drop-in workshops, day-long experiences, alternative spring breaks, service-learning trips, and other programs housed in student affairs and administrative offices (Guthrie & Jenkins, 2018). Moreover, the number of programs has steadily increased over the last 15 years from just under 1,000 in 2006 (Brungardt, et al., 2006) to more than 2,000 (ILA Program Directory, 2021). And while there is some commonality among the approach of these leadership programs in terms of content and delivery (see Harvey & Jenkins, 2014), vast differences exist in the structure and learning goals of student leadership programs compared to other social science disciplines. A potentially fruitful area in which to explore its effectiveness in supporting leadership development is the environment of competitive teams, where individuals work together as a group to compete against other teams. The purpose of our research was to investigate the degree to which such a competitive environment might support or detract from student leadership group, employing a potentially effective example of a formal program that utilizes the innovative approach of team competitions to motivate learning (the CLC).

Medical uncertainty is recognized as a critical issue in the sociology of diagnosis and medical sociology more generally, but a neglected focus of this concern is the question of patient decision making. Using a mixed methods approach that draws upon autoethnographic accounts and third-party interviews, we aim to illuminate the dilemmas of patient decision making in the face of uncertainty. How do patients and supportive caregivers go about navigating this state of affairs? What types of patient–doctor/healthcare professional relationships hinder or enhance effective patient decision making? These are the themes we explore in this study by following patients through the sequence of experiencing symptoms, seeking a diagnosis, evaluating treatment protocols, and receiving treatments. In general, three genres of culturally available narratives are revealed in the data: strategic, technoluxe, and unbearable health narratives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the historical contributions of complex innovations (both creative and tactical components) in a formative period in a major Australian department store, David Jones Ltd.

The study uses a context-specific lens to examine complex retail innovation. The study adopts a longitudinal design with the focus on a single firm, which met the inclusion criteria. Data collection was predominately from company archival materials and publicly available documents, including newspapers.

An in-depth analysis of two complex innovations demonstrates the retailer’s successful management of both marketing exploration (innovation) and marketing exploitation of that innovation. Effective marketing requires operational, tactical marketing exploitation to dovetail marketing exploration.

The study is limited to one successful department store. Notwithstanding, there are expectations that the lessons extend to many other retailing organizations.

The practical relevance is clear, with the emphasis on retail innovation (and especially complex innovation) as a basis for both surviving and thriving in an ever-changing marketing environment.

The use of a complex innovation approach is a novel way of examining marketing history. The study concludes that both marketing exploration and marketing exploitation are essential for retail longevity.

This is a personal narrative, but I trust not a self-regarding one. For more years than I care to remember I have been working in the field of curriculum (or ‘program’) evaluation. The field by any standards is dispersed and fragmented, with variously ascribed purposes, roles, implicit values, political contexts, and social research methods. Attempts to organize this territory into an ‘evaluation theory tree’ (e.g. Alkin, M., & Christie, C. (2003). An evaluation theory tree. In M. Alkin (Ed.), Evaluation roots: Tracing theorists’ views and influences (pp. 12–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage) have identified broad types or ‘branches’, but the migration of specific characteristics (like ‘case study’) or individual practitioners across the boundaries has tended to undermine the analysis at the level of detail, and there is no suggestion that it represents a cladistic taxonomy. There is, however, general agreement that the roots of evaluation practice tap into a variety of cultural sources, being grounded bureaucratically in (potentially conflicting) doctrines of accountability and methodologically in discipline-based or pragmatically eclectic formats for systematic social enquiry.

In general, this diversity is not treated as problematic. The professional evaluation community has increasingly taken the view (‘let all the flowers grow’) that evaluation models can be deemed appropriate across a wide spectrum, with their appropriateness determined by the nature of the task and its context, including in relation to hybrid studies using mixed models or displaying what Geertz (Geertz, C. (1980/1993). Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. The American Scholar, 49(2), 165–179) called ‘blurred genres’. However, from time to time historic tribal rivalries re-emerge as particular practitioners feel the need to defend their modus operandi (and thereby their livelihood) against paradigm shifts or governments and other sponsors of program evaluation seeking for ideological reasons to prioritize certain types of study at the expense of others. The latter possibility poses a potential threat that needs to be taken seriously by evaluators within the broad tradition showcased in this volume, interpretive qualitative case studies of educational programs that combine naturalistic description (often ‘thick’; Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Towards an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of culture (pp. 3–30). New York, NY: Basic Books.) description with a values-orientated analysis of their implications. Such studies are more likely to seek inspiration from anthropology or critical discourse analysis than from the randomly controlled trials familiar in medical research or laboratory practice in the physical sciences, despite the impressive rigour of the latter in appropriate contexts. It is the risk of ideological allegiance that I address in this chapter.