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The provision of accommodation devices is said to aid organizational inclusion of employees with a disability. However, devices that are meant to enable might only partially facilitate productivity, independence, and social inclusion if these devices are not accepted by the user's workgroup. The authors outline a conceptual model of accommodation device acceptance through a sociomaterial lens to suggest conditions influencing workgroup device acceptance.

To build the model, the authors draw upon the sociomateriality and disability literature to frame accommodation devices as experienced in ongoing interactions, representing the goals, feelings, and interpretations of specific workgroups. The authors also unpack attributes of devices—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism—and propose how each of these can pattern social conduct to influence device acceptance. The authors then draw upon the disability literature to identify attributes of workgroups that can be expected to amplify or diminish the effect of device attributes on device acceptance in that workgroup.

The conceptualization, which the authors illustrate with examples particular to visual impairment, presents implications for who and what serves as a gatekeeper to accommodation device acceptance and thereby workgroup inclusion.

Prior research has focused on conditions under which devices are requested by users or made available by organizations, undergirded by the assumption that devices are well-specified once provided and that they operate relatively predictably when used in various workgroups. The authors focus instead on what happens after the device is provided and highlight the complex and dynamic interaction between an accommodation device and the workgroup, which influences device and user acceptance.

Persons with disabilities (PWD) are among the largest and most diverse minority groups and among the most disadvantaged in terms of employment. Entrepreneurial pursuit is often advocated as a path toward employment, inclusion, and equality, yet few studies have investigated earning variation among PWD.

The authors draw on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), and the disability employment and entrepreneurship literature to develop hypotheses about who among PWD are likely to earn more (less) from entrepreneurial pursuits. The authors then conduct analyses on the nationally representative sample of the Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) by including all PWD engaged in entrepreneurial pursuit, and matching each to an organizationally employed counterpart of the same gender and race and of similar age and disability severity (n ≈ 810).

Entrepreneurial pursuit has a stronger negative association with the earnings of PWD who experience earlier disability onset ages, those who report more unmet accommodation needs, and those who are female.

First, this study applies SCCT to help bridge the literature on organizational employment barriers for PWD and entrepreneurs with disabilities. Second, we call into question the logic of neoliberalism about entrepreneurship by showing that barriers to organizational employment impact entrepreneurial pursuit decisions and thereby earnings. Third, we extend the understanding of entrepreneurial earnings among PWD by examining understudied disability attributes and demographic attributes. Lastly, this study is among the first to use a matched sample to empirically test the impact of entrepreneurial pursuit on the earnings of PWD.

Persons with childhood-onset disabilities are among the most marginalized populations, often unemployed or underemployment in jobs providing neither adequate hours for financial self-sufficiency nor fulfillment through skill-utilization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which social capital in the form of strong ties with family and friends is associated with enhanced employment outcomes for persons with childhood-onset disabilities.

Questioning the current theoretical consensus that strong social ties are unimportant to employment quality, the authors draw on disability research and opportunity, motivation and ability social capital theory to propose a model of the impact of strong ties with family and friends on paid-work-hours and skill-utilization as well as the potential moderating role of gender and disability severity. The authors then test this model using data from 1,380 people with childhood-onset disabilities and OLS regression analysis.

As theorized, family-of-origin-size is positively associated with hours worked. Family-of-origin-size is also associated with having more close friends and children. These strong ties, in turn, are positively associated with hours worked. The impact of having more children on hours worked and skill-utilization, however, is positive for men but non-significant for women.

This study breaks new ground by focusing on the association between strong ties with family and friends and employment quality for people with childhood-onset disabilities – a marginalized and understudied group. Findings further indicate the particular vulnerability of women with disabilities.

Although research has uncovered important predictors of managerial career success, the causal relationships between these predictors has not been fully explored. Accordingly, we propose and test a model that establishes a link between individual differences, salient career‐related beliefs, career enhancing outcomes and managerial career success. Using path analysis, we found that education and career impatience directly affected willingness to relocate and perceived marketability, which in turn led to more promotions offered and greater exposure to powerful networks. Finally, the number of promotions offered directly affected management level, which in turn affected compensation level. With respect to gender differences, we found that beliefs regarding the efficacy of mentoring positively influenced a woman's sense of marketability, and like her male counterpart, exposure to powerful networks. However, we also found that for women managers, unlike men, such exposure did not affect the number of promotions they were offered.

Given advances in digitalization and automation, manufacturing employees are facing the increasing threat of being substituted by smart machines and robots. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that explains as well as can be used to study career sustainability of workers in the fast-paced, continuously changing manufacturing landscape.

After tracing the evolution of manufacturing sector in China, the authors review existing literature on career sustainability and then propose a new framework. The authors then describe two fictive cases and illustrate the applicability of the four-dimensional framework in helping understand the lived experience of objects in these fictive cases.

The proposed dynamic framework of career sustainability constituted by four intricately interconnected dimensions (i.e. resourceful, flexible, renewable and integrative) is useful in understanding the fictive cases and hopefully will guide future research on career sustainability in manufacturing or similarly fast-past, dynamically changing environments.

The framework of career sustainability facilitates manufacturing employees to accurately evaluate the sustainability of their careers, whereby they can choose to continue, shift or re-orient their career paths during the transitional period toward digitalized manufacturing; it also enlightens employers to think about how to enhance the job security and engagement of workers by helping prolong their careers and re-design their career plans.

This paper proposes a novel yet context-specific framework to understand and study sustainability of careers. In addition to helping us understand how careers evolve during transformational periods, it also offers fruitful avenues for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two explanations for the Baldrige Award’s decline. The management fashion literature suggests that it is a waning management fad, and the marketing choice literature suggests the likely presence of an ISO 9000 substitution effect.

This exploratory study utilizes data collected on Baldridge Award applications, publications, ISO 9000 certifications and economic indicators. These data are contrasted to explore patterns and trends, and correlation analyses conducted to reveal the plausibility of the fad and substitution effect explanations for the Baldrige Award’s decline.

Data analysis confirms the Baldrige Award’s prolonged decline and strongly suggests it is in the final stage of a management fashion life cycle with support provided for the presence of an ISO 9000 substitution effect.

Many organizations have shifted their attention away from the Baldrige as a means to quality and performance excellence, and there is evidence that the ISO 9000 standards are a viable substitute.

The Baldrige Program has served its purpose with the Baldrige Award being the pinnacle of recognition for performance excellence achievement. However, the Award is in decline and the Baldrige Program is on a path to financial exigency. The Baldrige must be reframed to recover its role as the preeminent approach to performance excellence.

The paper satisfies the need to examine potential causes for the diminishing role of the Baldrige Award and challenges both academicians and practitioners to reexamine the Baldrige Program.

Advocates training in business etiquette for auditors: an important “people skill” especially where the relationship of auditor and auditee is a delicate one. Discusses the basic principles underlying good manners and business protocol, trust, respect and mutual concern, and their expression in conversational aptitudes, order, propriety and convention. Also considers how to recover from lapses. Reports on a survey of the ranked concerns, with respect to etiquette, of 14 auditing executives.

How the concept of organisational culture was applied to a recent study of academic organisations in an Australian university is the thrust of this article. Rather than use the more traditional approach of analysing functions and formal structures, the study added a different perspective by applying a cultural framework adapted chiefly from the works of three noted scholars of higher education. It examined academic culture, namely, the symbolic dimension of academic organisation embodying the traditions, myths, rituals, occupational beliefs and values and other forms of expressive symbolism that have grown up about universities and the life and work of academics. Different levels of culture are revealed, bases of conflict and aspects of a common culture are elucidated, their organisational implications are discussed and the value of a cultural perspective is addressed.

Annual reports and operational data are key performance indicators for any business. However, performance measurement is critical in today’s real property domain and should become part of strategic planning and management processes for an organisation to be truly successful. In this paper the authors examine a number of case studies for the application of the Balanced Scorecard framework in establishing a balanced distribution of measures across four perspectives: financial; customer; internal business processes; and learning and growth. This balanced measurement of government organisations can help satisfy customers and shareholders ‐ in the public sector, often one and the same.

Several years ago I began an intellectual adventure that has paid high dividends in terms of understanding the role of leadership and in selecting more effective leadership strategies. The adventure consisted of seeing what would happen if one conceptualised a social system (family, group, organisation, agency, corporation, school, college, community, state, nation, or world) as a system of human energy.