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There is a growing interest in employee involvement as a means to enhance commitment and wellbeing. Typically, there is a degree of power sharing in decisions at all levels. In large organizations, the strategy has been shown to deliver benefits. The authors wanted to study the themes in a small NFP.

The authors chose an extreme case of a small NFP organized on democratic lines but with only informal HRM policies. They felt an extreme case would be instructive. The organization, which they gave the pseudonym OA, is a small non-profit agency that offers education around sexual violence and advice and support to survivors. As a collective, it involves everyone in decision-making. The lead author carried out the detailed study over six months based in the office. It involved formal interviews with six existing employees and six ex-employees, or volunteers, as well as a clinical supervisor.

The study showed that without systematic and strategic HRM policies, strong forms of employee participation won’t deliver higher levels of equity. Although the NFP in the study operated as a collective, it lacked even basic HR policies. The consequences included poor management, high turnover, burnout and inadequate training.

The authors said the results showed that small size and organizational commitment did not always support effective employee participation. Weak HR policies made the problems of poor communication and decision-making worse and caused a lot of stress. As a result, the high turnover impacted performance. The findings add a note of caution to existing findings about employee participation. In fact, perversely, it can even lead to worse outcomes. Arguably, they say, HRM is even more essential in a small NFP environment because of the structural constraints and lack of funding.

Argues that the way in which the UK Government, through its various departments and quangos, approaches designed to approve the effectiveness of the small business sector, is based on a flawed understanding of how small businesses actually operate. Argues that this naïve, over‐simplistic understanding of the motivation of those in the small business sector means that many government interventions that are made, are blunt instruments destined to fail, given the limited understanding shown of the complexity of the small business market. Presents evidence from two recent studies amongst small firms; a series of large‐scale qualitative studies undertaken for a blue chip company and a mixed study on the Business Link network. The emphasis is based on – using qualitative research – getting to grips with the emotion, ambiguity and complexity that characterises this market.

With the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act in the USA, many companies are investing in corporate wellness programs as a way to reduce healthcare costs and increase productivity of their workforces. Increasing healthcare expenditures and the pandemic of obesity and chronic diseases are driving forces to the development and implementation of workplace wellness programs across the globe. Companies expect to experience a return on their investment through lower healthcare costs and increased productivity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this study, 109 business professionals were surveyed (primarily almost equally divided between Russian and Americans citizens) to examine their health-promoting and health risk behaviors. Demographics were compared in an effort to identify the key differences in order to pinpoint development opportunities to increase efficiencies among target populations.

According to the results, nationality was related to certain differences in health-promoting behaviors, participation rates and frequency of wellness programs offered by employers. No differences were found among different age groups. The results indicated that not even a single wellness program design is appropriate for all companies or even one company across all locations.

Although there were no general conclusions have been drawn nor have the influencing factors for the different behaviors of the various target groups been adequately examined in this exploratory study, there were baselines developed for future research.

Few empirical studies exists that measure the perceived value of corporate wellness programs, especially among different cultural settings. In effect, wellness programs need to be developed specifically for the target population, with considerations to perceived value differences.

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

The paper's purpose is to consider the challenges, a public sector organization faces combining both transparency and “intelligent” forms of accountability (cf. Roberts, 2009).

The authors conducted a case study of StatePol, a police service in an Australian state.

The data analysis revealed three themes. First, prior to 2013, transparency forms of accountability dominated, emphasizing crime statistics with the effect of reinforcing internal partitions and inhibiting collective action. Second, post-2013, a greater emphasis was placed on “intelligent” accountability with conversations around process and collective accountability at the operational level. Crime statistics were used less for operational-level accountability and more for attention-directing. Third, changing the emphasis from transparency to its combined use with “intelligent” accountability required strong leadership, clearly communicated strategy and middle-level managers with appropriate skills.

The authors identify a number of important factors in combining transparency and “intelligent” forms of accountability. The authors note the difficulties that fragmentation between forms of accountability and the somewhat amorphous nature of the accountability concept itself can cause. In doing so, the authors provide empirical evidence of the challenges changing from an emphasis on transparency, to combined use with an “intelligent” form of accountability.

IN THE March 1973 issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD Dr H T Hookway commented that the new head of the British Library must be first and foremost an administrator and a manager, a man for whom the intricacies of book selection or ‘class and cat’ would hardly be of much use. Few would doubt the validity of this first statement, but surely a grounding in any of the traditional library disciplines could do no harm whatsoever and might indeed be a positive advantage.

ONCE UPON a time there was no need to question the purpose of a good library; it was there as a ‘repository of human knowledge’ and both users and librarians were satisfied with this description and used it to evaluate libraries accordingly.

From this push for non‐linear innovation has come a fragmented market of hardware, software, and services branded as, knowledge‐management solutions. Virtual knowledge networks provide a dynamic way of working relevant for the emergence of a post‐industrial economy. E‐learning is seen as a driver of knowledge creation across unstructured virtual communities. The paper considers the role of managed learning environments (MLEs) in the context of information‐intensive organisations operating in virtual markets (software, publishing, education, music, consultancy services plus many more), the relationship with knowledge creation across distributed networks, and finally strategies for building knowledge networks through the creation of e‐learning communities.