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The purpose of this paper is to focus on different types of university-based business school dean (BSD) in a context of insecurities within the business school business and more widely with changing business and educational models and disruptions such as the global financial crisis and Brexit. The position of the BSD is contextualised within the industry sector, institutionally, and in relation to individuals’ tenures to make sense of how BSDs are operating on a burning platform. A well-established middle management strategic role framework is applied to the empirical data.

In total, 50 one-to-one interviews were conducted with deans and their colleagues. Deans’ behaviours were analysed according to attention paid to “facilitating”, “synthesizing”, “championing”, and “implementing” strategic activities.

Behaviours from primary professional identities as scholars and educators were identified as prevalent. It is suggested that to achieve greater legitimacy in declining mature markets, future deans will need to re-negotiate their roles to champion as public intellectuals the societal impact of business schools more widely in a context of shifting business and educational models.

The study is relevant to current and aspiring deans and for those hiring and developing business school deans.

The dean is conceptualised as a hybrid upper middle manager besieged by multiple stakeholders and challenges. Novel first-order insights into a typology of strategists are highlighted.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analytical summary of UK housing policies. It aims to evaluate UK government's housing policies, before and after the publication of the Barker Review, to tackle affordability issues in the owner‐occupied sector. It examines the extent to which housing policy contributes to or alleviates the problem of the affordability of owner‐occupied housing.

This paper evaluates the impact of UK government housing policies since 2000 on housing affordability by analysing their impact on the dynamics of housing demand and supply.

The Barker Review, which applied simple economic ideas and techniques in analysing the owner‐occupied UK housing market, argued that increases in new housing supply would help to improve housing affordability. The second Barker Review suggested that changes to the planning system were needed in order not only to increase new housing supply, but to make housing supply more sensitive to changing demands. The Barker Reviews brought about a major re‐think in government policy towards housing, particularly relating to new build and the planning system. However, the heavy reliance on the private sector to provide additional housing has reduced the effectiveness of policy changes. In addition, the adoption by the government of “demand‐side” housing policies has done little to negate the volatility of UK house prices or to raise the overall affordability of owner‐occupied housing.

This paper reflects on government failures in UK housing policy in addressing the affordability of owner‐occupied housing. The findings will be of interest to policy makers and housing researchers.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of learning organization concepts from the perspective of Professor Bob Garratt and presents an interesting evolution toward his work on learning boardroom members.

Through a conversation with Professor Garratt, the authors capture several topics pertaining to his evolution of learning organization concepts, those who have differing views and ultimately what led him to develope his theories on the impact of the most senior members of an organization on the learning constructs.

The learning organization debate has many foundations that today have led to differing perspectives. Professor Garratt provides his particular background and how he developed his opinions, which he admits have not always been embraced in practice.

The discussion with Bob Garratt reveals his understanding of the learning organization concept and how it developed from a lifetime of practical application. Ultimately, the reader will understand, in Professor Garratt’s own words, where he was confronted with challenges and why his concepts evolved to where they are today.

As a sector, higher education is at the low end of innovation rankings. The challenges we face – demographic, technological, political, and pedagogical – will require sustained innovation at a strategic level. Recent research with mature companies has identified exemplars in strategic innovation (e.g., O’Connor, Corbett, & Peters, 2018). This work explores whether – and how – higher education institutions might adapt insights from the corporate sector for strategic innovation in teaching and learning.

The introductory section provides an overview of the nature of strategic innovation (and why it is hard to sustain), strategic issues facing higher education, and the status and challenges of sustaining strategic innovation for teaching. The next two sections describe insights from research with corporate exemplars of sustaining strategic innovation. Each section uses a scenario from higher education as a proof-of-concept test to explore the application of the corporate sector insights for strategic innovation in higher education teaching and learning.

The final section of the chapter discusses the planned next steps to prototype and test adaptation of these corporate sector insights with institutional innovation leaders in higher education, as well as additional potential sources of insights (from other research in the corporate sector and from strategic innovation in the public sector).

On every side voices are raised against the growing use of chemical additives in food; the possible hazards to health; the inadequacy of present methods of control and of stemming the rate at which the practice is growing. Not unexpectedly at the season of annual conferences, with its crop of wildish statements and scare headlines, attention appears to be focussed upon the problem as if it were something new. These platform heroics not‐withstanding, it is indeed a difficult and growing problem. Not by any means a new one, however, for additives have been used in food preparation for many years, but before the first War they were mainly natural products; large‐scale food processing had yet to come. Now synthetic products have replaced the natural and possible ill‐effects are engaging world interest.

This paper aims to identify the ethical foundations and principles underpinning the learning organization (LO) concept.

By interviewing one thought leader in the field, Professor Robin Snell, this paper traces how his early days in academia shaped the development of an ethics-driven research agenda on LO.

An ethical perspective advocates the importance of establishing a covenant or constitutional foundation of rights that would enable and empower organizational members at all levels to enact the processes of LOs, thus signifying the importance of employee development and a more sustainable approach for developing LO.

A personal reflection of Robin Snell on his own academic career development and research trajectory offers some insights into how an ethical perspective of LO evolved and flourished as a field of study.

For generations, Britain has had a household delivery of fresh milk; from the days before the Great War when it was delivered by a horse‐drawn milk float, with the roundsman often bringing the housewife to the door with his cries of “Milk‐O!”. The float had a churn and milk was delivered in a small can, served out by a dipper. This was the start of the distributive trade, organised between the Wars, from which the present industry has emerged. The trade gave universal acceptance to the glass bottle, returnable for household delivery, only the method of sealing has changed. There have been many demands for its abandonment in favour of the carton, of which recent years has seen a rise in its use in the increasing sales of milk by supermarkets and stores. Despite the problems with returnable vessels, the glass bottle has a number of advantages. The milk, including the cream line, is clearly visible, and short measure is most unlikely, which is a growing problem with carton‐filled milk. The number of prosecutions for short measure with cartons must be causing concern to trading standards departments. There is nothing to indicate the offence until the carton is opened.

REW Video have been designing and installing industrial video systems for some twenty years and during that time have been involved with numerous education authorities and establishments throughout the UK. Initially contact between REW and local authorities, for example, was simply in the supply of various items of equipment; more recent contracts have however called for REW's assistance and expertise throughout complete projects, from system concept to commissioning of hardware.

TWO Government reports in one week—one at first unobtainable because of a union dispute, the other a vast opus of three volumes, with three separate volumes of maps—this was the fate of librarians in Britain during the second week of June 1969. So long to wait for these reports of Dainton and Maud, then so much to read.

The purpose of this paper is to revive interest in the question, never definitively answered, which Stephen Watson raised in the title of his 2000 paper, “Why is it that management academics rarely advise on their own institutions?” It is argued that finding the answer to the question would not only be interesting in and of itself but could also lead to valuable contributions to the theory of the learning organization.

Inspired by Watson’s original paper and a new interview the authors made with him in 2017, this paper discusses the possible explanations for why management academics rarely advise on their own institutions and sets out an agenda for future research.

The authors suggest a simple three-way categorization of the nine hypotheses identified by Watson (2000), grouping them by the themes of management knowledge, motivation of higher education institution (HEI) managers and incentives for academics to engage. This study proposes an integrated framework to illustrate how these three categories of hypotheses are connected and can jointly explain the observed phenomenon. The study provides theoretical underpinnings for the most promising hypotheses and suggests an agenda for future research, emphasizing the potential of such research to contribute to the learning organization field.

This paper should not be interpreted primarily as an attempt to provide support for any particular hypothesis. Rather, the principal aim of the authors is to sketch out a future research agenda and inspire others to contribute empirical evidence that can help shed light on the paradox of why management academics rarely advise on their own institutions.

The theoretical contribution of this paper is to revive the important research topic of “why management academics do not seem to be widely engaged in advising university managers” (Watson, 2000, p. 99) and to introduce a research agenda that can help realize the potential contribution of this topic to the learning organization literature. The practical contribution is to re-address the difficulties of HEIs in becoming full-fledged “learning organizations” and to suggest that HEI managers re-examine the possibilities for using hitherto untapped internal expertise.