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The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: in what sense does experimentation as improvisation lead to methodological innovation? What are the implications of artistic experimentation as improvisation for education and learning?

The paper tracks the known concept within research of “experimentation” with a view to revealing how practice-led research in art works distinctively with experimentation. It proposes experimentation as improvisation drawing on a research project Sounding Drawing 2012 as an example. The paper situates art experimentation as improvisation in art (Cage, 1995) anthropology (Hallam and Ingold, 2007; Bateson, 1989) and the theoretical work of Arnheim (1986) on forms of cognition.

Arts research as improvisation is participatory, relational and performative retaining the research subject in its life context. The artist as researcher starts with open-ended critical questions for which there are no known methods or immediate answer. By setting up boundary conditions from the outset and understanding the situatedness and contingencies of those conditions, the artist as improviser seeks ways of not only avoiding chaos and the arbitrary but also being trapped by what is already known.

This approach is important within and beyond the arts because it consciously draws together different forms of cognition – intuition and relational knowledge and also sequential knowledge. It is also significant because it offers a different epistemology in which new knowledge emerges in the relationship between participants in the research taking form in co-creation. These qualities all position improvisation as a research paradigm and a counterpoint to positivism.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the advances in grey system theory research and various application achievements in science and engineering. At the same time, it commemorates the 40th anniversary of the birth of grey system theory and the 10th anniversary of Grey Systems–Theory and Application.

Firstly, the innovations of theoretical research in grey system theory were summarized and some of the widely recognized new results are briefly described. By searching and combing the research results of grey system theory in China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI) database and Web of Science by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), this paper shows the rapid development trend of grey system theory in the past 40 years, and the successful applications of grey system theory in the fields of social sciences, natural sciences and engineering technologies.

More than 227 thousands literature were found by input 10 phrases such as grey system, grey number and sequence operator etc. in CNKI database. After entering the new century, the number of grey system papers included in CNKI database is increasing rapidly. Since 2008, more than 10 thousands papers have been included per year and more than 15 thousands papers have been included per year since 2014. Grey system method and model are widely used in physics, chemistry, biology and other fields of natural science, as well as transportation, electric power, machinery and other fields of engineering technology, and a large number of valuable results have been achieved.

It can be seen that the grey system theory plays an important role in promoting China’s scientific and technological progress, innovation and development and high-level talent training from tens of thousands of literatures marked with important national science and technology projects and a large number of grey system literatures published by China’s double first-class universities and double first-class discipline construction universities.

Both innovations of theoretical research and practical application play important role in the growth of new theory. The innovations of theoretical research provide methods and tools for practical application, which is conducive to improve application efficiency and broaden application fields. A large number of practical applications needs have become the source of theoretical innovation and the solid background for the birth of theoretical innovation achievements.

High‐secure hospital patients often have complex presentations that are marked by co‐morbidity, violence, histories of poor concordance with oral medication, and treatment resistance. The ability to give a long‐acting medication with a low propensity for extra pyramidal side effects is of potential value to clinicians treating these patients. Risperidone Long‐acting Injection (RLAI) is the first long‐acting atypical antipsychotic medication and may be potentially useful in this population. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

This was a retrospective, naturalistic study to investigate the use and effectiveness, using hard outcome measures, of RLAI in the four UK high‐secure psychiatric hospitals. Hospital pharmacy databases at Ashworth, Broadmoor, Carstairs and Rampton hospitals were used to identify all patients who had been prescribed RLAI. Anonymised data were then obtained from the pharmacy databases and case notes which were then pooled.

A total of 159 patients were prescribed RLAI, most of whom had schizophrenia. The mean length of treatment with RLAI was 65 weeks (range two to 260 weeks) and the mean maximum dose was 43.2 mg every two weeks (range 25‐75 mg every two weeks). No serious adverse effects were reported. In total, 42 per cent (67) patients responded to RLAI in as much as that they either remained on it in the long‐term or were discharged to conditions of lower security whilst taking it. As there was no control group, it is not possible to determine if RLAI was a significant factor in such discharges to conditions of lower security. Of those patients who failed to respond to RLAI, 44 per cent were subsequently treated with clozapine.

This pragmatic multi‐centre study of a small but complex patient group demonstrated that RLAI was effective in 42 per cent of patients and was well‐tolerated.

Micro-businesses account for a large majority of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). However, they remain comparatively under-researched. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the extant literature on growth challenges and to distinguish growth constraints facing micro-businesses as a specific subset of SMEs from those facing larger SMEs.

The study consists of a systematic review of 59 peer-reviewed articles on SME growth.

Micro-businesses distinguish themselves from larger SMEs by being owner-manager entrepreneur (OME) centric and are constrained by a tendency to be growth-averse, underdeveloped capabilities in key business areas, underdeveloped OME capabilities, and often inadequate business support provision.

The use of keywords, search strings, and specific databases may have limited the number of papers identified as relevant by the review. However, the findings are valuable for understanding micro-businesses as a subset of SMEs, providing directions for future research and generating implications for policy to support the scaling up of micro-businesses.

The review provides a renewed foundation for academic analysis of micro-business growth, highlighting how micro-businesses are distinct from larger SMEs. At present, no literature review on this topic has previously been published and the study develops a number of theoretical and policy implications.

Research indicates that although women have achieved virtual parity with men when entering organizations, within five to six years their careers begin to lag behind those of their male counterparts. This lag is often attributed to the glass ceiling and mentoring has been suggested as one tool to assist women in breaking through. We still have very little empirical research that informs our understanding of the effectiveness of formal mentoring in comparison to informal mentoring relationships. The purpose of this article is to take a hard look at formal mentoring programs and the implications for women participating in them. It compares formal mentoring to informal mentoring. It focuses on the practice of formal mentoring relationships and the unique challenges that women may face as they negotiate these planned relationships as well as some suggested strategies to deal with these challenges. It concludes by discussing the implications of this work as well as alternative sources of support for women.

The role and contributions of blue and gray collar employees in strategy making in practice are generally ignored, and left out of scientific inquiry. However, the authors argue that they are “hidden actors” in the strategy making process, and “silent heroes” of the strategy. Their participative role is generally seen limited to operational phases of strategy. Nevertheless, recent literatures have fruitful implications on blue and gray collars workers’ contributions in formulation phase. Upper echelon (Hambrick, 1987; Hambrick & Mason, 1984) and strategy as practice (SAP) literatures (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 2006) are suggested to be closely scrutinized since the former has incorporated the middle- and low-level teams of management in the explanation (Carpenter, Geletkancz, & Sanders, 2004), and the latter takes “practice” as a prominent research perspective, and thus enable us to approach strategy phenomena from a wider context of practitioners, practices, and praxis (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002). Overall, this chapter suggests that future studies could question the hidden assumptions behind strategy approaches to trace the assumed image and role of blue and gray collars in strategy making, and go further to integrate their deserved role in strategy process, content, context, and cognition.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.