Search results

The purpose of this article is to critique the strengths and weaknesses of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). The primary purpose of the NCSL is to improve student attainment levels through enhancement of leadership capacity within England's government schools. The critique aims to include the issues of strategic rethinking, definition of terms, leadership competencies, core competencies, selection criteria, and research needs.

This article provides a review of literature related to leadership capacity building and challenges to the NCSL enhancement of student attainment levels in England's government schools.

The article indicates that the NCSL had numerous strengths adequate for the initial core activities of headteacher development. Subsequent broadening of those responsibilities to include all leadership development in government schools is a challenging task. The continued increase in expectations necessitates a strategic rethinking of NCSL capability.

The number of potential school leaders warrants reflection on current practice. The “demographic time‐bomb” of the teaching profession has implications for succession planning and professional development. The NCSL has endeavoured to prepare additional school leaders. The increase in NCSL responsibilities regarding school leadership necessitates a sharing of responsibility with other providers.

The article is among the first to critique the NCSL and to identify lessons to be learned by educational leaders from the NCSL experience.

During the last few dacades, most nations have seen a significant growth in the number and proportion of women, especially married women, in the labour force. However, the cultural norms of many of these countries remain ambivalent about the employment of women outside the home. Rarely, outside socialist countries, do nations fully accept or endorse the employment of women. Political constraints reinforce ambivalent social and cultural attitudes and generate resistance to the acceptance of the costs involved, and benefits to be gained, in adjusting society's structure to the changing roles of women and assisting in the integration of women into the labour force without discrimination.

With escalating competition in the hotel industry, a growing number of hotels have considered service quality their top priority in maintaining competitiveness. To maintain competitiveness, the hotel management often needs to develop reliable service quality standards. Perhaps one of the best ways of developing such standards is to compare the hotel’s service performance with that of the service leader and reassess its service performance continuously through competitive benchmarking. In an effort to establish practical guidelines for competitive benchmarking, proposes the use of an analytic hierarchy process and a competitive gap analysis. These methods can help the hotel manager formulate viable service improvement strategies in the increasingly competitive hotel industry. Illustrates the usefulness of the proposed benchmarking methodology using the case of Korean luxury hotels.

This paper aims to provide a detailed case study of a corporate foresight for innovation (CFI) project done by the Higher School of Economics’ (HSE) (Moscow, Russia) corporate foresight (CF) unit for a large state-owned Russian service company. It demonstrates how CFI methods lead to recommendations and how these recommendations result in decisions.

Drawing from being part of the project team, review of the project documents and interviews, the case describes a multi-phased CFI project which incorporated several CF methods. Techniques used for the project itself included grand challenges and trend analysis, analysis of best practices through use of benchmarking and horizon scanning, interviews, expert panels, wild card and weak signals analysis, cross impact analysis, SWOT and backcasting. The project used a broad-base of secondary information, expert panels consisting of company experts and HSE CF team personnel, interviews with senior management and an extensive literature review using HSE’s propriety iFORA system.

In all 17 CFI recommendation and over 100 implementation recommendations were made; 94 per cent of the CFI recommendations were accepted with most implemented at the time this case was written. The case also identifies five enabling factors that collectively both helped the CFI project and led to a high rate of recommendation acceptance and one factor that hindered CFI project success.

The case study provides detailed information and insight that can help others in conducting CF for innovation projects and establishes a link between CF methods and innovation-based recommendations and subsequent decisions.

In-depth case studies that show academe and practitioners how CFI leads to recommendations and is linked to subsequent decisions have been identified as a gap in the literature. This paper therefore seeks to address this need by presenting a detailed CF case for a corporate innovation project.

One of the leading indicators of the quality of human life is health and access to medical care. Increasing social concern over the problems of health has resulted in various nationwide proposals like medicare and medicaid. At present, many bills are pending before the United States Congress for the creation of a comprehensive national health insurance scheme. One result of this public awareness is the demand in many libraries for information on the various aspects of the health care industry in general and in particular, on health legislation, resources and facilities, prices and costs and insurance. The following survey aims to examine certain leading publications which provide statistical and other types of information in this area. Excluded from this survey are sources dealing specifically with clinical aspects of drugs and medicine. Moreover, additional and uptodate information on the specific topics discussed below can be obtained by consulting subject indexes like the Hospital Literature Index and the Insurance Periodicals Index.

Examines the literature to identify the essential components of kaizen or continuous improvement programmes. Relying on published sources on the North American experience with continuous improvement, also tries to identify organizational structures and practices likely to lead to successful implementation of such programmes. Distinguishes between kaizen and more radical, “strategic leap” improvement approaches, and describes the North American record of success with continuous improvement programmes. An emergent theme is that success with continuous improvement requires a wide array of systems, processes, and orientations to be congruent within the organization. Argues that the study of when, how, and why kaizen succeeds is by no means complete, and proposes a set of open research questions whose investigation is likely to be useful to both scholars and practitioners. Finally, discusses some of the ways in which the existing literature can be immediately useful for practice in organizations.

Can employees in possession of a high degree of professional expertise look forward to unlimited mobility and employability? Are they able to cope easily with new job assignments and re‐employment in different fields? These thought‐provoking questions and others are well worthwhile further investigation. In view of improvements in human resource management, it would seem of importance to find out to what extent their career performance is exemplary and whether it should be imitated. For this reason, this article discusses the relationship between five dimensions of professional expertise and the degree of future employability of 406 higher level employees. The central position is that the possession of expertise is necessary to guarantee employability throughout the career.

The “classical” logic of organisations existing as generators of shareholder value, with the human “resources” seen as a means to this end, has been the subject of criticism regarding alienation in its members and the instrumentalisation both of work and of people. This paper aims to look at the way a medieval monastic rule is used to govern secular for‐profit organisations and trace its potential relevance as an alternative example for the structure and governance of organisations today.

Based on an in‐depth case study, the paper critically discusses the feasibility of applying aspects of the rule of Saint Benedict (RSB) to modern organisations.

Some of the principles of the RSB (such as fitting jobs around people, inverse delegation, and a critical attitude towards organisational growth) are quite different from standard management practice. Yet these monastic organisations turn out to be highly successful businesses with remarkably low employee turnover and high profitability.

The paper claims that the principles of the RSB can contribute, outside of the monastic context, to the creation and running of more “humane” organisations.

The paper illustrates that several of these monastic communities are important commercial organisations in their own right, producing goods and services for the market place. Some are businesses with multi‐million euro turnovers, the scale of whose activities compels them to rely on lay employees from outside the monastery on conventional contracts of employment. Yet these outsiders are managed under the same principles of the RSB as the monks.