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This case puts students in the shoes of the Ebola response leadership teams of Firestone Liberia and its parent company, Bridgestone Americas, as they worked together to respond to the deadly 2014 Ebola epidemic. While the companies had received positive press for their containment of the virus on their rubber farm in Liberia, which was home to 8,000 employees and 80,000 Liberian citizens, the situation off the property was worsening. With death counts rising and hospitals across the nation closing as staff caught the virus, the Liberian government declared a national state of emergency. The teams now faced the possibility that the government might attempt to take control of the farm's medical center. How could they balance their duty to care effectively for employees against the demands of the Liberian government? Should they try to fend off the government or cooperate to meet the government's demands? Students will learn how to do a methodical situation analysis that considers ethical obligations and strategic implications, and to distill their recommendation into a briefing for senior leadership.

Wherever television is a commercial venture which earns a significant percentage of revenues from advertising, it tends to be transformed to better serve the needs of ad agencies and their clients. One oft raised complaint is that in an attempt to raise ratings and viewership, advertisers insist that shows cater to the “lowest common denominator” of society; as a result, quality programming is often compromised, eliminated, or banished to time periods when viewing is inconvenient. Programme diversity is also undermined. This paper suggests that the strategies of commercial television often restrict high quality programming even if the actual sponsors are committed to quality and diversity. This is done to create an environment which will best serve the majority of sponsors, and thus attract maximum advertising revenues. A history of Voice of Firestone (a long‐lived programme on U.S. Radio and TV) will be used as an example of this tendency. In an era when Europe is becoming more involved with commercial television, the lesson of such examples is especially significant.

The tendency for communication researchers in the area of crisis management to limit data collection and analysis by national borders consequently limits practitioner understanding of the dynamics of crisis planning and response. The Firestone/Ford tyre recall crisis of 2000‐2001 presents an opportunity to mine data on a massive, global scale in an effort to better understand and explain media and public response at that level. The author analyses media reports gleaned from around the world to suggest ways to incorporate potentially determining factors into crisis planning and response matrices. Those factors include media structure and function, as well as cultural syndromes.

European television is on the brink of being transformed by a new breed of commercial stations which garner revenues from advertisements — not merely taxes, governmental subsidies, and/or legislation which requires viewers to underwrite the programmes they watch. European commercial television, now in its infancy and usually only available to those with cable TV, exhibits all the signs of being an emerging “enfant terrible”. “Annual double‐digit gains in … (TV) advertising in Europe” will continue for the next 20 years, predicts John Eger, a major international media consultant and former senior Vice President of CBS Worldwide Enterprises.

In March 1988, Japan's Bridgestone Corporation acquired the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company for $2.6 billion. John J. Nevin, Firestone's chairman and CEO, provides this behind‐the‐scenes look at the events leading up to the merger. He also discusses the effect of foreign investment on the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interview with Dr Marsha Firestone, Founder and President of the Women Presidents' Organization (WPO), to elicit her expert views on the support available to women entrepreneurs and the obstacles which are typically faced by businesswomen in start‐up enterprises and in a wider corporate context.

The interview was conducted via telephone in June 2008 by Helen Evans, Assistant Publisher for the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship.

Dr Firestone points to an aim towards economic security as the keystone of women‐led enterprises. She identifies the common trait of entrepreneurial women as the drive to succeed, often breaking the rules and coming up with better ways of doing things. Support for women entrepreneurs comes from role models and from associations such as the WPO who work to connect women entrepreneurs throughout the world. Dr Firestone criticizes some areas of the Media for their unrelenting focus on the work of women in leadership roles in corporations. The paper goes on to describe the WPO 2008 Conference and Dr Rebecca Henderson's workshop which won best workshop prize.

Marsha Firestone is the Founder and the President of the WPO. Dr Firestone was previously Vice President of Women Incorporated and of Training and Counseling at the American Woman's Economic Development Corporation. She has published research on adult learning theory, nonverbal communication and managerial competency, appearing in both business and educational journals, and The Busy Woman's Guide to Successful Self‐employment, an interactive, easy to read resource. This interview is an opportunity to gain an insight into her expert views of the state of women's entrepreneurship.

Here are eight more people solidly behind the eight ball and their plans for setting up winning shots.

School finance reform is contentious. Critics charge that funds states provide to poor districts are wasted on salary increases, administrative featherbedding, and reduction of local property taxes. This paper analyzes the results of New Jersey's most recent school finance reform. The findings show that (a) little money was spent on property tax relief, (b) the salary gap between rich and poor districts remained, and (c) the proportion of staff that were administrators was comparable in both rich and poor districts. Thus, funds were not wasted, and a number of useful expenditures were made. However, after three years of reform, rich districts still spent more and had more staff.

Knowledge management (KM) as a field has been characterized by great confusion about its conceptual foundations and scope, much to the detriment of assessments of its impact and track record. The purpose of this paper is to contribute toward defining the scope of KM and ending the confusion, by presenting a conceptual framework and set of criteria for evaluating whether claimed KM interventions are bona fide instances of it or are interventions of another sort.

Methods used include conceptual evaluation and critique of a variety of types of “KM interventions” and presentation of a detailed analysis of an unambiguous case (The Partners HealthCare case) where KM has been successful.

The critical analysis indicates that the use of tools and methods associated with KM does not imply that interventions using them are KM interventions, and most “KM projects” are probably interventions of other types. The analysis also illustrates a pattern of intervention that can serve as the basis of a long‐term systematic strategy for implementing KM.

This is the first detailed examination of whether KM is really being done by those who claim to be doing it. It should be of value to all those who think about the scope of organizational learning and KM, and who care about unbiased assessments of its performance.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of some guidelines to evaluate new knowledge management (KM) models and frameworks, by means of the presentation and analysis of The New Knowledge Management, a model developed by the North‐American consultants Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy, and the associated knowledge life cycle.

This is an analysis that encompasses epistemological issues and KM theory, intending to review some fundamental concepts and make comparisons to preeminent works. The KM framework examined is grounded on the philosopher Popper's ideas and has in its core the process of knowledge claim validation, which distinguishes it from other information‐oriented approaches. Based on the guidelines pointed, some of the aspects of the KM model exposed are outlined and criticized, among them the difficulty of establishing a meta‐theory that could support the judgment of diverse knowledge claims.

The guidelines found useful to analyze KM models are: the observance of the adopted scope, the concern over the fundamental concepts, the extension of the employed interdisciplinary procedures, the authors' intentions and background, and the possible comparisons and analogies to concepts and theories of related fields.

Many KM solutions and practices are implemented in the organizations without a solid theoretic background. The guidelines can help to choose from the myriad KM models and frameworks that show up uninterruptedly.

The paper focuses on providing methodological means to analyze and evaluate new KM models, not on merely discussing one of them.