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This research investigates the challenges and benefits of working from home and the needs that organisations should understand when adopting working from home practices.

Self-determination theory was used to understand the drivers of motivation when working from home, to provide a deep understanding of how organisations may support employees working from home. A cross-sectional qualitative survey design was used to collect data from 511 office workers during May and June of 2020.

Employees' needs for competence were thwarted by a lack of direction and focus, unsuitable work environment, work extensification and negative work culture. Employees' experiences and needs for relatedness were more diverse, identifying that they enjoyed spending more time with family and having a greater connection to the outdoors, but felt more isolated and suffered from a lack of interaction. Employees' experiences of autonomy whilst working from home were also mixed, having less autonomy from blurred boundaries between home and work, as well as childcare responsibilities. Conversely, there was more freedom to be able to concentrate on physical health.

Employee’s needs for competence should be prioritised. Organisations must be conscious of this and provide the support that enables direction and focus when working at home.

Swathes of research were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but overwhelmingly focused on quantitative methods. A qualitative survey design enabled participants to answer meaningful open-ended questions, better suited to explain the complexity of their experiences, which allowed for understanding and richness not gained through previous studies.

The authors contribute to scholarly understanding of the interplay between macro-level institutions and micro-level action by focusing attention on the ways the power of institutions works through mundane organizational spaces to constrain individuals as they interact with organizations. The authors explore these macro- and micro-connections between institutions and organizational spaces through a qualitative inductive study of an emergency department in a public hospital in Australia. Analyzing observational and interview data related to a waiting room and a corridor, their findings show how the systemic power of the state and the medical profession impacts micro-level action through organizational spaces. The authors find that the medical profession exerted power in a system of domination over marginalized patients through the waiting room as an exclusion space. At the same time, the state exerted discipline power over professional subjects through the corridor as a surveillance space. Individual resistance to institutional power over the ED was controlled by policing deviance in the surveillance space and ejecting resisters to the exclusion space. Their findings contribute to the literature by opening up new insight into how mundane organizational spaces convey institutional power by dominating and disciplining micro-level actions.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a controversial psychiatric diagnosis. Despite an increasing amount of research looking at the BPD diagnosis when applied to young people, there is limited understanding of the key viewpoints of mental health professionals working with young people in the UK. This research aims to use Q-methodology to contribute to understanding the multiple views of the diagnosis.

Q-statements about views of the BPD diagnosis were selected from relevant journals, internet sites and social media platforms and were validated by a Q-methodology research group, the research supervisors and an online group of individuals with BPD. Q-sorts were then used to explore the viewpoints of 27 mental health professionals in the UK working with children and adolescents. Analysis of the data was completed using Q-methodology analysis software.

Three main factors emerged from the data, explaining 66% of the variance. Of the 27 participants, 24 loaded onto these three factors, defined as: harmful not helpful; language and optimism; and caution and specialist services. Three Q-sorts did not load significantly onto any one factor.

There appears to be at least three ways of understanding the BPD diagnosis for young people. It may be useful for clinicians to consider and share their own viewpoint, be open to difference and formulate difficulties from an individual perspective.

A sense of collective free-thinking with tangible goals makes co-creation an enlightening experience. Yet despite the freedom and organic flow of the methodology, there remain barriers to deploying co-creation in the real-world context. The aim was to understand the barriers and solutions to co-creation, reflect on applying co-creation in practice and co-create an applicable framework for co-creation.

These reflections and conceptual developments were completed using a Participatory Action Research Approach through the co-creation of the Erasmus+ funded Co-creating Welfare course.

Results presented are centric to the experiences in the United Kingdom but led to application at an international level. Problem formulation led to solutions devised about who should co-create, what co-creation aims to achieve, how to receive management buy-in, co-creating beyond the local face to face context and evaluation.

The Three Co’s Framework is proposed using the outline of: Co-Define, Co-Design and Co-Refine. Those who take part in co-creation processes are recommended to be called co-creators, with less focus on “empowerment” and more about facilitating people to harness the power they already have. Utilising online and hybrid delivery methods can be more inclusive, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of co-creation needs to be evaluated more moving forwards, as well as the output co-created.

This paper aims to examine the differences in investors’ reactions toward firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related news announcements between individuals and institutions.

Analyzed by the short-term event study and ordinary least squares (OLS) methods using a unique CSR data set collected from newspapers in Japan from 2001 to 2016.

The study finds, first, the different reactions toward CSR-related news announcements among shareholders. Second, the findings indicate that individual investors are more sensitive to CSR-related positive news, whereas institutional investors are more concerned about the negative news, providing one of the reasons for mixed results in the studies on the CSR and financial performance linkage. Those findings indicate that CSR-related news affects investors’ behaviors differently based on their purpose, ability and accessible information.

This study deepens the understanding of the different investing behaviors toward CSR-related announcements by shareholder type. Second, different attitudes among investors require different investor relations (IR) approaches depending on the type. It also provides valuable implications not only for Japanese business managers or policymakers but also for those from countries with a similar stage of market maturity in the CSR context.

This paper is original in two ways. First, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to deepen the understanding of investors’ reactions toward CSR-related events through analysis by the main shareholder, which provides some insights into mixed results in the previous studies. Second, the original CSR data set collected from newspapers by the author allows the analysis to use a larger data set than other research, resulting in more robust conclusions.