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The purpose of this study is to identify and explain how leadership behaviors of sales managers can enhance the development of salespeople within the context of those interpersonal connections and interactions that is the sales ecosystem.

The authors collected and analyzed qualitative data from in-depth interviews with a sample of 36 sales professionals. Over 47 hours of interviews were transcribed and analyzed via NVivo. The statements were labeled as particular leader behaviors using the Miles and Huberman (1994) coding system.

The study identifies coaching, customer engaging, collaborating and championing as the four key leader behaviors that are relevant to the sales ecosystem. Specifically, coaching and customer engaging enhance the individual microsystems of salespeople; and collaborating and championing enhance the corresponding mesosystems. Analysis of the interview statements further revealed that trust, confidence, optimism and resilience are four relational elements that tend to coexist with these leader behaviors in the sales ecosystem.

This study provides a structure for sales organizations to strengthen their sales ecosystem through targeted interventions and training for those that manage salespeople. Past research finds that sales organizations too often neglect this type of managerial training.

This is the first study to examine sales leadership through the lens of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory. Further, the qualitative methodology, which is relatively unique in sales research, provides rich data that is particularly useful for exploring how and why things have happened.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what sales management practices (SMPs) are being used by managers in the current market place, changes over time, insights that can be gained and future research needs.

Data for this paper were collected via a cross-sectional internet-based survey using a sampling frame provided by a professional sales publication. ANOVA was used to analyze 159 sales manager respondents.

Empirical results indicate that several differences are evident across the 68 SMPs items gathered, especially in terms of the size of the sales force and establish some data on using technology in sales management. However, in spite of significant changes in the sales environment, many SMPs have had limited change.

The limitations of this paper include a sample frame drawn from a single source and via the internet and, thus, may have excluded some possible respondents from participation and somewhat limit generalizability.

The results of this paper raise a number of important issues for sales managers to consider. First, which SMPs should they be using? Managers need to give serious thought as to which practices they choose to use. Second, why are so many of them not making more extensive use of sales force technology? Third, is it wise for sales managers to be relying on executive opinion as their most extensively used forecasting method or should they be emphasizing another approach? A fourth issue is the continued heavy emphasis on generating sales volume as opposed to profits.

The data provide a rare and updated understanding of the use of SMPs by sales managers.

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other learning technology platforms, but their use also raises several pertinent issues that warrant consideration. This chapter reviews the educational use of virtual worlds from a design perspective. Virtual-world definitions are explored, along with their key educational characteristics. Different virtual-world environments are briefly contrasted, including Second Life, Active Worlds, Open Sim, and Minecraft. A wide variety of virtual-world uses in schools and universities are examined so as to understand their versatility. Key educational benefits of virtual worlds are distilled from the literature, such as the ability to facilitate 3-D simulations, role-plays, construction tasks, and immersive learning. Emergent issues surrounding the use of virtual worlds are also analyzed, including cognitive load, safety, and representational fidelity. One higher education and one school level vignette are provided in order to offer more detailed insight into the use of virtual worlds in practice. Recommendations for learning design and implementation are presented, based on the thematic analysis of contemporary virtual-worlds research.

To elucidate the relationship between science and the arts in Gregory Bateson's thinking, from the viewpoint of an artist‐musician and student of Bateson.

Synthesis.

One theme that pervaded Gregory Bateson's lifelong contribution was the rich and complex interface between art and science. Artistry (which may occur in either the arts or the sciences) plays across the interface between conscious and unconscious mind and environment. We come in actual practice to an appreciation and a facility for working with total cybernetic systems rather than the fragmented bits and pieces which are taught in conventional education and media. Through the play and discipline of creativity, we are able to experience this total systemic view of mind and nature.

Shows the reader significant ways of seeing the systems nature of our world through the experience and the practice of artistic creativity.

New Zealand has long been regarded as a country with little or no governmental corruption. In recent times it has been ranked consistently as one of the five least corrupt countries in the world, on Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In 2009 and 2011 it was ranked as the single most corruption-free country on the CPI, and in 2012 it shared first place with Denmark and Finland. This chapter examines the reasons why historically New Zealand has been largely free of governmental corruption, using widely accepted definitions of what constitutes corrupt behavior. It goes on to argue that, at least by its own normal standards, the country might now be more susceptible to corruption, for a variety of reasons, in both the public and private sectors, and that more political and administrative attention may need to be paid to this issue. This chapter discusses New Zealand’s surprising tardiness in ratifying the United Nations Convention against Corruption, an apparent reluctance that leaves the country sitting alongside other non-ratifying countries which have endemic levels of corruption in all its forms. In this context, this chapter also notes some international dissatisfaction with New Zealand’s anti-money laundering legislation, enacted in 2009.

We present a comprehensive literature review and critique of union decertification research, and develop a theoretical framework that should prove useful for future research. The framework incorporates three theoretical viewpoints from several research traditions: the expected utility, social‐political, and workplace voice perspectives. We provide suggestions for how each viewpoint can be modeled in future research. Additionally, although some previous decertification research was theoretically rich, the empirical findings across prior studies were ambiguous and inconsistent. We analyze the reasons for the ambiguous and inconsistent prior findings, and note how future research can avoid or minimize the empirical problems of the past.

This monograph is an attempt to examine some of the changes which have occurred in the structure of the workforce in Australia during the 1970s. The study has the form of exploratory analysis of data extracted from official labour market statistics, and its aims are to consider three broad issues: the significance changes in the labour market may have for Australian society, and particularly for the people who constitute the workforce, actual or potential; the implications of those changes for social policy; and the appropriate research methods of identifying social and social welfare issues in economic activities.

This paper describes a longitudinal picture of manufacturing strategy called a strategy chart. It begins with a summary of the research methodology used to develop and test the picture in live situations. Next, the chart and its role within an overall manufacturing strategy process are described. Case examples are then used to illustrate practical outcomes of a longitudinal viewpoint in two areas; first, to increase the awareness of a firm′s strategy making process and, second, to make strategies more explicit than previous methods. The method produces a rich picture that appears useful for reviewing the coherence between manufacturing and business strategy; showing strategy as concrete actions as well as objectives and plans; for providing insight into the firm′s realised strategy and its strategy process; and as a strategy communication tool which may make strategies more credible.

The Annual Report of the Ministry of Health for the year 1928–1929 states that 129,034 samples of food and drugs were reported upon by Public Analysts in England and Wales in 1928, an increase of 4,770 over 1927. Of these samples, 7,524 were reported as adulterated or not up to standard, a proportion of 5·8 per cent., the same as in 1926, and slightly more than the proportion (5·5 per cent.) for 1927. It is noteworthy that apart from milk there was a substantial reduction in the recorded percentage of adulteration (viz., from 4·2 in 1926 and 3·9 in 1927 to 3·2 in 1928) in spite of the operation of the Preservatives Regulations. The appointments of 46 Public Analysts in England were approved during the year.

The goal of this essay is to examine the conflict resolution activities during political diplomacy as a dynamic and interactive process. In an application of Relational Order Theory (Donohue, 1998), this essay employs a model highlighting the instrumental, relational, and identity‐based issues involved in conflict resolution. To illustrate the utility of this model of Relational Process Management, this essay examines the process of diplomacy leading to the Dayton Accords in the areas of the Former Yugoslavia. For years the international community's efforts at intervention in this conflict were quite meager, as ceasefires and peace plans were brokered and dissolved with some regularity. Ultimately, a final coordinated effort by multiple external parties finally brought the combatants to the table in Dayton, Ohio to negotiate a formal agreement. The complex process by which the parties came to the negotiating table provides a rich case study by which to explore the interactive processes of diplomacy. An examination of the events in this case through the lens of instrumental, relational, and identity‐bound issues culminates with lessons learned from this interactionally‐based analysis of international conflict.