Search results

“Public relations” should be the uncomplicated concept of getting to know the people you deal with, serving them professionally and developing understanding and trust with each other. Our profession has lost a lot of its reputation over the last few years. This is partly because of the glossy and sometimes blatantly false hype that is seen up‐front in today’s “public relations”. Couple that with mechanical, impersonal “PR programmes”, in which only the name of the company on the word processor changes – and you have a jargonised, smooth‐talking recipe for redundancy. If the profession is to regain its credibility, company directors and practitioners must accept some basic facts about “communication” – and about our informed and sophisticated “publics”.

Why is Tandem Computers, a $1 billion a year computer firm, buying a minority equity interest in a company with less than 50 employees? Why is Eastman Kodak, with more than $12 billion in sales and spending over $1 billion on R&D, buying an 18 percent stake in a company with 35 employees? Why is DuPont, a $29 billion a year firm, also spending more than $1 billion a year on R&D, collaborating with a company with just 14 employees? Why is Pfizer investing $2.9 million in a company with less than 75 employees? None of these investments is expected to significantly boost these blue chip corporations' earnings per share in the near future, and the firms' managements are fully aware of the risks of getting involved with businesses they don't have time to run. When a mega‐giant firm invests in a tiny start‐up company, it's obviously prospecting for hot intellectual property and not just earnings growth.

Sending key managers on foreign assignments is common practice for multinational and international firms. Although firms spend considerable resources to support expatriates, the return they receive remains disappointing. Current research suggests that expatriates are very likely to cut short their visit, and/or return to dissatisfying careers. Effective mentoring promises to remedy some of these problems, yet few firms seem to implement the mentor concept in practice. Based on depth‐interviews of expatriates, we delineate the mentor’s role both in the home and host office. We also develop a checklist of activities for home‐office mentors.

This paper seeks to link the extraordinary success of an aboriginal community called Membertou First Nation to the literature of entrepreneurship and small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises.

The paper recounts the remarkable case of the people of Membertou First Nation who have been very successful in the area of economic development. It then considers their objective to further promote entrepreneurship within in the community.

The literature informs us that fast growing firms contribute disproportionately to job creation, wealth creation, and longer term support systems of local economies. The paper suggests that some of the unique circumstances that would appear to favor efforts to raise rates of new firm formation may ultimately constrain growth.

The findings are limited by the unique circumstances operating within Canada and may not apply to other situations. Moreover, as Membertou First Nation is an urban‐based reserve it faces a different set of opportunities and constraints than rural‐based communities within Canada.

At one level, the story of Membertou First Nation is inspirational. But, this paper identifies some of the unique challenges and barriers faced by First Nations people pursuing opportunities as entrepreneurs. Challenges include issues of political stability; the need to respect the value placed upon community, conservation and sustainability by the culture the limited access to traditional sources of capital and other possible barriers. It attempts to foresee some potential barriers and underscore the real complexity of issues that arise when development and entrepreneurship are linked.

The purpose of this study is to examine the question of whether the repatriation adjustment process varies with different combinations of duration and purpose of international assignments.

A multiple-case study within one company was conducted based on in-depth interview data.

The authors find that learning-driven international assignments are more beneficial for career growth and receive better organizational support, as assignees are able to maintain regular communication (visibility) with the home unit. On the other hand, those on demand-driven, long-duration international assignments need to have a closer connection (integration) with employees in the host unit and find it challenging to maintain high visibility in the home unit simultaneously.

The authors contribute to existing research by highlighting that demand-driven assignees on longer assignments face greater challenges upon returning home. In addition, expatriates on short-term assignments face drastically fewer challenges than expatriates on longer assignments.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

This paper aims to investigate how unique features of built facilities would affect the application of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading, and to explore what adaptive measures may be taken for emissions trading to be applied to the built environment. Emissions trading is a financial tool to encourage GHG emissions reduction in various industries. As the building sector is responsible for a large amount of GHG emissions, it is valuable to explore the application of emissions trading in built facilities.

The analysis is based on a comparative study reviewing the current emissions trading schemes (ETSs) in Australia, Japan and the UK covering the building industry, and to evaluate the approaches adopted by the schemes to tackle the problems related to buildings and facilities management.

The research findings reveal that the small energy savings of individual building units, the large variety of energy-saving technologies and the split incentives and diverse interests of building owners and tenants would be the barriers hindering the development of emissions trading. To overcome these barriers, an ETS should allow its participants to group individual energy savings, lower the complexity of monitoring and reporting approaches and allow owners and tenants to benefit from emissions trading.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the current emissions trading practices in the built environment. Besides, it raises the attention and consciousness of policymakers to the need that building characteristics and facilities management should be taken into consideration when designing an ETS for the building sector.

Gender distinctions were central to the ideological and discursive construction of ‘freedom’ in colonial plantation societies, but so too were ethnicity and national identity. This article examines the contested nature of masculinity in the making of free citizens in post-emancipation Jamaica through an analysis of government and missionary sources, popular petitions, public speeches, and newspapers from 1834 to 1865. Close readings of the tensions within these public texts and their official reception demonstrate how freed men worked within and against the dominant discourses of Christian liberalism and masculine individualism as the bases for national citizenship. The key argument is that in laying claim to a Christian and British identity, African-Jamaican men constituted their freedom not so much through a seclusion of women in a private domestic role, but more importantly through an exclusion of indentured East Indians who were negatively defined as ‘foreign’ heathens.