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Pre‐adolescents (children between the ages of eight and 12) are becoming increasingly important in today's market segment, in terms of both absolute size and spending power. Although much research is available concerning adolescent consumer behaviour, very little is known about pre‐adolescent consumer behaviour. The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which normative and informative conformity issues affect the purchase of apparel products by pre‐adolescents. Results from the 200 pre‐adolescents interviewed indicate that: —as pre‐adolescents age, social conformity influence increases; —both males and females are concerned that others like the clothing they purchase, and purchase clothing to look like peers; —they purchase clothing to conform with both social and organised groups; —they most often observe informational clothing behaviours from peers, athletes, entertainers and siblings. This study revealed that pre‐adolescents begin to use clothing to conform to peer groups as early as age eight, a finding never before reported.

This paper aims to explore the ways in which a social enterprise provides opportunities to its homeless employees to increase their number and types of affiliations.

Affiliation theory is used to explore whether employment at a social enterprise may ameliorate homelessness by increasing the affiliations employees acquire. Seven semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with participants at one social enterprise.

Results indicate that enterprise leadership staff facilitate opportunities to employees to increase and maintain their affiliations. Leadership staff provide a supportive environment, allowing employees to gain social skills and feelings of utility that result in their building and maintaining affiliations. However, leadership staff confront high turn-over, addiction and mental illness among employees, which result in disaffiliation. Employees contend with a lack of housing and limited educational and job training opportunities; obtaining these resources in the future may necessitate additional affiliations.

This paper contributes to the current state of knowledge concerning affiliation theory and the employment of homeless individuals through a social enterprise by demonstrating the importance of both strong and weak ties between employees and employers, social service agencies, other employees and members of the community outside of work, and how the strength of ties may change over time.

The purpose of this study is to explore the implications of national and international standards for human resource development (HRD) practice. It focuses on the experiences, perceptions and learning of those involved in the social construction of standards and standardisation processes.

The research is grounded in institutional and organisational excellence theories and adopts a qualitative approach based in social constructivism. Thematic analysis of the data obtained from 13 semi-structured interviews leads to a discussion of awareness of standards, standards adoption including constraints, and impact of standards.

The findings indicate that that there has been a disconnect between the potential impact of British Standards Institute (BSI) HR standards and what has occurred in practice with little awareness of the BSI standards among practitioners.

This paper identifies an absence of institutional isomorphism in the HR arena and highlights the potential for a “standards-practice” gap where HR standards formation processes are perceived as detracting from flexibility and innovativeness in organisational practice.

This study contributes a new perspective of the implications of HR standards formation from the perspective of those involved and further contributes to the wider theorisation of standards in the HRD field.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity in efforts to conserve biodiversity.

The paper examines a case study of biodiversity conservation efforts to restore a degraded blanket bog habitat. The analysis adopts a social nature perspective, which sees the social and the natural as inseparably intertwined in socio-ecological systems: complexes of relations between (human and non-human) actors, being perpetually produced by fluid interactions. Using a theoretical framework from the geography literature, consisting of four mutually constitutive dimensions of relations – territory, scale, network, and place (TSNP) – the analysis examines various forms of accounting for biodiversity that are centred on this blanket bog.

The analysis finds that various forms of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity have rendered this blanket bog visible and comprehensible in multiple ways, so as to contribute towards making this biodiversity conservation thinkable and possible.

This paper brings theorising from geography, concerning the social nature perspective and the TSNP framework, into the study of accounting for biodiversity. This has enabled a novel analysis that reveals the productive force of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity, and the role of such accounting in organising the world so as to produce socio-ecological systems that aid biodiversity conservation.

Alcohol Concern decided to develop the service for several reasons. Primary care is the main contact people have with the health service ‐ in any year 70% of the population will visit their general practitioner (GP). This makes primary care an ideal setting in which to detect and identify hazardous and dependent drinkers. While people experiencing difficulties or ill health because of their drinking will not necessarily attend a specialist alcohol service, they will probably visit their GP. Problem drinkers are known to consult their GPs twice as often as the average patient, the most common complaints are gastrointestinal, psychiatric and accidents (Heather & Kaner, in press).

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

This paper aims to examine brand-naming decisions, along with other management decisions that affect tourist experiences, such as visitor tours and souvenir appropriation, in the context of a microbrewery located on a Greek island that remains heavily dependent upon tourism.

Data were gathered from in-depth interviews with the microbrewery’s owner and senior management team to offer rich insights into the issues under investigation.

Findings stress the importance of the meanings that can be conveyed through brand names, including those that indicate authenticity of the brand’s origin, filling previously identified gaps in the literature on country of origin (COO) with regard to fast-consuming goods and low-involvement products such as beer, and exploring the issue of experiential consumption of beer as part of the tourists’ vacation experience.

Data were gathered from only a single company, and although highlighting important managerial decisions regarding brand naming, further research could be widened to other companies and other industries, and could explore these issues from the tourists own perspective rather than solely from a managerial perspective.

Results may offer insights for local producers, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, whose markets serve both domestic and tourist consumers.

This research furthers knowledge into gaps on a range of issues arising in the literature that have hitherto not been previously linked, specifically: product COO/brand origin, cultural consumption of beverages and sense of place, issues of authenticity, souvenirs and experiential consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for depicting organizational processes: the episodic spiral model (ESM).

On the basis of a strong process view as the orienting paradigm, the authors demonstrate the need for the ESM by discussing the shortcomings of two specific spiral types in the organizational literature – the knowledge creation spiral and the efficacy spiral.

A review of each spiral type through the lens of nonlinear assumptions reveals the treatment to date of organizational spirals as uni-directional and insufficient for understanding organizations. The authors propose that managers must undertake a paradigm shift in order to gain a greater awareness of both the environment in which they operate, as well as their process actions. To facilitate this shift, the ESM depicts choice points, chosen and rejected trajectories, and upward and downward environmental drafts, as well as a multi-dimensional environment, as a way of re-conceptualizing approaches to space, time, and change in organization studies.

The authors propose that the model provides a way for scholars to enhance the study of organizations by understanding that organizations exist in a more dynamic environment than previously studied; recognizing that the organization has a wider range of choices available, and acknowledging the long-lasting ramifications of both choices made and choices discarded; and obtaining a more comprehensive look at the way the organization moves through space and time at any given moment. Taken together, the authors hope that these contributions allow organizational scholars a new approach to theorizing, exploring, and writing about the organizations they study.