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This study seeks to confirm the main factors in the followers' perception of leaders and to explore effects of collectivist values, age and work experience on followers' perception of leaders.

Confirmatory factor analysis is done for the 32‐item Romance of leadership scale and an exploratory multi‐level research in perceptions of 452 individuals in five cultural groups.

The study confirms the “influence” and the “interchangeability” of leaders as independent constructs in the followers' perception of leaders. The results indicate: older followers view leadership change more negatively than younger followers; with more work experience followers view the influence of leaders diminishing; differences in perception of followers from collectivist and individualistic cultures were inconclusive.

A large proportion of the sample used in this study were young undergraduates with little work experience and exposure to organisational leadership. A more representative spread of age and work experience in a replication of this study will mean the findings could be generalised.

The research suggests that inexperienced followers attribute more influence to leaders. With greater exposure at work they are likely to see limitations in their leaders' influence. As followers age they see leadership change as more troublesome for organisational performance. This could create cognitive dissonance among followers who see leaders as having diminishing influence but at the same time being increasingly irreplaceable.

This paper contributes to the relatively limited amount of research on followers' perception of leaders. This will assist in understanding the determinants of effective leadership.

As competitive pressures persist and global economic influences continue to present new challenges, businesses need to be able to respond to emerging circumstances. Goal-setting and planning are key mechanisms contributing to organizational competitive success, yet organizations underappreciate the role of competency and capacity building factors that contribute to successful planning. This paper integrates three theoretical models enabling an investigation into the positive relationships between managerial activities generating information feedback, training in planning and skills and organizational performance outcomes, while exploring the positive mediating roles of goal-setting and planning.

A unique organizational sample of agribusiness producers (n = 499) in Canada is examined. A structural equation path analysis model is used to evaluate the main relationships.

The results suggest that organizations are finding that managerial and training activities should not be considered in isolation, but rather as supports for goal-setting, planning and performance outcomes. Thus, the implications are that managers can find organizational value enhanced through the building of human resource competency (e.g. management activities and training) with these emerging capacities aiding goal setting and planning activities.

This study makes three main contributions: first, by adopting a rational-design perspective and integrating theoretical frameworks focusing on (a) planning-performance and (b) goal-setting-planning. This extended model goes beyond previous studies by including managerial activities, training, goals, planning and performance outcomes. Second, this study uniquely accounts for a more comprehensive set of key confounding factors such as operational activities, organizational strategy and organizational size in the integrated framework. Finally, as far as the authors are aware, there has not been a survey study at the organizational level that has explored the role of managerial activities and training in planning within a similarly comprehensive model.

This study aims to characterize several wine consumer segments who were “likely” to sample (i.e. taste before purchasing) wine from vineyards using cover crops, a sustainable production practice that reduces herbicide applications, and identify those with a greater probability of being a viable target market based on survey responses.

A total of 956 wine consumers from the Mid-Atlantic and boarding US states were separated into segments based on an ECHAID (exhaustive Chi-square automatic interaction detector) classification tree from internet survey responses.

Out of the 12 created segments, 6 (n = 530, 72% of training data) contained participants who were at least 1.02 times (index score =102%) more “likely” to try the wine compared to the overall sample and were willing to pay $18.99 for a 750-mL bottle of the wine, which included a $1 surcharge to cover associated production costs. Of these, three (n = 195, 26%) had the greatest potential for which a marketing plan could be developed (index scores of 109%–121%), with over half in each segment willing to pay $20.99 for the bottle of wine, which could motivate growers to consider implementing this sustainable strategy.

Although several segments of participants were “likely” to sample the sustainably produced wine, an ECHAID classification tree allowed us to identify participants who would not pay $18.99 for a 750-mL bottle of wine, even after learning about the use of cover crops and the trade-off ($1 bottle surcharge). By narrowing the number of potential “likely” segments to those with a greater potential of sampling the wine, more purposeful marketing strategies can be developed based on demographics, attitudes, and behaviors defined in the model.

Although policy makers strengthen the necessity of “deregulation”, discussions about deregulation vs regulation in Europe still seem to be characterized by a lack of sophistication and require a more differentiated picture of specific forms of deregulation. As a consequence, the analysis of new educational governance approaches should consider the local actor's interpretation of new roles and new responsibilities. Relating actions and reactions of school leaders to their formal environment should lead to more contextual patterns of responsiveness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors investigate, based on a survey among Cypriot school leaders, whether school autonomy needs deregulation, or regulation towards autonomy, respectively. At the time of research the school system of Cyprus could be characterized as a “centralized” system and hence represented a suitable field of study. Using a factor model followed by a cluster analysis the paper explores the school leaders’ profiles of operative and perceived autonomy in different fields of governance issues and identify different types of leadership.

The authors find that the autonomy school leaders experience is not necessarily related to a “defined” degree of autonomy which is prescribed by educational law and driven by concepts of new public management. Their “perceived” autonomy is also due to factors which can be located at a rather individual level.

The findings provide insight into principals’ motives to adopt certain styles of leading schools, quite independently from new measures of educational governance. The authors conclude that greater emphasis on systematic support programmes may prepare school principals for gains of autonomy as well as for potential sources of conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to convince the readers that more complex images of working women are needed, and that fiction may provide them.

In this paper, text analysis is done using a version of close reading.

Both media and research tend to simplify the images of working women, either in positive or negative way. Reality and some of its fictive representations offer more nuanced examples.

Fiction can be treated as field material.

Women should dare more at workplaces.

Researchers should join fiction writers in convincing society of the crucial role women play in contemporary organizations.

This paper belongs to the growing tradition of transdisciplinary organization studies.

This article aims to develop the methodological and intellectual approach taken in the authors' co‐authored book to explore the synergies and disconnections in the experience of being in the academy at different historical moments using the inter‐relationship between different feminisms in the context of the authors' lived experiences as a mother and daughter whose experience of the academy has crossed second‐wave feminism into third wave. There have been significant demographic, cultural and legislative shifts, but the authors' conversations demonstrate the endurance of imbalances of power and the continuing need for a feminist politics of difference which can engage with contemporary life in the academy.

This is primarily a theoretical paper that adopts feminist approaches to reflection and dialogue. The article is designed to bring together lived experience across generations, feminist theories and methodologies and the implications for activism. The paper uses the device of “I‐Kath I‐Sophie” as part of an autoethnographic approach to the cross‐generational conversation.

Far from being redundant, the authors argue that feminist critiques of inequalities that are often manifest in women's invisibility and silence even in the academy in the twenty‐first century – there is still the need to support a politics of difference and to explore ways of giving women a voice. The persistence of inequalities means that feminist battles have not been entirely won. The authors argue for dialogue between the feminisms of mothers and daughters.

Feminist concepts and arguments from what has been called the “second wave” are still useful, especially in relation to maintaining the category woman as a speaking subject who can engage in collective action.

The authors' arguments support the continuation of spaces for women to share experience within the academy, for example in feminist reading groups and through women's networks.

Feminist theories and activism remain important political forces for women in the academy today and post feminism is a questionable conceptualisation and phenomenon. In times when feminist battles may seem to have been won there remain issues to explore in relation to a new problem with no name.

The article is original in its authorship, methodological approach to a conversation that crosses experience and theoretical frameworks across generations and in its support for a twenty‐first century politics of difference.

Acknowledges that research on objects belonging to the categories of furniture, glass and stained glass, metalware, pottery and porcelain, or rugs and carpets involves the consultation of specific handbooks and guides. Lists, with a brief description, various decorative‐art reference books as sources for research in these categories, and offers relevant subject headings so that the New York Public Library’s catalogs can be checked for similar holdings.