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The purpose of this paper is to analyse three innovative Master's programmes designed for public and voluntary sector managers across three EU countries.

The paper compares similarities and differences between the programmes in order to shed light on the “innovation journey” which the authors took in establishing these programmes, and on the distinctive pedagogies which have been designed and developed to help address the complex dilemmas and challenges facing public and voluntary sector managers in the three countries.

The paper draws on theories of innovation and entrepreneurship to illustrate how these programmes were created, and how both new curriculum content and new approaches to pedagogy had to be developed.

The paper addresses the current and future learning needs of these public and voluntary service managers.

Outlines previous research on the links between board composition, firm performance and chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, and presents a study of CEO pay‐performance sensitivity, board independence and performance in the US banking industry. Explains the methodology and presents the results, suggesting that for large bank holding companies with average performance, increased board independence reduces pay‐performance sensitivity because internal monitoring is sufficient without extra alignment incentives. Adds that when performance is poor this no longer holds true and compensation contracts are then used to align the interests of managers and shareholders.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the Nordic tradition of Critical Utopian Action Research (CUAR) and to demonstrate how CUAR might reinvigorate participatory democracy as an intrinsic characteristic of social enterprise. This leads us to sketch out the beginnings of how researchers might work with communities to help realise their democratic impulses through social enterprise.

This paper aims to synthesise the participatory action research literature, particularly CUAR, with literature on social enterprise and democracy to demonstrate how the two approaches might fruitfully be combined.

The authors show how CUAR might be utilised by researchers, to articulate new social enterprise organisational responses to local problems or to reinvigorate democracy within existing social enterprises.

This exploratory paper marks (we believe) the first attempt to bring together social enterprise and CUAR.

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users’ sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

Optimizing material handling within the factory is one of the key problems of modern assembly line systems. The purpose of this paper is to focus on simultaneously balancing a robotic assembly line and the scheduling of material handling required for the operation of such a system, a topic that has received limited attention in academia. Manufacturing industries focus on full autonomy because of the rapid advancements in different elements of Industry 4.0 such as the internet of things, big data and cloud computing. In smart assembly systems, this autonomy aims at the integration of automated material handling equipment such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to robotic assembly line systems to ensure a reliable and flexible production system.

This paper tackles the problem of designing a balanced robotic assembly line and the scheduling of AGVs to feed materials to these lines such that the cycle time and total tardiness of the assembly system are minimized. Because of the combination of two well-known complex problems such as line balancing and material handling and a heuristic- and metaheuristic-based integrated decision approach is proposed.

A detailed computational study demonstrates how an integrated decision approach can serve as an efficient managerial tool in designing/redesigning assembly line systems and support automated transportation infrastructure.

This study is beneficial for production managers in understanding the main decisional steps involved in the designing/redesigning of smart assembly systems and providing guidelines in decision-making. Moreover, this study explores the material distribution scheduling problems in assembly systems, which is not yet comprehensively explored in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to first create an overview of relevant factors directly influencing employee absence in the healthcare sector. The overview is used to further investigate the factors identified using employee satisfaction survey scores exclusively. The result of the overall objective is a management framework that allows managers to gain insight into the current status of risk factors with high influence on employee absence levels.

The research consists of a quantitative literature study supported by formal and semi‐formal interviews conducted at the case organisations. Employee satisfaction surveys were applied to analyse the development over time of selected factors correlated with concurrent employee absence rates. Checking for causal results, comparisons with the included published literature findings were also carried out.

Four major clustered factors, three of which constitute the term “social capital”, showed a high degree of connection with employee absence rates. The factors are general satisfaction, fairness, reliance and co‐operation. Integrating the four elements in a management framework will provide valuable and holistic information about the determinants with regard to current levels of employee absence. The framework will be a valuable support for leaders with the authority to alter the determinants of employee absence.

Since a great part of the empirical material is supplied from the healthcare sector, the results obtained could be restricted to this sector. Inclusion of data from Arbejdsmarkedets Tillægspension (ATP) showed no deviation from the results in the healthcare sector.

The product of the study is a decision support tool for leaders to cope with levels of employee absence. The framework is holistic and can prove to be a valuable tool to take a bearing of where to focus future initiatives.

Gathering former observational studies in a complete overview embracing many relevant factors that influence sickness absence has not yet been attempted. Hospital management is provided with valuable information when given insight into the factors that control employee absence behaviour. Having this insight will enable the managers to promote a healthy working environment, thus lowering employee absence rates to a minimum.

Teaching executive courses always raises the challenge of how to deal with the tension between theory and practice. The present chapter analyses the use of experiments in practice as a pedagogical approach to deal with this tension in Master’s programmes.

The empirical data comprise eight qualitative interviews with former students, exam papers and participant observations during the course ‘Experimental Management Practice’ over a period of five years.

The course requires the participants to experiment with their (managerial) practice and make these experiments the learning material and stepping stone for formulating problems in new ways. We argue that it is fruitful to make a distinction between practical problems and knowledge problems, and that playful shifts back and forth between the two forms of problems can provide learning. We also argue that it is important to observe the distinction between the role of the manager and the role of the student in order to meet ethical challenges, inevitably raised by experimenting with practice. Finally we argue that the experimental teaching practice can be conceptualised as a monstrous pedagogy, as the pedagogy creates a liminal zone with hybrid characteristics.

The chapter provides new conceptualizations of the tensions between theory and practice based on our experiences from one degree programme. It would have been interesting to study other executive programmes and which pedagogy they use fort dealing with this tension.

Many Master’s programmes draw empirical data from the students’ own practice into the teaching. We argue that using experiments is highly useful to identify some of the general challenges inherent in analyses of one’s own practice. It does not solve the tension between theory and practice but creates new challenges, potentialities, dilemmas and insights.

We suggest using ‘monstrosity’ as an umbrella term for ‘hybrid’ and ‘liminality’ of the complex relations that are at play in further education of practitioners. We compare the idea of the monstrous to the notion of educating ‘reflected practitioners’, and we argue that in a situation where the public manager is expected to define his/her own role, we might be better off educating a ‘monstrous practitioner’ instead of a ‘reflecting’ one.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the last 50 years of empirical research on leaders' influence on employee absenteeism. Furthermore, the aim is to direct future management research by identifying what is still undiscovered regarding areas such as leadership concepts, measurements of absenteeism, methodology and country-specific contexts of the studies.

This is a qualitative review which is suitable as the literature on leadership and employee absenteeism is still emergent and characterized by heterogeneity in terms of operationalization of absenteeism and leadership concepts, respectively, as well as types of analyses.

This review identifies different aspects of leadership affecting employee absence, i.e. leadership behaviours (i.e. task, relational, change, passive), leadership styles, leaders' social modelling and attitudes, and leaders' management of health and absence. Furthermore, a number of gaps in extant research are identified as well as a research agenda is provided.

This review is the first of its kind and hence contributes more profound insights into leaders' influence on employee absenteeism. Leaders as a factor explaining employee absenteeism have only played a minor role, in large theoretical contributions, and the exact behaviour and style is not elaborated much in the literature. Thus, this paper provides practical and theoretical considerations over the role of leaders in shaping employee absenteeism.