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Translating the well-established theory of the gendered organization into strategic interventions that build more gender equitable organizations has proven to be difficult. The authors introduce the emergence of the “bifocal approach” and its subsequent development and examine the potential of the “bifocal approach” as a feminist intervention strategy and an alternative means of countering gender inequalities in organizations. While pre-existing transformative interventions focus on more immediately apparent structural change, the focus begins with the development of individuals. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Developed through iterative cycling between theory and practice, the “bifocal approach” links the existing focus on women’s development with a focus on transformative organizational change. The bifocal approach deliberately begins with the organization’s current way of understanding gender in order to build towards frame-breaking transformative change.

The authors show how the bifocal is able to overcome some of the main difficulties of earlier transformative approaches, maintaining organizational access, partnership building, sustaining a gender focus and ultimately sustaining the change effort itself. The bifocal approach seeks structural change, however, the change effort rests with individuals. The development of individuals, as conceived within the bifocal approach was designed to create a “small wins” ripple effect, linking individual (agency) and organizational change (structure).

The bifocal approach offers a comprehensive re-modelling of traditional interventions for other scholars and practitioners to build on. Organizational interventions previously categorized as “fixing women” could be re-examined for their capacity to provide the foundation for transformative change.

The contribution of this paper lies in proposing and examining the bifocal approach as a feminist intervention strategy that overcomes the dualism between the existing frames of organizations and the transformative frame of scholars, in order to move practice and theory forward.

There is considerable literature about the impact of mentoring on the mentees but little is known about the effect of the mentoring relationship on the mentor. This paper aims to address that gap.

Interviews with 15 mentors and survey responses from 128 mentees are used to examine a formal mentoring programme. Most emphasis is on the perspective of the mentors, raising questions about how they view outcomes for themselves and their mentees, as well as the effects of mentoring on the workplace culture over time. Questions about the mentoring relationship, including gender differences, are analysed against the background of a decade‐long organisational change strategy.

Mentors report significant benefits for themselves and the mentee as well as the organisation itself as a result of their participation. The findings suggest that a long‐term mentoring programme for women has the potential to be an effective organisational change intervention. In particular, men involved in that programme increased their understanding and sensitivity regarding gendering processes in the workplace.

The importance of the impact of mentoring programmes on the mentors is an under‐investigated area. This study suggests that programme design, together with careful selection and targeting of mentors, enables mentoring to become a critical part of a culture change strategy.

The paper assists academics and practitioners to conceive of mentoring as a core element in an effective organisational change intervention. The innovation is to move mentoring away from assuming a deficit model of the mentee. As this programme shows, a focus on what needs to change in the dominant organisational culture, practices and values can lead to key players in the organisation becoming actively involved in the needed change process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine male and female executives as leaders “championing” gender change interventions. It problematizes current exhortations for male leaders to lead gender change, much as they might lead any other business-driven change agenda. It argues that organizational gender scholarship is critical to understanding the gendered nature of championing.

This paper draws on a feminist qualitative research project examining the efficacy of a gender intervention in a university and a policing institution. Interviews with four leaders have been chosen from the larger study for analysis against the backdrop of material from interviewees and the participant observation of the researcher. It brings a social constructionist view of gender and Acker’s gendering processes to bear on understanding organizational gender change.

The sex/gender of the leader is inescapably fore-fronted by the gender change intervention. Gendered expectations and choices positioned men as powerful and effective champions while undermining the effectiveness of the woman in this study.

Further research examining male and female leaders capacity to champion gender change is required.

This research identifies effective champion behaviors, provides suggestions for ensuring that gender equity interventions are well championed and proposes a partnership model where senior men and women play complementary roles leading gender change.

This paper is of value to practitioners and scholars. It draws attention to contemporary issues of leadership and gender change, seeking to bridge the gap between theory and practice that undermines our change efforts.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a reflective use of literary devices, within an over‐arching concept of narrative, in practical coaching. The paper also aims to show the benefits of working with literary devices within the coaching relationship and provide a few practitioner tips.

Using case study methodology and based on the recorded field notes of five participating coachees, the nature of the relationship between coach and coachee in coaching conversations forms the empirical basis of the paper. A framework of sub‐headings of different forms of narrative; stream of consciousness, metaphor, time and space, analepsis, prolepsis and focalisation are applied to the case studies in the context of coaching sessions. The analysis includes reflections of the coach.

Literary language devices associated with narrative can be applied in the coaching context. Such techniques can be used for the analysis and interpretation of coaching conversations to enable sense‐making and enhancement of insightful questioning, interpretation and reflective practice.

There are many other literary devices which could be studied and applied to coaching both as part of reflective practice and in coaching supervision.

There is a need for active listening by the coach and a heightened awareness of literary techniques and deep culture to explore and probe meanings through narratives embedded within coaching conversations.

Literary techniques are used as a means to analyse the coaching relationship and for the discovery of insightful coaching questions and reflective practice.

By applying a systematic literature review, this paper aims to identify the major healthcare problem domains (i.e. target areas) for lean supply chain management (LSCM) and to provide a list of the most common techniques for implementing LSCM in healthcare. Moreover, this study intends to investigate various contingency factors that may have influenced the selection of LSCM target areas or the application of LSCM techniques by healthcare organizations.

A systematic literature review was carried out following the method presented by Tranfield et al. (2003). Thereby, 280 peer-reviewed journal articles, published between 1995 and 2018, were selected, profiled and reviewed. In total, 75 papers were also selected for a qualitative analysis, known as meta-study, on the basis of high relevancy to the research objectives.

This work extracts, from previous research, a set of target areas for improving supply chain in healthcare by applying lean approaches. The work also unifies the language of lean thinking and supply chain in healthcare by defining metaphors in circumstances under which healthcare organizations pursue similar objectives from their supply chain management and lean programs (Schmitt, 2005). This paper also outlines a list of applications of lean for supply chain improvement in healthcare. Finally, a set of contingency factors in the field of lean supply chain in healthcare is found via the published literature.

This paper provides insights for decision-makers in the healthcare industry regarding the benefits of implementing LSCM, and it identifies contingency factors affecting the implementation of LSCM principles for healthcare. Implementing LSCM can help healthcare organizations improve the following domains: internal interaction between employees, supply chain cost management, medication distribution systems, patient safety and instrument utilization.

The research shows potential synthesis of LSCM with the healthcare industry’s objectives, and, thus, the outcome of this research is likely to have positive influence on the quality and cost of healthcare services. The objectives of the healthcare industry are cost reduction and providing better service quality, and LSCM implementation could be an effective solution to help healthcare to achieve these objectives.

The prime value of this paper lies in conducting a systematic literature review using a meta-study to identify the major factors of implementing LSCM in healthcare. Only a few other studies have been published in the literature about LSCM in healthcare.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how upstream social marketing can benefit from using social media commentary to identify cognitive biases. Using reactions to leading media/news publications/articles related to climate and energy policy in Australia, this paper aims to understand underlying community cognitive biases and their reasonings.

Social listening was used to gather community commentary about climate and energy policy in Australia. This allowed the coding of natural language data to determine underlying cognitive biases inherent in the community. In all, 2,700 Facebook comments were collected from 27 news articles dated between January 2018 and March 2020 using exportcomments.com. Team coding was used to ensure consistency in interpretation.

Nine key cognitive bias were noted, including, pessimism, just-world, confirmation, optimum, curse of knowledge, Dunning–Kruger, self-serving, concision and converge biases. Additionally, the authors report on the interactive nature of these biases. Right-leaning audiences are perceived to be willfully uninformed and motivated by self-interest; centric audiences want solutions based on common-sense for the common good; and left-leaning supporters of progressive climate change policy are typically pessimistic about the future of climate and energy policy in Australia. Impacts of powerful media organization shaping biases are also explored.

Through a greater understanding of the types of cognitive biases, policy-makers are able to better design and execute influential upstream social marketing campaigns.

The study demonstrates that observing cognitive biases through social listening can assist upstream social marketing understand community biases and underlying reasonings towards climate and energy policy.

Based upon an analysis of 30 historic narrative accounts of mutinies, Coye, Murphy, and Spencer recently extended voice theory to clarify the ontological status of the concept of upward defiance. The purpose of this article is to extend the framework of Coye et al. and illustrate the process of escalation towards hostility to offer practicing managers guidance on appropriate steps to interrupt the extreme escalation of member resistance.

The authors examined the significant historical insurrection within the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. With the case of the Blair Mountain War, the historical record provides ample narrative data for a textual, interpretive, pseudo‐ethnographical analysis.

The examination of the Battle of Blair Mountain provides additional support for the upward organizational defiance framework proposed by Coye, Murphy, and Spencer. In addition, the authors have extended the theoretical upward defiance framework to account for the escalation of constructive to destructive forms of voice towards mutiny to reveal managerial actions and attitudes to mitigate follower defiance.

The common limitation to any historic case study is one of generalizability, although it often useful to accept the trade‐off between limited generalizability and the potential discernment associated with the methodology.

The paper investigates a mutiny outside of a maritime setting to offer support for Coye et al.’s conceptual framework, extend that framework in a manner more consistent with organizational practice, and offer guidance to practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of identity play defined as people's engagement in provisional but active trial of possible future selves.

Current research and theorizing on the variety of strategies and behaviors used by individuals to tailor, adapt or otherwise change their identities has converged on the notion of identity work to conceptualize these processes. This paper introduces an alternative but complementary notion – identity play – and develops a framework that specifies how identity work and play differ from each other, and proposes a set of ideas about the process of identity play in role transitions.

The authors theorize that role transitions are a useful context to explore identity play and that just as individuals move between cycles of career stability and professional transitions so may they move between periods of identity work and play.

The concept of identity play provides a useful starting point to explore the multiple, often incoherent and variable nature of the self as well as the process of exploration and discovery necessary for creating new identities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine funding models for Open Access (OA) digital data repositories whose costs are not wholly core funded. Whilst such repositories are free to access, they are not without significant cost to build and maintain and the lack of both full core costs and a direct funding stream through payment-for-use poses a considerable financial challenge, placing their future and the digital collections they hold at risk.

The authors document 14 different potential funding streams for OA digital data repositories, grouped into six classes (institutional, philanthropy, research, audience, service, volunteer), drawing on the ongoing experiences of seeking a sustainable funding for the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI).

There is no straight forward solution to funding OA digital data repositories that are not wholly core funded, with a number of general and specific challenges facing each repository, and each funding model having strengths and weaknesses. The proposed DRI solution is the adoption of a blended approach that seeks to ameliorate cyclical effects across funding streams by generating income from a number of sources rather than overly relying on a single one, though it is still reliant on significant state core funding to be viable.

The detailing of potential funding streams offers practical financial solutions to other OA digital data repositories which are seeking a means to become financially sustainable in the absence of full core funding.

The review assesses and provides concrete advice with respect to potential funding streams in order to help repository owners address the financing conundrum they face.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unique overview of business-to-business (B2B) companies engagement with and strategic approach to use of social media in brand building. This research complements the much more extensive knowledge base regarding social media use in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts.

Since social media marketing is a relatively new activity for B2B companies an interpretivist stance that is inductive in nature is adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing professionals involved in managing social media programmes in France, Ireland, the UK and the USA.

The study found that the level of enagement with social media marketing varied, as summarised in the B2B Social Media Engagement Taxonomy. Enhancing brand image, extending brand awareness and facilitating customer engagement were the most common social media objectives. There was no evidence to suggest that companies saw social media as heralding a paradigm shift in brand management and control of the kind discussed and experienced in B2C social media contexts. The B2B social media strategy framework is proposed; this identifies the following six components of a social media strategy: monitoring and listening, empowering and enagaging employees, creating compelling content, stimulating electronic word of mouth, evaluating and selecting channels, and enhacning brand presence through integrating social media.

The research contributes to the knowledge base associated with social media marketing by offering insights into and a framework summarising B2B social media strategy.