Search results

The financial restructuring of the US department store industry is commonly interpreted as a time of corporate excess, value‐destruction and ultimately collapse. The purpose of this paper is to re‐analyse these events using qualitative methods to understand the background to the leveraged transactions and to review the implications that their failure had for the longer term strategy and structure of the US department store industry.

The research is based on two extensive periods of fieldwork in the US when the author interviewed (n=28) many of the protagonists of the 1980s restructuring period and those who inherited the management of the bankrupt businesses in the 1990s. By adopting a qualitative perspective, we are accessing social and human perspectives of these developments as well as their wider effects.

The leveraged transactions were conceptually an appropriate attempt to centralise the structure of the industry but their execution was not possible under such extreme financial distress. However, bankruptcy protection provided the environmental conditions to realise the benefits of more efficient strategic and subsequent wide‐ranging structural change.

This research differs from economistic readings of the period that analyse changes in market value of the constituent firms and the more reactionary journalistic accounts. The paper re‐casts the failed financial restructuring in a new light, underlining the regenerative effects of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in promoting firm revival, alongside visionary leadership.

WE tell our students to concentrate on policy rather than practice, and this I propose to do here. But I am sure that librarians are interested in the way in which our policy is implemented, so there will be some account of our selection procedures. Some questions of principle will be examined as they arise from the facts given; others will be left to later sections of this paper.

SEPTEMBER this year will be unique in the history of the librarian in England in that for the first time in nearly sixty years the annual conference of the Library Association has already become a memory only. There are those who profess to believe that the conference should be restored to the autumn months. It may be suggested on the other hand that the attendance at Margate lent no assistance to that point of view; indeed, the Margate conference was one of the most pleasant, one of the most successful, of which we have record. Nevertheless, if it can be proved that any large body of librarians was unable to be present owing to the change of month, it appears to us that the matter should be considered sympathetically. Although no one holds any longer the view that one week's attendance at a conference will teach more than many months' study in hermit‐like seclusion—the words and sentiments are those of James Duff Brown—because to‐day there is much more intimate communication between librarians than there was when that sentiment was expressed, there is enormous value, and the adjective is not an exaggeration, in one large meeting of librarians in body in the year. It is an event to which every young librarian looks forward as the privilege to be his when he reaches a high enough position in the service; attendance is a privilege that no librarian anywhere would forego. And this, in spite of the fact that there is usually a grumble because the day is so full of meetings that there is very little chance of such recreation as a seaside, or indeed any other, place visited, usually provides for the delegates.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the human resource management (HRM) policies and practices in consulting firms. The paper specifically investigates whether or not the HRM approaches in these firms mirror the two organisational archetypes of professional partnerships (P2) and manage professional businesses (MPB) found in the professional services sector.

The paper draws on interviews with experienced consultants from a sample of 28 large and medium‐sized consulting firms with a presence in Germany and Switzerland. The paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the data.

The findings in the paper show that P2‐type consulting firms take fundamentally different approaches to HRM from MPB‐type firms. In P2‐type consulting firms, HRM is an integral part of the organisational system and is run in practice by consultants, rather than by specialised HR staff. P2‐type firms emphasise the notion of membership of individuals in an organisation tied together by extended socialisation processes and adherence to common values. In contrast, MPB‐type firms exhibit HRM systems with “corporate” features widely used in other large‐scale service organisations.

The paper shows that the organisational archetypes prevalent in professional service firms have significant implications for their HRM systems. Consulting firms' HRM practices and policies should be interpreted in the light of their respective organisational archetype.

The paper concludes that consulting firms should use HRM practices that fit the organisational archetype they embody.

The paper provides systematic evidence on the HRM policies and practices in an important yet under‐researched sector.

This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.

The purpose of this paper is to discover and develop the conceptual understanding of teaching and learning in entrepreneurship lecturers and how this is influencing the change in teaching experience.

The study was carried out among Estonian entrepreneurship lecturers who participated in a lecturer-training programme. A qualitative research method was adopted, focussing on thematic analysis. The framework for research and the analysis of results relied on the teaching and learning model, enabling the model to be tested in the context of entrepreneurship education.

The results show that the lecturers with learning-centred mind-sets tended to make changes in their teaching approaches and introduced changes in other teaching and learning components, such as the content (learning process) and outcomes of the learning subject. These inconsistent applications of changes justify the need for a systematic approach to entrepreneurship teaching and learning.

The results of the study contribute to a more systematic understanding of conceptions of teaching entrepreneurship among entrepreneurship lecturers, thereby allowing school management to understand the need for developing staff in addition to curricula. The study results are useful for informing training for entrepreneurship lecturers, designing entrepreneurship courses and choosing the appropriate methodology in such design.

This paper provides input for creating a conceptual teaching and learning model of entrepreneurship education that contributes to a more systematic understanding of the relationships between the components of teaching and learning when designing entrepreneurship education programmes. In the context of entrepreneurship education, the use of the teaching and learning model is required when considering the timeline between different components of the model. This means that it is important to first make decisions about the presage factors (including conceptual understanding of teachers), which provide the frame (context) for the teaching and learning process, as well as learning outcomes.

The “business‐risk” relationship across countries does not fit exactly into a “model” nor does it have a pure palliative effect. Following this idea, the purpose of this research is to reinforce a comparative study on small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) handling both risk and crisis management according to a new tailored model of a balance scorecard (BS). This new model of risk and crisis management aims at improving both SMEs' management adaptation and performance across all of crisis' stages, something not attempted so far in the literature.

The application of such a BS comes from the author's experience as a banker financing various SMEs industries, as a bank consultant on risk management, yet primarily from the results of a survey performed on a set of Romanian and Cypriot SMEs, equal‐proportionally selected from the area of trading, manufacturing, and services. The data regard the period 12/2008‐06/2011 as representative for the latest global financial crisis affecting the entire European Union region, too.

Coincidently or not, this study's results show a significant improvement of the financial performance of the SMEs who employed this model compared to those who did not.

This model's simplicity appeals to managers and regulators in understanding important business risks and crisis related phenomena. Backed by this idea, this research underpins a comparative study on SMEs handling risk and crisis management according to a new tailored model of a BS.

This paper aims to offer a cultural understanding of investor faith in stock picking despite overwhelming evidence questioning its efficacy. Why, in the face of very widely communicated findings calling into question the advice and assistance offered by financial professionals to help them pick stocks or manage their mutual funds, do so many people persist in these practices? The authors believe that the best way to understand investor faith in the efficacy of stock picking is through teleinvestmentevangelists such as Jim Cramer, whose fusion of celebrity and religion taps into the ritualistic elements of investment that usually lie hidden. Drawing from media, religious and cultural studies theory, the authors flesh out the dynamics of the teleinvestmentevangelist as a powerful character, the understanding of which provides insights on the pre-modern meanings that inhere in mediated global capital.

This conceptual work draws on theoretical perspectives and qualitative experiences of everyday investors to explain why the entire field of stock picking remains so robust and captivating in the face of ample evidence that calls into question the validity of the entire phenomenon.

This paper derives and introduces the hypothetical figure of the “Teleinvestmentevangelist” in an attempt to weave dimensions of celebrity, ritual and religion together to explain investors undeterred faith in the ability to pick individual stocks and “beat the market”.

The primary research implication of this paper is that it exhibits the continued value of integrating interdisciplinary perspectives for understanding investing experience beyond more limited views undergirded by neoclassical economics. One challenge of the paper is that it attempts to merge three disparate perspectives that have not typically been integrated and applied to financial phenomena.

One practical implication of this paper is that it provides a perspective and vocabulary that enables us to understand financial experiences more fully and reflect on these understandings more critically.

Armed with a richer understanding of financial and investing experience, individual investors can better appreciate fundamental cultural misrecognitions that potentially culminate in symbolic violence whereby certain groups of investors are systematically disadvantaged.

The originality of this paper lies in its synthesis of disparate literature bases and application of this synthesis to the financial and investing world. Not only are the individual theoretical perspectives rarely consulted vis-à-vis investing experience but also is their synthesis particularly unique and original in the context of financial and investing phenomena.

The first paper in this series explored the effects of the tor‐learner relationship on learners' feelings, learning and interest during management learning events.

When it came to networking Ind Coope′s Burton‐on‐Trent Brewery, Allen‐Bradley′s Communications Division provided an integrated broadband cable solution which has enabled the brewery to produce its vast array of beer and lager products to specific batching demands and with a greater control of process and quality monitoring.