Search results
1 – 10 of 576This was an exploratory study of problems encountered by aspiringadministrators or instructional supervisors as they conductedinstructional improvement conferences with teachers…
Abstract
This was an exploratory study of problems encountered by aspiring administrators or instructional supervisors as they conducted instructional improvement conferences with teachers for the first time. Twenty‐nine initiates from the University of Colorado preparation programme were monitored routinely over two semesters. After class instruction, monitoring and practice, initiates completed two formal observation cycles. Analysis of data gathered and conference tapes showed that only 10 per cent of the initiates demonstrated adequate conferencing abilities. Identified problems included under‐analysis, poorly focused strategising, lack of reflective discussion, and failure to pursue the conference objective. Reasons are explored and related recommendations for the preparation of initiates to practise direct instructional assistance to teachers are given.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.
Design/methodology/approach
This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.
Findings
When Thomas a Becket is slain in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, the act is described as “the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason”. The observation might just ring a bell with companies and organizations that favor guilt marketing. The approach of guilt marketers is to encourage people to buy into products or services, or act in a certain way, not because it is right or it will bring happiness, but because failure to do so will leave them feeling bad about themselves.
Practical implications
The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.
Social implications
The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that can have a broader social impact.
Originality/value
The briefing saves busy executives and researchers' hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.
Details
Keywords
Yuan George Shan, Junru Zhang, Manzurul Alam and Phil Hancock
This study aims to investigate the relationship between university rankings and sustainability reporting among Australia and New Zealand universities. Even though sustainability…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the relationship between university rankings and sustainability reporting among Australia and New Zealand universities. Even though sustainability reporting is an established area of investigation, prior research has paid inadequate attention to the nexus of university ranking and sustainability reporting.
Design/methodology/approach
This study covers 46 Australian and New Zealand universities and uses a data set, which includes sustainability reports and disclosures from four reporting channels including university websites, and university archives, between 2005 and 2018. Ordinary least squares regression was used with Pearson and Spearman’s rank correlations to investigate the likelihood of multi-collinearity and the paper also calculated the variance inflation factor values. Finally, this study uses the generalized method of moments approach to test for endogeneity.
Findings
The findings suggest that sustainability reporting is significantly and positively associated with university ranking and confirm that the four reporting channels play a vital role when communicating with university stakeholders. Further, this paper documents that sustainability reporting through websites, in addition to the annual report and a separate environment report have a positive impact on the university ranking systems.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to extant knowledge on the link between university rankings and university sustainability reporting which is considered a vital communication vehicle to meet the expectation of the stakeholder in relevance with the university rankings.
Details
Keywords
Abdelmajid Hmaittane, Kais Bouslah and Bouchra M’Zali
This paper aims to examine whether corporate social responsibility influences the cost of equity capital of firms operating in controversial industry sectors.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine whether corporate social responsibility influences the cost of equity capital of firms operating in controversial industry sectors.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper computes the ex-ante cost of equity capital implied in analyst earnings forecasts and stock prices for a sample of 2,006 US firm-year observations belonging to controversial industry sectors (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, military, firearms, nuclear power, oil and gas, cement and biotechnology) during the period 1991-2012. The baseline regression model links CSR score to the implied cost of equity capital (ICC) and controls for firm-specific characteristics, industry factors and economic or market-wide factors. This model enables to capture the differential effect of CSR on ICC when the firm belongs to a specific sector of the controversial industries by adding an interaction term between CSR and the dummy variable representing this belonging.
Findings
The findings show two main results. First, CSR engagement significantly reduces the implied cost of equity capital (ICC) in all controversial industry sectors, taken as a group, as well as in each one of these sectors individually. Second, this effect is more pronounced when the firm belongs to the alcohol and tobacco industry sectors.
Practical implications
The findings have two important practical implications. First, they should increase managers’ confidence and incentives, in controversial industry sectors, to pursue CSR activities. Second, policymakers can encourage managers to undertake CSR initiatives in controversial industry sectors through tax incentives (e.g. reduce taxes for CSR related investment projects).
Originality/value
This paper extends prior studies that investigate the perceptions of capital market participants of firm’s CSR commitment (Sharfman and Fernando, 2008; Goss and Roberts, 2011; El Ghoul et al., 2011; Jo and Na, 2012; Bouslah et al., 2013) by examining the effect of CSR on ICC in the controversial industry sectors. It contributes to the debate around the relevance of CSR in controversial sectors by providing evidence of the reduction effect of CSR activities on ICC in controversial industries and by showing that this reduction impact is more pronounced when the firm belongs to alcohol, tobacco industry sectors.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to trace the emergence, rise and eventual fall of Mojo-MDA. Established as a creative consultancy in 1975, Mojo embarked on an ambitious growth strategy that would…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to trace the emergence, rise and eventual fall of Mojo-MDA. Established as a creative consultancy in 1975, Mojo embarked on an ambitious growth strategy that would see it emerge as Australia’s first multinational agency. By examining the agency’s trajectory over the 1970s and 1980s, this paper revisits the story of an Australian agency with boundless confidence to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic role played by corporate culture in the agency's fortunes.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses reports and features published in the Australian advertising trade press, along with other first-hand accounts, including oral history interviews and personal correspondence with former agency staff.
Findings
By identifying the forces and influences affecting Mojo-MDA’s outlook and operations, this paper demonstrates the important yet paradoxical role that corporate culture plays in both building and undermining an agency’s ambitions and the need for marketing historians to pay closer attention to it.
Originality/value
This examination of an agency’s inner machinations over an extended period presents a unique perspective of the ways that advertising agencies operate, as well as the forces that drive and impede them, at both national and global levels. The Mojo-MDA story also illustrates the need for marketing and business historians to pay close attention to corporate culture and the different ways that it affects marketing business and practices.
Details
Keywords
Jeremy Segrott, Jo Holliday, Simon Murphy, Sarah Macdonald, Joan Roberts, Laurence Moore and Ceri Phillips
The teaching of cooking is an important aspect of school-based efforts to promote healthy diets among children, and is frequently done by external agencies. Within a limited…
Abstract
Purpose
The teaching of cooking is an important aspect of school-based efforts to promote healthy diets among children, and is frequently done by external agencies. Within a limited evidence base relating to cooking interventions in schools, there are important questions about how interventions are integrated within school settings. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a mobile classroom (Cooking Bus) sought to strengthen connections between schools and cooking, and drawing on the concept of the sociotechnical network, theorise the interactions between the Bus and school contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
Methods comprised a postal questionnaire to 76 schools which had received a Bus visit, and case studies of the Bus’ work in five schools, including a range of school sizes and urban/rural locations. Case studies comprised observation of Cooking Bus sessions, and interviews with school staff.
Findings
The Cooking Bus forged connections with schools through aligning intervention and schools’ goals, focussing on pupils’ cooking skills, training teachers and contributing to schools’ existing cooking-related activities. The Bus expanded its sociotechnical network through post-visit integration of cooking activities within schools, particularly teachers’ use of intervention cooking kits.
Research limitations/implications
The paper highlights the need for research on the long-term impacts of school cooking interventions, and better understanding of the interaction between interventions and school contexts.
Originality/value
This paper adds to the limited evidence base on school-based cooking interventions by theorising how cooking interventions relate to school settings, and how they may achieve integration.
Details
Keywords
Mary Ann Hofmann and Dwayne McSwain
This paper provides a review and synthesis of past research regarding financial disclosure management by nongovernmental nonprofit organizations and suggests directions for future…
Abstract
This paper provides a review and synthesis of past research regarding financial disclosure management by nongovernmental nonprofit organizations and suggests directions for future study. The primary purpose of this review is to summarize the evidence on financial disclosure management to help regulators and other stakeholders understand why, how, and to what extent nonprofits engage in this behavior. The paper begins by defining disclosure management in nonprofit organizations and exploring the motivations for why it might occur. Next is a survey of the nongovernmental nonprofit financial reporting environment: objectives, common practices, and the informational needs of users of nonprofit financial reports. Research exploring the motives, methods, and consequences of disclosure management is summarized. The evidence suggests that nongovernmental nonprofit managers have a variety of incentives to manage reported numbers and that they do in fact alter spending decisions, choose accounting methods, and design cost allocations to achieve certain performance benchmarks. Furthermore, this review sheds light on the consequences of disclosure management and what can or should be done to limit it.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach, this paper illustrates how language becomes part of a mechanism of negotiating group membership and of perpetuating or challenging power asymmetries through social and ideological processes.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on interview data from an ethnographic case study of a Korean MNC to understand language ideologies in one working team. The interview data are analysed through an IS framework to connect the situated interaction to the broader social context.
Findings
This paper shows that participants’ discourse of linguistic differentiation becomes an interactional resource in challenging the organisational status quo. Linguistic superiority/inferiority is constructed through particular sequencing and the systematic production of a dichotomy between two groups – expatriate managers and local employees – at various levels of their company structure. Group membership is enacted temporarily in positioning the self and the others.
Originality/value
This paper offers a methodological contribution to international business language-sensitive research on language and power by conducting interactional analysis of interview talk. Through the lens of IS, it provides insights into how discourse becomes a primary site of negotiating power and status and a multi-level approach to the study of organisational power dynamics and the complex linguistic landscape of any workplace.
Details
Keywords
Shay S. Tzafrir and Simon L. Dolan
This study investigates the conceptual and psychometric properties of trust in organizations. Critical review of recent literature led to the conclusion that there is no single…
Abstract
This study investigates the conceptual and psychometric properties of trust in organizations. Critical review of recent literature led to the conclusion that there is no single agreed upon definition of trust and that controversy exists as to its construct validity. We present empirical results based on a complex procedure for scale development, which includes a design made up of four separate stages of research. The construct of trust in employment relationships was ultimately refined to entail three dimensions: harmony, reliability, and concern (HRC). The final results of this study led to the development of a standardized 16‐item instrument that can be used to measure trust in the context of employment relationships. Evidence of the scale’s reliability, factor structure, and validity is also presented.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and its relation to institutional investor (INSV) of Jordanian private listed companies…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and its relation to institutional investor (INSV) of Jordanian private listed companies (PLCs).
Design/methodology/approach
A unique sample of 159 largest companies over “a period of 8-years” listed on the ASE in terms of market capitalisation during the 2005-2012 period. Testing of hypotheses has been conducted by applying multivariate regression techniques using longitudinal data analysis of companies’ annual reports.
Findings
Results which confirmed earlier estimations indicated that there are positive and significant relationships between CSR disclosure (CSRD) and INSV. This result indicates that among the CSRD dimensions, INSVs are less concerned with companies engaging in community contribution practices and those related to the community involvement and product dimension in which the company operates.
Practical implications
Jordanian PLCs should be encouraged to be involved in CSR activities as one of their program strategies in attracting investment, as well as to improve their reputation and image in their social activities.
Originality/value
This paper conducts a comprehensive empirical evidence on the development of the relationship between the CSRD dimensions and INSV in Jordanian PLCs as an emerging market, where much existing evidence exists on this issue that may help in explaining difference in prior work.
Details