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The purpose of this study was to describe any patterns of distinctive sociocultural adaptation in the form of exchanges of time and money between American households, and to determine whether any observed racial or ethnic differences remain after controlling for social background characteristics. We tested one dimension of the sociocultural adaptation hypothesis — Through processes of distinctive sociocultural adaptation, minority group members learn to survive by adjusting behaviors, values, and informal organization in response to demands and stressors in their social environment. The focal adaptation in our study involved instrumental and expressive exchanges between households. The findings showed that minority groups on average were less likely to participate in instrumental and expressive exchanges between households as compared to the majority group. The study involved a secondary analysis of data collected in 1987–1988 as part of the National Survey of Families and Households (N= 13,017). Logistic regression was used to test for racial and ethnic variations in a multivariate context.

The purpose of this report is to highlight findings from research presented at the 2006 Administrative Sciences Association of Canada conference in Banff, Alberta.

Ten papers, of interest to Equal Opportunities International readers, were selected from the proceedings and presentations made at the conference for this report. The papers themselves vary in terms of research design and methodology. There was a mix of conceptual/review papers and empirical studies, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Findings from the empirical studies showed that women and minorities continue to face barriers in employment and the workplace. Women continue to experience gender role stereotypes detrimental to their careers, while minorities face both discrimination and harassment at work.

Each of the papers selected demonstrated new insights, both conceptually and empirically, and contributes to the literature on diversity.

Performance programs, games, rituals and story telling are looked at as part of the performance of organization. Some leaders in these methods are gifted performers, and they are able to pass on the plots of these themes to succeeding generations of employees.

Although the rapid spread of information processing technology is widely expected to have dramatic social impacts, the argument most commonly advanced for this position, a simple appeal to the speed of technical progress, is quite weak. Any more compelling case must identify the attributes of information technology which distinguish it from other, less disruptive, technical innovations. One such is informa‐tion technology's combination of high reactivity, coupled with a basic lack of understanding of its underlying conceptual structure on the part of those who have to adapt to it. This lack of understanding not only implies that users will become alienated from their environment, but also presents practical difficulties to applications of information technology such as office automation. This analysis makes the basic cognitive skills, such as procedural reasoning, underlying any effective use of information processing devices a topic of central concern. However, neither the difficulty nor the importance of these skills are widely appreciated. Most of the techniques which have been proposed to facilitate the use of complex, programmed devices are simply incommensurate in scope with the problem. A Gendanken analysis of programming is advanced to indicate why this is so and to serve as the basis for an agenda of cognitive science research.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

While tracing the decline of incentive pay among some of Britain's manufacturers, Arrowsmith and Marginson's research also offers some compelling insights into the way the industry works in the UK, and its means of trying to prosper in an increasingly services‐dominated economy.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate important determinants of the culture of collective leadership in academic organizations. The present school improvement framework of Dubai School Inspection Board (DSIB) does not include cultural factors such as collective leadership, which is, according to many researchers, a leading factor of the operational efficiency and sustainable growth. The research objective was to identify the set of conditions that extend support to the development of collective leadership culture in the school work environment. In order to achieve research objectives, a sample of 271 employees from 12 underperforming private schools in Dubai was selected to examine the degree of the presence of visible practices promoting the culture of collective leadership. The past literature was explored to identify three manifest variables as determinants of the culture of collective leadership in the organization. The descriptive research design was adopted, and factor loadings on three manifest variables were examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to validate the scale, and later the model hypotheses were tested using the linear regression model. The study has revealed that shared vision, employee’s commitment to achieving the organizational goal, and collaboration are key determinants, whereas staff commitment is the most important determinant of collective leadership. Generalization of the findings is one of the main concerns due to small sample size, which can be improved in future similar studies by running the model on the larger sample size. Indeed, this study is one of the few that provides a quantitative approach to the measurement of collective leadership in schools, and its findings can be a source of guideline for institutions in higher education and non-academic organizations as well.

The descriptive research design was adopted to explain the the characteristics of the population with respect to variables used in the model. The underlying variables were explored through the past literature; therefore, EFA was also undertaken to validate the relationship between scale items and manifest independent variables of the hypothesized construct. The testing of hypothesis makes this research “confirmatory” that allows making inference about the parameters of the multiple regression models in this empirical model.

The concept of collective leadership is explaining the wider role of leadership function in an organization. It is one of the cultural aspects that can be seen through everyday practices in any educational institution. These practices include shared vision among employees, commitment to achieving the common goal, and collaboration and teamwork. The results show that staff commitment is the most important determinant of collective leadership. The understanding of a cultural aspect of collective leadership is necessary to deal with the problems of nonperforming educational organizations. It is important that school leaders must think beyond the current DSIB model and include elements of collective leadership in their strategic plans. This will enable them to achieve sustainable students and organizational achievements. Employees’ clarity on the objectives, trust and collaboration are prerequisite of such culture.

Generalization is one of the main concerns in this study. The larger sample size can help overcome this problem. The sample size in the current study was also gathered without stratification of the population. Schools can be classified with respect to gender, ethnicity, curriculum and social status. These factors were controlled in this study but can produce different results if included for the analysis. Data collection can be expanded to the entire country, Middle East and Asian region for further generalized interpretation. This will also open the scope to the cross-cultural analysis on the subject. Moreover, the mediating or moderating role of many other variables needs to be involved in the model for more accurate findings, such as curriculum, economic status of students, employees nationality and qualification, leadership experience and school budgetary volume are considered important factors which may affect school performance. A similar study can be conducted for the entire country covering all states.

The culture of collective leadership is not a sole cultural factor that creates success for the institution. When an organization achieves maturity in the collective leadership, employees set up goals in their own work in alignment to the overall organizational objectives. These goals will act as challenges, and with the motivated employees will take up these challenges and find new and improved ways to address the problems. This will provoke the creative thinking among employees. They will start realizing the importance of the critical knowledge in the work. Ultimately, when the organization develops a system to identify, store and make use of such knowledge, it will become learning organization, which is ready to meet future challenges.

This study will help organizations in other sector and industry as well, especially in service industry including financial institutions, higher education, etc. This will also provide guidelines to the education ministries across the region and beyond.

This is a new contribution in the field of HRM or workplace practices. It describes the factors determining the culture of collective leadership that in return creates success for the organization. This paper was never published before.

This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article.

The essays are invited and peer‐reviewed contributions from scholars in organizational studies and anthropology.

The scholars invited to comment on the original article have seen its value, and their contributions ground its content in contemporary issues and debates.

The original article was deemed “original” for its time (1987), anticipating as it did considerable reclamation of ethnographic methods in organizational studies in the decades that followed it. It was also deemed of value for our times and, in particular, for readers of this journal, as an historical document, but also as one view of the unsung role of anthropology in management and organizational studies.

The purpose of this paper is to question and reflect on the spatial metaphors that inform Mats Alvesson’s (2009) conception of an organizational home in his description of at-home ethnography. (Cultural) hybridity is proposed as an alternative metaphor because the concept of hybridity can be used to highlight the complex nature of the relationships between an at-home ethnographer and the people she or he studies as they are produced during ethnographic work in an era where multiple (organizational) cultural sites are increasingly connected; where (organizational) cultural boundaries are uncertain; and where the notion of (organizational) culture itself is opaque, rather than transparent. Thus, this paper suggests that it may be more appropriate to speak of “hybrid home ethnography,” rather than “at-home ethnography.”

This paper explicates the concept of (cultural) hybridity and shows that this concept provides a useful metaphor for understanding and studying one’s own organizational home in these times of globalization where complex societies and the social collectivities of which they are composed are increasingly dispersed and mediated. Subsequently, the value of this metaphor is briefly illustrated through a hypothetical study of an academic department.

The metaphor of (cultural) hybridity reveals how studying one’s own organizational home (or homes) entails investigating a web of relationships between other organizational members, nonmembers, and oneself (the ethnographer) that are blends of diverse cultures and traditions constituted in the course of everyday communication. In addition, this metaphor shows that liminality is a key feature of this web and invites at-home ethnographers to combine first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in their fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork. Moreover, this metaphor highlights the importance of practicing “radical-reflexivity” in this kind of ethnography.

This paper provides a relational, communicative view of at-home ethnography based on a critical reflection on what it means to examine one’s own organizational home.