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This paper aims to examine the impact of social networking in the workplace and to assess its use as an effective business tool.

The paper examines positive and negative perceptions of social networking in the workplace and provides a critical review of literature in the area. The drivers of, and barriers to, change are explored, and whether the reasons for some organisations prohibiting or restricting social networking in the workplace are well‐founded or corporate suicide. The link between social networking and organisational culture is examined, looking at whether social networking tools are capable of revitalising and reshaping the culture and brand of an organisation, which in turn can lead to better ways of working and increased levels of employee productivity and satisfaction.

The findings indicate that the business advantages and benefits of social networking in the workplace are still very much underappreciated and undervalued. Although some organisations across the world have started to implement some of the facets of social networking technology and reap the business benefits, fear, resistance and risk are the opinions that still dominate many organisations.

The value of social networking technology in the workplace is yet to be determined. This paper addresses gaps in the current literature and demonstrates that the business benefits of social networking far outweigh the negative perceptions that are still predominant in the pre‐millennial generations. The paper highlights that social networking technology can facilitate improved workplace productivity by enhancing the communication and collaboration of employees which aids knowledge transfer and consequently makes organisations more agile. Moreover, social networking can provide enhanced levels of employee satisfaction by reducing the social isolation of teleworkers and making them feel part of organisational culture during long absences from the physical office.

Purpose – This paper proposes a new procedure for measuring affective responses during social interaction using facial thermographic imaging.

Methodology – We first describe the results of several small pilot experiments designed to develop and refine this new measure that reveal some of the methodological advantages and challenges offered by this measurement approach. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this measure using data from a laboratory experiment (N=114) in which we used performance feedback to manipulate identity deflection and measured several types of affective responses – including self-impressions and emotions.

Findings – We find warming of the brow (near the corrugator muscle) and cheek (near the zygomatic major muscle) related most strongly to emotion valence and self-potency, with those whose brows and cheeks warmed the most feeling less positive emotion and less potent self-impressions. Warming in the eye area (near the orbicularis oculi) related most closely to undirected identity deflection and to positive self-sentiments. Positive self-views and strong identity disruptions both contributed to warming of the eyes.

Implications – The rigor of contemporary sociological theories of emotion exceeds our current ability to empirically test these theories. Facial thermographic imaging may offer sociologists new assessments of affect and emotion that are ecologically valid, socially unreactive, temporally sensitive, and accurate. This could dramatically improve our ability to test and develop affect based theories of social interaction.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

The Asia Pacific region is a geographical appellation that many still feel with justification will be the dynamic economic arena for this century. Accepting this premise and acknowledging the importance of the role of finance in that development brings with it the imperative to gain a greater understanding of the unique financial characteristics of the region. This chapter has two major pursuits. The first goal is to provide some background on the various markets of the region. An understanding of institutional detail (size and scope) of the relevant markets affords a view that lends or detracts from the credibility of intermarket comparisons. An exposure to institutional detail also supplies information that may bear on the statistical results of the empirical analysis. The vital roles played by stock markets of pricing capital, issuing new shares, providing a liquidity-creating secondary feature, serving as a vehicle for asset transfer and providing a linkage to international capital markets are as important to emerging markets as to developed countries. However, fixed income markets are still not as well developed in emerging markets and therefore an even heavier capital sourcing burden is placed on emerging stock markets. The Asia Pacific region derivatives markets (futures and options) play their risk-transfer role in equity and fixed income areas and are integral to the scene. The second pursuit in this chapter is to provide a thumbnail sketch of each of the contributions. The summary will include the nature of the empirical work, the type of methodology or statistical technique applied, and the results. In addition the results will be viewed in light of any reinforcement or digression from a priori expectations drawn from other markets. This volume contains 19 original research papers from 36 authors who represent major academic and financial institutions around the globe.

We review research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) published in 13 top accounting journals over the last decade. We begin with a brief discussion of the data that archival researchers have used to measure CSR. Next, we conduct our review in four parts: (1) determinants of CSR; (2) the relation between CSR and financial performance; (3) consequences of CSR; and (4) the roles of CSR disclosure and assurance. We summarize the accounting literature in these areas and comment on how accounting researchers can use their skill sets with regard to specific issues. Within each area, we present some suggestions for future CSR research in accounting.

Among the major problems identified by Organisational Behaviour Scientists in Africa today are those of a highly organised formal and a highly centralised management of organisation crushing the Organisation‐Man under the dead weight of uniformity. Formal organisations have become large and complex and highly organised, and the basis of their organisation is production efficiency. In this system, an Organisation‐Man is essentially looked upon as a producer and, because the formal organisation in which he is carrying on his role is so vast and complicated, personal relations seem to have lost all meanings. Formal organisation is relatively affluent. The output of goods is enormous, but entrepreneurs, and sometimes management continues to exploit the situation in their own interest, and the Organisation‐Man is engaged all the time in nothing but the exacting task of trying to, or worrying in order to, improve his economic status. The Organisation‐Man has to remain so busy in the pursuit of his vocation that he hardly gets time to look within himself and think of the quality of his life pattern. Meeting each other in factory or workshop or a crowd, commuting or agitating, he finds himself more and more isolated and alienated from the formal organisation.

This paper aims to investigate the ways in which gender influences entrepreneurial motivations and barriers in the Brazilian tourism sector. As an economic process, tourism entrepreneurship is widely spread in Brazil, with tourism development programs promoting it as a strategy to empower women, however limited research exists on how gender roles influence entrepreneurial ideals. This nationwide study aims to provide a contemporary insight into how tourism entrepreneurs in Brazil are situated within current entrepreneurship theorizing by questioning the complexity caused as gender roles influence entrepreneurial conceptualizations of what constitute motivations and barriers.

This study uses online questionnaires aimed, for the first time, at a large variety of tourism sub-sectors in Brazil. Having nation-wide scope, the questionnaires produce knowledge on what motivates and what constrains Brazilian tourism entrepreneurs through a gender lens. Quantitative analysis using SPSS statistical software tests the statistical significance of results and is complemented by the integration of feminist economic theories into the analytical framework.

The current study’s findings highlight the invisibility of gender’s workings, as the majority of participants did not conceive gender as playing a role in their entrepreneurial experience. Entrepreneurial motivations and barriers show a departure from past literature, such as the fact that similar numbers of male and female tourism entrepreneurs perceive networking as a significant entrepreneurial barrier. This and other interesting findings prompt for alternative conceptualizations of discourses surrounding women’s involvement in tourism entrepreneurship.

This study consists of an original contribution to knowledge on tourism entrepreneurship in Brazil as this is the first time an empirical study has been made on a nation-wide scale regarding the role of gender in Brazilian tourism entrepreneurs’ motivations and constraints.

A functionalist framework is used to synthesize well‐known ideas about societal integration and, conversely, disintegration. If the underlying Darwinian metaphor in functional analysis is retained, and supplemented by dialectical metaphors, then functional theorizing can insightfully address the forces of societal disintegration. The emerging theory revolves around, on the structural side, the dynamics of segmentation, differentiation, interdependence and exchange, structural overlap, structural embeddedness, mobility, segregation, and domination whereas on the cultural side, the theory emphasizes the dynamics inhering in systems of evaluational, regulatory, and legitimating symbols as well as generalized symbolic media.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.