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Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The PMI Risk Framework (PRF) is introduced as a guide to classifying and identifying risks which can be the source of post-merger integration (PMI) failure — commonly referred to as “culture clash.” To provide managers with actionably insight, PRF dissects PMI risk into specific relationship-oriented phenomena, critical to outcomes and which should be addressed during PMI. This framework is a conceptual and theory-grounded integration of numerous perspectives, such as organizational psychology, group dynamics, social networks, transformational change, and nonlinear dynamics. These concepts are unified and can be acted upon by integration managers. Literary resources for further exploration into the underlying aspects of the framework are provided. The PRF places emphasis on critical facets of PMI, particularly those which are relational in nature, pose an exceptionally high degree of risk, and are recurrent sources of PMI failure. The chapter delves into relationship-oriented points of failure that managers face when overseeing PMI by introducing a relationship-based, PMI risk framework. Managers are often not fully cognizant of these risks, thus fail to manage them judiciously. These risks do not naturally abide by common scholarly classifications and cross disciplinary boundaries; they do not go unrecognized by scholars, but until the introduction of PRF the risks have not been assimilated into a unifying framework. This chapter presents a model of PMI risk by differentiating and specifying numerous types of underlying human-relationship-oriented risks, rather than considering PMI cultural conflict as a monolithic construct.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between the interactive and diagnostic use of MCSs with the extent of adoption of contemporary management accounting practices, and the subsequent impact on the success of such practices in the public sector.

Data were collected through the distribution of a mail survey of 740 questionnaires to public sector organisations in Australia, and analysed using structural equation modelling.

The study found that both the interactive and diagnostic approaches to using MCSs exhibit a positive association with the adoption of contemporary management accounting practices, both as a package and individually. In addition, while the level of success of contemporary management accounting practices was moderate, it was found that the extent of adoption of the practices enhanced their success.

The findings suggest that by intensifying the use of MCSs in a more interactive and diagnostic manner, public sector organisations are more likely to adopt contemporary management to a greater extent, with the subsequent increase in the extent of adoption of such practices to exacerbate their success.

The study contributes to the MCS contingency-based research by highlighting the interrelationship between two aspects of MCSs, the use of controls and the adoption and success of management accounting practices.

This study examines the association between the use of strategic management accounting (SMA) practices and competitive advantage and the moderating role of four aspects of organisational culture – teamwork orientation, outcome orientation, innovation orientation and attention to detail orientation – on this association. Online survey data were collected from 408 accountants in Australian business organisations, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data. The results indicate a positive association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage with such an association positively moderated by one cultural dimension, teamwork orientation. Specifically, the findings indicate that the positive effect of SMA practices on competitive advantage is dependent upon the fit between the use of SMA practices and teamwork orientation with more (less) teamwork-oriented organisations exhibiting a stronger (weaker) association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to examine multiple dimensions of reflexive and reciprocal mentorship as they work through the fear of teaching challenging and politically charged ideas.

This piece is a case study of the complex instances of reciprocal mentorship within a teacher education program. Objects of analysis included the informal educational experiences from the bi-monthly meetings and student-teaching experiences. Semi-structured interviews, field notes, interpersonal discussion and the authors’ own reflections were used as data sources.

The authors found that having difficult conversations in informal spaces provided social studies teacher candidates with the opportunity to get more comfortable with challenging conversations; that mentorship is helpful when shifting context between formal and informal spaces; and that once these teachers grew more comfortable, they moved from mentee to mentor with support and guidance from their own mentors. The authors conclude by providing several implications for pre-service teachers, teacher and teacher educators, as they help social studies practitioners work with and beyond the politics of fear.

Limitations such as subjectivity, generalizability and implementation exist. Factors such as personality, program, cultural background, lived experience and other elements played a role in the findings. Therefore, the authors do not suggest these are monolithic claims about the nature of mentorship, teacher education or teaching, but rather the authors wish to share these findings and recommendations.

The authors argue that three major findings emerged from the data. First, informal spaces are valuable for initiating difficult conversations among mentors and mentees. Second, shifting between formal and informal spaces can be uncomfortable, but allow for mentoring opportunities during these challenging instances of becoming. Third, moving from mentee to mentor includes valuable reciprocal mentorship within a learning community.

This research project is grounded in the needs of the participants and researchers. To the authors’ knowledge, a project of this type with similar participants has not been done.