Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature, causes and consequences of the UK’s productivity problems and whether these may be addressed through the new technologies of artificial intelligence (AI).

This paper reviews the literature on productivity to explain how it relates to earnings within different theoretical frameworks, advocating a “power over rents” framework as most realistic. It explains the UK’s twin productivity problems and reviews their potential causes, critically assessing the capacity for new technologies of AI to address them. It highlights the enduring importance of distribution and the design of work to improving the UK’s productivity.

The authors find that the UK’s productivity problems will not be solved by AI technologies due to technical and socio-technical challenges which will require the significant re-design of work. The authors highlight the importance of aggregate demand, which has been inhibited by the shifting distribution of income towards capital and rising inequality of earnings. These issues suggest an important role for trade unions and a renewal of the institutions of employment regulation and collective bargaining. While reversing recent trends raises considerable challenges, the authors observe renewed interest in trade unions from previously hostile thinktanks and international institutions including the IMF and OECD.

This paper advocates adopting a “power over rents” theoretical framework to understanding productivity and the distribution of gains. This provides a clear rationale for the role of trade unions, employment regulation and collective bargaining in improving distributional outcomes, raising firm-level productivity and achieving real productivity growth at an aggregate level.

Rhetoric and reality lead separate lives when it comes to integrating health and social services in Scotland, and it is making planning and implementation difficult for practitioners of integration. This paper is a collaboration between a practitioner and two academics who teach, research and write about integration. It explores the views of other integration practitioners about the policy, language and nature of integration, and the issues practitioners are currently grappling with, especially how the policy language of ‘integration’ fails to connect with integration in practice. It appears that ‘integration’ has less to do with broad policy aspirations and principles of service (re)organisation, than with the specific aims, objectives and outcomes of individual projects delivered in very specific circumstances. Acknowledging the localisation of integration, and allowing the time for productive problem solving which can generate a new language, ought to be essential elements of integration.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how postgraduate education can contribute to the effective integration of health and social care through supporting public service managers to develop the skills required for collaborative working.

Review of documentation from ten years of delivery of a part-time postgraduate programme for health and social care managers, critical reflection on the findings in light of relevant literature.

The health and social care managers participating in this postgraduate programme report working across complex, shifting and hidden boundaries. Effective education for integration should: ground learning in experience; develop a shared language; be inter-professional and co-produced; and support skill development.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature relating to the educational and development needs of health and social care managers leading collaborative working.

The purpose of this paper is to look back on 150 years of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and reflect on the recent challenges to organised labour.

Places unions in their current context and discusses how they have responded to the challenge of declining membership.

With declining membership levels and the lack of a “silver bullet” solution, unions continue to face many challenges, although there is some light at the end of the organising tunnel.

This paper introduces the special issue which reflects on 150 years of the TUC.

This chapter explores the potential for the classroom to be a space for activism and hope within the contemporary business school. Drawing on the extant literature, a reflexive account of our own teaching and learning practice, and a small number of interviews with academics using feminist material in their teaching in business schools, we explore the challenges, opportunities and joys experienced in the feminist classroom. We suggest that engaging in feminist teaching practice and theory can offer an opportunity for academics to engage in the critical management studies practice which is often said to be lacking within management research. We begin by setting out the extant positioning of Critical Management Studies, moving to an analysis of the educational context. Interwoven through this are our own perspectives. Our own reflections do not reveal the identities of students.

The purpose of this article is to explore the understanding and interpretation of evidence‐based practice among Sure Start centre managers.

Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with Children's Centre managers from one London borough.

The interviews highlighted the varied and, for some limited, view of evidence‐based practice. For many managers their understanding was confined to evidence generated locally rather than perceiving a role for externally‐generated evidence to support effective practice. Managers also highlighted the constraints they face in taking what some perceive to be an evidence‐based approach.

Although Sure Start Children's Centres are one of the main sites for delivering evidence‐based interventions to improve outcomes for young children and families in the UK, and despite Government announcements promoting the use of evidence‐based practice in these settings, little is known about the knowledge and interpretation of managers on this issue or the difficulties of translating ideas into practice on the ground. Thus, there is a danger that some of the potential benefits of evidence‐based practice may be lost if this disconnect between policy and practice is not addressed.

The last decade has seen much soul‐searching within the Marketing Academy as it struggles to address what Brown has described as the discipline’s “mid‐life crisis”. Magee terms this tendency “metanoia” and observes that no less a work than “Dante’s Inferno begins with lines that refer to it”. He notes how people reaching this point often “turn in on themselves, and perhaps turn towards religion”. It is with this “metanoid” perspective on marketing theory that the authors of this piece present two possible paths to epistemological paradise; one route representing an inward re‐evaluation and the other more of an outward exploration. Two of the authors combine to take an axiomatic approach to rediscovering the celestial citadel, whereas the third has forsaken the fundamentalist fortress. In his, the second, sermon Brother Nick implores you to reject the foregoing calls to get back to basics, and instead, to embrace a more contemporary, critical orientation to “dat ole time marketing religion”.

In today’s hypercompetitive, digital-first, knowledge-based economy, organizational creativity has never been more important as a potential source of competitive advantage. The foundation stone for every innovation is an idea and all ideas are born of creativity. The innovation process thus starts with creativity and the new ideas it yields are ideally based on insights that will lead ultimately to novel outcomes (such as new products, services, experiences or business models) and thereby to a sustainable competitive advantage. In established businesses, until relatively recently, creativity was called on only for specific, often high-profile occasions, for ‘hackathons’ or for major ‘innovation jams’, but today it is an essential, everyday necessity of routine work. However, attaining the right level of creativity from within is a challenge for many organizations and so they need to establish an appropriate and effective way to import it into their teams, projects and, ultimately, culture. The arts are a pure, unadulterated form of creativity. Mindsets, processes and practices from the arts can give organizational creativity a significant boost and can potentially offset the creative deficit in an organization. Here, the illustrative cases and practices that demonstrate how the arts can have a positive impact on business are examined.

SO much controversy has raged around the subject of newsrooms in the past two years, that librarians are, as a rule, utterly tired of it, and the appearance of still another article upon the subject is not calculated to tone down the general spirit of vexation. It requires no little courage to appear in the arena in this year of Grace, openly championing those departments of our institutions which were originally intended to convey the news of the day in the broadest manner.