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Stagl, Salas, Rosen, Priest, Burke, Goodwin, and Johnston (this volume) conducted a review of distributed team performance and discussed some of the implications of distributed, multicultural operations for individual, team, and organizational decision making. Expanding upon Stagl and colleagues’ discussion, Alutto (this volume), and Coovert and Burke (this volume) provided thought-provoking commentary on these issues. The current note briefly responds to some of the questions posed and comments made by Alutto, Coovert, and Burke and concludes by calling for a continued dialogue by all stakeholders concerned with fostering effective distributed teams.

This chapter presents the key results of a research project that explored managing service productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of lived experiences of bank executives employed as ‘knowledge workers’ in the Nigerian banking sector. The study adopted a qualitative phenomenological research design. Data was gathered from 16 Nigerian top bank executives purposively selected using semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Trans Positional Cognition Approach (TPCA), a new phenomenological research method, was used to analyse the data gathered. The study data analysis yielded five themes; micromanagement practices, use of dysfunctional strategies to drive service operations, deposit mobilisation target as a productivity measure, managerial indifference to potential nescience economy issues and master-servant (power culture) strategy, which epitomises fundamental managerial approaches adopted in the sector. The study identified critical service productivity management issues grounded in reality that influence the capability and potentiality of the study knowledge workers. It also contributes the novel, ‘official knowledge worker lived experience of service productivity model’ for use by decision-makers in the banking sector. Thus, it sets an agenda for these ‘knowledge workers’ line managers’ and bank regulators in the research setting. The study extended the viable system model by applying it in this phenomenological enquiry and using it to explain/deepen our understanding of the findings that emerged. The output of this work contributes to scholarly knowledge on service productivity management from the sub-Saharan African banks’ perspective. It can be generalisable in countries with similar financial and economic characteristics like the research setting.

This chapter aims to make a contribution to recent debates on the ‘governance of security’ (Johnston & Shearing, 2003) by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the author and other writers on ‘plural policing’ and the construction of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance networks. The chapter attempts to avoid the tendency in some of the ‘governmentality’ literature to ‘airbrush out the state’ (Hughes, 2007, p. 184), whilst at the same time showing that the aims and intentions of dominant state forces and elites are not always realised in practice. The chapter also tries to avoid any simplistic notion of a shift in policing strategies from ‘crime fighting’ to ‘risk management’. The aim instead is to show how the construction of surveillance networks is blurring the boundaries of the ‘public–private’ divide along the ‘sectoral’, ‘geographical’, ‘spatial’, ‘legal’ and ‘functional’ dimensions (Jones & Newburn, 1998), giving rise to a plural policing continuum.

Donna L. Van Raaphorst provides a detailed statistical analysis of a large sample of Alcatraz Prison inmates using the Social Science Statistical Package. The data, drawn directly from the inmate files, is compared whenever possible with similar data provided by the Bureau of Prisons in order to determine if Alcatraz, often regarded as America's Devil's Island, really incarcerated the so-called “Worst of the Worst” in its time. The results would seem to indicate that Alcatraz inmates were, in fact, not remarkably different from those in any other Federal prison in the system.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

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.

A broad range of policy evaluations below is begun in Chapter 2 by Kate Johnston, Colette Henry and Simon Gillespie in their evaluation entitled ‘Encouraging Research and Development in Ireland's Biotechnology Enterprises’. This investigation critically evaluates Irish government policy towards biotechnology development over a preceding 10-year period. In Chapter 3, Anthony Ward, Sarah Cooper, Frank Cave and William Lucas examine ‘The Effect of Industrial Experience on Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-Efficacy in UK Engineering Undergraduates’ in a large-scale study that generally produces satisfactory results in terms of raising the profile of entrepreneurship among undergraduates. Deirdre Hunt, in Chapter 4, again focuses on the evolution of strategy in Ireland, this time towards the more general topic of new firm formation with a personal contribution entitled ‘Now You See Them — Now You Don’t: Paradoxes in Enterprise Development Strategy: The Case of the Disappearing Academic Start-Ups’.