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Unions face serious challenges, which raise questions about organizational priorities. An issue important to the recent breakup of the AFLCIO is the priority given political action vis-à-vis organizing. We examine competing theoretical perspectives on the potential relationship between union political action and organizing effectiveness. We present evidence on the scope of union political spending and conduct a preliminary analysis of its correlation with organizing. Our results indicate a negative relationship, but we urge a cautious interpretation. Theory raises substantial doubts about political activity as a motivation for joining a union. We urge more research.

The future of unions hangs in the balance. Labor unions face enormous challenges to overcome decades of decline and diminishing power. The authors examine the current status of unions with an eye toward identifying pathways to rejuvenation. Our analysis focuses on what the authors know about the decline of unions, how its compares historically, and what avenues are available to unions to change. Pathways to growth with undoubtedly require breaking old molds, which have proven ineffective. Unions need to explore new models of representation to take advantage of a changing workforce with new employment relationships typified by the “gig economy.” The authors present an agenda for fruitful research and discuss the implications of a weakened labor movement on the well-being of society.

Civil wrongdoings with consequent financial and other loss or damage to employers, employees and third parties may result in the course of various trade union activities. These day to day trade union activities take a variety of forms. The most common ones are inducement of breach of contract, conspiracy, trespass, nuisance, and intimidation. Each of these activities constitutes a tort which, unless the statutory immunities apply, would normally give rise at common law to an action for damages or, as is more frequent, enable the aggrieved party to obtain an injunction.

Scholarly studies on mentoring have mostly focused on traditional mentor–mentee relationships, with little or no emphasis on how institutionalized mentoring activities that include different pedagogical approaches could be used to enhance the professional development of academics. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how an institutionalized multilevel mentoring program could be used to enhance the professional development of early-career academics and academics in designated groups in a South African university.

The data for the study were gathered from 18 mentees and 2 program administrators using semi-structured interviews. The data gathered were assessed by way of thematic analysis that involved a detailed process of identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing and reporting the themes that were developed from the data set.

The findings revealed that when mentees participate in different mentoring and professional development activities that are structured based on different pedagogies, they can engage in higher-order thinking processes and develop multidisciplinary experiences within an expanded professional learning community. Enabled by the situated learning setting, mentees can negotiate the meaning of their professional practice within a professional community and comprehend the nuanced pedagogical approaches including scaffolding learning used by mentors to shape their career trajectory and guide them to secure promotions.

The current study contributes to the scholarly discourse on situated learning by showing that mentoring could be planned and implemented as a pedagogical endeavor with diverse learning activities and structured as a form of professional development program within a professional community.

Although workers' organisations operated in the early nineteenth century and “…. workers in every trade were becoming very much alive to the necessity for defending their standards”, nevertheless “The first twenty years of the nineteenth century, witnessed a legal persecution of trade unionists as rebels and revolutionists”. The beginnings of modern trade unionism may be traced to about 1850 where a number of craft unions, as for example, miners' and engineering unions, were successful in establishing themselves, and slowly building up their financial resources and thus acquiring sufficient strength to enable them to bargain on almost equal terms with the employer.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which newly agile organizations followed 2001’s Agile Manifesto, especially in terms of the 12 principles of the agile approach, as included in the Manifesto.

The authors conducted in-depth case studies of groups in three large business organizations that had recently adopted agile. Two researchers spent one day at each site, attending daily standups and conducting interviews with managers, developers and customers.

Across the three organizations, developers were faithful to two agile principles: the primacy of delivering valuable software continually and regular reflections on the process with an eye toward improvement. The developers were uniformly unfaithful to the principle that requires face-to-face communication. Each organization varied in their adherence to the remaining nine principles. Obstacles to faithful adoption included the experience of the organization with agile, the extent to which the industry was regulated and the extent to which developers and customers were physically dispersed.

While past research on agile development is extensive, this paper examines perspectives on the method and its adoption through the lens of the original Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles. The principles were grouped into three broader categories – software delivery, people and process – to provide additional insights and to sharpen the analysis.

This paper aims to propose and test a ten-factor framework of four contexts from technology-organization-environment (T-O-E) theory and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to provide insight(s) that complements and extends extant inquiries on technology adoption.

Survey data were collected from small service enterprises with strong operations in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and the mode of sampling was purposive and snow ball, whereas analysis involved structural equation modeling.

The results show that factors in the technological, organizational and environmental contexts have direct statistically significant relationship with adoption; thus, adoption is more driven by T-O-E factors than by individual factors. For individual context, social factor equally was statistically supported, whereas hedonistic drive was not.

The study is limited by its scope of data collection and phases; therefore, extended data are needed to apply the findings to other sectors/industries/countries and to factor in the implementation and post-adoption phases and business to business (B2B) adoption to forge a more holistic framework.

Implicit is that the findings encourage vendors and policy makers to recognize the strength of interpersonal and group relationships in addition to T-O-E contexts in developing investment decisions.

The paper contributes to the growing research on innovation adoption by using factors within the T-O-E and UTAUT frameworks to explain SMEs’ adoption of technologies.