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Middle leaders play an important role in the education landscape, first and foremost as teachers, and second as leaders. The purpose of this paper is to identify the expectations and challenges experienced by first-time middle leaders in New Zealand primary schools, and identify the leadership development and support they were provided with.

This was a small qualitative study designed to collect data from the perspectives of first-time middle leaders and principals in New Zealand primary schools. Three methods were employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six middle leaders who had been in the role for one to three years. These participants were identified through an analysis of recent public appointment records and then e-mailed with an invitation. Four principals from a local principals’ association were invited to comprise a focus group and relevant documents were analysed.

The findings from this study are presented in three sections: expectations, challenges and leadership development and support. Whilst the principals described wide and varied role expectations the middle leaders highlighted the importance of their teaching role with leadership responsibilities as secondary. From both perspectives time to do the administrative work was an overwhelming difficulty. A key finding was related to a lack of confidence to undertake the role in spite of efforts to provide and receive support. Overall, there was agreement that further development for new middle leaders was essential.

This small, limited study highlights the central role that middle leaders play in leading learning and teaching, and the existence of a lack of confidence. Further research is needed to delve into conditions that would enable new middle leaders to manage the challenges of time and confidence.

The research recommends that practitioners who are new to a middle leadership role be allocated dedicated time for performing the administrative tasks and participating in an ongoing induction programme. The middle leaders themselves and their schools would benefit from efforts to strengthen middle leadership development.

Although a great deal has been written about middle leadership, there is only a small amount of research about primary schools. This research adds valuable new information in a primary school context and breaks new ground in researching early career, first-time middle leaders in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to make intelligible the rationalities and mechanisms through which markets have been proffered as alternatives or complements to traditional welfare‐based provision and the effect of this development on the subjectivity of workers.

The research involved collection of archival data, personal encounters and in‐depth interviews with managers, staff and elected representatives at a local authority in New Zealand. Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality is mobilised to interpret these data.

The paper finds that the mandatory changes required by legislation are associated with efforts to constitute local authority workers as business‐like subjects through disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of the self. While markets have permeated this local authority, with some managers and staff claiming to work in a business‐like manner and transact with each other as customers, these discourses have not vanquished the traditional concern of working for one organisation to serve the community.

While the results of this study are not generalisable to other contexts, they show how the introduction of New Public Management in a specific context is associated with a contest between the traditional discourses of community and public service, and the more recent ones of enterprise and customer. The paper illuminates the pathologies associated with these new technologies and how their implementation is often divergent from the rationalities in the name of which they are promoted.

The paper will contribute to ongoing debate on how best to deliver public goods and services and especially, the limits and potential of markets.

The paper's mobilisation of Foucault's governmentality framework in the study of a local authority case study in a contemporary setting is relatively unusual.

Although existing studies demonstrate positive relationships between ethical cultures and innovativeness, their explanations of why an ethical culture leads to innovativeness are limited. This study explores the relationship between ethical organizational culture and knowledge workers' innovativeness

Based on Kierkegaardian existential philosophy, this study proposes a research model that employs knowledge workers' existential affirmation as the link between ethical culture and innovativeness. The main hypothesis proposed in this study is that ethical organizational culture offers knowledge workers the opportunity to find their existential affirmation, which leads them to become more innovative. A structural equation modeling analysis is based on data collected from a survey of 348 knowledge workers from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in different hi-tech industries.

The findings suggest that among the four subdimensions of an ethical organizational culture, ethics training and awareness raising had the strongest relationships with knowledge workers' existential affirmation, which, in turn, had a significant relationship with their innovativeness.

Based on this philosophical reflection, this study develops a research model that examines knowledge workers' existential affirmation as the factor that links ethical organizational culture and knowledge workers' innovativeness. The authors test ethical organizational culture as an environment that allows knowledge workers to validate their existential affirmation. Further, they test the link between knowledge workers' existential affirmation and their innovativeness.

This paper adapts the model espoused by Snape and considers avenues for trade unions to increase membership. It studies two specific industrial sectors, namely 20 non‐unionised manufacturing small‐ to medium‐sized establishments (SMEs) and four large unionised banking and insurance establishments all of which are based in the central belt of Scotland. The authors consider possible implications for trade unions in developing strategies for targeting workers in an attempt to boost trade union membership as indicated by the setting up of a TUC Organising Academy, as well as possible effects of the Employment Relations Act, 1999. Discussion also centres on employer suppression or substitution strategies, and on trade union commitment towards investing resources in workplace establishments that are either non‐union or are unionised but exhibit a low union density. The authors conclude that trade unions will have to think very carefully about the rewards available when conceiving strategies aimed at increasing membership in non‐union establishments, and density in unionised establishments.

Argues that organizations should be thought of as cultures rather than machines, and that managing is as much a social as a technical process. Suggests that effective leadership, and the successful design of appropriate organization development programmes, are dependent on executive understanding and sensitivity to organizational culture. Describes Schein′s model of culture and illustrates each of its major elements with examples drawn from the literature and the author′s own experience. These examples demonstrate the importance and the power of cultural approaches to understanding organizations in general and the leadership function in particular. Demonstrates a new set of tools for mobilizing commitment and enforcing control that can have important performance implications, and which will be of value to the practising manager.

This study aims to investigate the response by a multi-campus private higher education provider to a major crisis. This study examined what elements of complex adaptive systems (CAS) were activated and/or developed within the organization during the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, through a retrospective analysis of organizational responses.

A retrospective qualitative approach has been used. The theory of CAS has been used as the theoretical lens to explore the organizational context, responses and behaviours during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 senior leaders across the major functions of the organization spread over multiple campuses.

Findings point to coverage of the main CAS characteristics in the organizational responses to the pandemic, however, in varying degrees. There was strong evidence for the application of guiding principles, for self-organizing, for micro-diversity coupled with independent actors and new generative relationships, all brought about by the chaos the pandemic generated. This study concludes that the global pandemic presented this organization with the impetus for rapid and agile responses to what ultimately has become a constructive crisis, paving the way for key elements of CAS theory to be enacted. This study recommend embedding the conscious creation of an adaptive space within ongoing strategic organizational transformation initiatives.

There is scant literature on CAS as applied to crises from organizations in the higher education sector and notably from outside of the health/medical fields. As a result, this study offers a novel and original approach to applying CAS theory during a major crisis. In addition to the findings above, this study also found an emergent characteristic, that of agility, which could be further tested as a potential theoretical addition to CAS theory.

A number of studies have investigated the relationship between energy performance certificates (EPCs) and house prices. A majority of studies have tended to model energy performance pricing effects within a traditional hedonic conditional mean estimate model. There has been limited analysis that has accounted for the relationship between EPCs and the effects across the pricing distribution. Moreover, there has been limited research examining the “standard cost improvements EPC score”, or “potential score”. Therefore, this paper aims to quantify and measure the dynamic effects of EPCs on house prices across the price spectrum and account for standardised cost-effective retrofit improvements.

Existing EPC studies produce one coefficient for the entirety of the pricing distribution, culminating in a single marginal implicit price effect. The approach within this study applies a quantile regression approach to empirically estimate how quantiles of house prices respond differently to unitary changes in the proximal effects of EPCs and structural property characteristics across the conditional distribution of house prices. Using a data set of 1,476 achieved transaction prices, the quantile regression models apply both assessed EPC score and bands and further examine the potential EPC rating for improved energy performance based on an average energy cost improvement.

The findings show that EPCs are valued differently across the quantiles and that conditional quantiles are asymmetrical. Only property prices in the upper quantiles of the price distribution show significant capitalisation effects with energy performance, and only properties with higher EPC scores display positive significant effects at the higher end of the price distribution. There are also brown discount effects evident for lower-rated properties within F- and G-rated EPC properties at the higher end of the pricing distribution. Moreover, the potential energy efficiency rating (score) also shows increased effects with sales prices and appears to minimise any brown discount effects. The findings imply that energy performance is a complex feature that is not easily “averaged” for valuation effect purposes.

While numerous studies have investigated the pricing effects of EPCs, they have tended to provide a single estimate to determine the relationship with price. This paper extends the traditional analytical insights beyond the conditional mean estimate by examining the quantiles of the relationship between EPCs and house prices to enhance the understanding of this esoteric and complex issue. In addition, this research applies the assessed energy efficiency potential to establish whether effective cost improvements enhance the relationship with sales price and capitalisation effects.

Despite the universal recognition of port as one of the most traditional and famous fortified wines in the world, there has been little investigation into this product, in either the field of marketing or strategic management. An empirical investigation into the marketing strategies of port wine companies is presented here. Qualitative data were obtained during early 1998 through internal sources and semi‐structured interviews conducted with the directors of port wine shippers and the chairmen of institutions which play a key role in the port wine industry. Four different types of companies were identified in the port wine industry: companies owned by multinationals (MOCs), British family‐owned companies (BOCs), Portuguese family‐owned companies (POCs) and independent wineries (IWs). This study identifies the key issues faced in relation to each of the components of a marketing strategy. It reveals the importance of key issues involved in the development of marketing strategies of port wine, and in particular, the extent of distribution network, packaging, product quality, price point, value for money, direct marketing and the organisation of special events. It also reveals that the port wine industry is controlled by long‐term orientated organisations (i.e. MOCs and BOCs). Companies that have difficulties in controlling their distribution network (i.e. BOCs and IWs) also have difficulty in establishing long‐term objectives. Generalisations to wine marketing must be made with caution since this investigation was built on a study of a specific wine industry which has particular characteristics.

Since the late 1970s, the study of the role, structure and functions of personnel management in the United Kingdom has been greatly facilitated by surveys emerging from a number of large‐scale surveys. A major interest in interpreting the data from these surveys has been to evaluate the impact of recession, and, latterly, recovery on the power, structure and roles of personnel departments and personnel specialists in recent years. The survey data are used comparatively to evaluate the empirical plausibility of the different scenarios which have arisen, and to account for the results that emerge.

Following the Gulf War, international discussions took place about multilateral restraints on “destabilising arms transfers”. Given that the UK is one of the leading exporters of arms, any reduction in such exports would affect the UK economy. The UK government spends considerable sums promoting such exports and it benefits from defence exports as they reduce the Ministry of Defence’s procurement costs. This paper analyses the direct financial implications of arms exports to the UK government, both as a buyer of defence equipment and as a promoter of such exports. The results suggest that in the UK each job generated by arms exports is subsidised by just under £2,000 per annum and that a one‐third reduction in UK defence exports would save the taxpayer some £76 million per annum (at 1995 prices).