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Universities in the UK have given prominence in their strategic objectives to quality teaching and yet many of these statements are extremely vague and say little about the learning experience their students might expect. Argues for two activities: the operationalization of such generic statements; and the use of quality assurance mechanisms to ensure that specific features of teaching are delivered in practice. Provides illustrative lists of the elements such an approach might entail.

This chapter tells the story of the initiation, development (over two decades) and collective contribution of the Copenhagen Forum since its foundation in 1996. This Forum comprises a grouping of teachers and directors of masters-level public administrative programmes (notably the MPA) from different academic institutions across Northern Europe. Each year a workshop is convened where a series of papers are presented by the participants, and from which this volume, and a number of other related publications, have been derived.

The chapter is essentially factual and descriptive in style; summarising the story of the Copenhagen Forum so far; doing so under the following five headings – ‘overview’, ‘origins’, ‘odyssey’, ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’.

The chapter is particularly oriented towards teachers of public administration and by focusing on the pedagogical aspects of the public management programmes that they are responsible for delivering, provides insights, guidance and suggestions from experience to help them develop their practice.

The aim is to provide readers with an appreciation of the context from which the inspiration for this volume, and the individual contributions, derive. It is a context that has been all about a shared fascination with, and collective commitment to, the advancement of learning and development among practicing public managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way “hybrid” clinical managers in Kenyan public hospitals interpret and enact hybrid clinical managerial roles in complex healthcare settings affected by professional, managerial and practical norms.

The authors conducted a case study of two Kenyan district hospitals, involving repeated interviews with eight mid-level clinical managers complemented by interviews with 51 frontline workers and 6 senior managers, and 480 h of ethnographic field observations. The authors analysed and theorised data by combining inductive and deductive approaches in an iterative cycle.

Kenyan hybrid clinical managers were unprepared for managerial roles and mostly reluctant to do them. Therefore, hybrids’ understandings and enactment of their roles was determined by strong professional norms, official hospital management norms (perceived to be dysfunctional and unsupportive) and local practical norms developed in response to this context. To navigate the tensions between managerial and clinical roles in the absence of management skills and effective structures, hybrids drew meaning from clinical roles, navigating tensions using prevailing routines and unofficial practical norms.

Understanding hybrids’ interpretation and enactment of their roles is shaped by context and social norms and this is vital in determining the future development of health system’s leadership and governance. Thus, healthcare reforms or efforts aimed towards increasing compliance of public servants have little influence on behaviour of key actors because they fail to address or acknowledge the norms affecting behaviours in practice. The authors suggest that a key skill for clinical managers in managers in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) is learning how to read, navigate and when opportune use local practical norms to improve service delivery when possible and to help them operate in these new roles.

The authors believe that this paper is the first to empirically examine and discuss hybrid clinical healthcare in the LMICs context. The authors make a novel theoretical contribution by describing the important role of practical norms in LMIC healthcare contexts, alongside managerial and professional norms, and ways in which these provide hybrids with considerable agency which has not been previously discussed in the relevant literature.

This article illustrates the experiences of employee resource group (ERG) members over a two-year period with the aim of understanding the benefits and risks of membership for sexual minority employees.

Qualitative interview data were collected from seven lesbian, gay or bisexual ERG members following an extreme case approach at two points in time separated by two years.

Three themes of outcomes related to ERG membership emerged from the data. Participants reported both benefits and risks associated with the social and career-related consequences of membership. The role that allies play in providing visibility, legitimacy and support to ERG members also emerged and shifted in importance over the two years between interviews, with ally involvement becoming more important to career outcomes over time.

This study illuminates potential consequences of supporting ERGs for minority employees, as well as insight into the role of allies in these groups.

This study contributes to the literature by revealing several individual outcomes of a growing form of diversity management practice: ERGs.

The purpose of the paper is to assess the extent to which these practitioners ' perspectives and practices match Willis ' s conception of a Revans “gold standard” of action learning.

This study adopts a qualitative design and methodology based on interviews and the collection of cases or accounts of practice, and upon the analysis of both. This exploratory study draws on 24 cases of academic practice of action learning within higher education (HE) institutions in the UK and 21 cases drawn from practitioners in the UK National Health Service.

Whilst action learning is shown to be a context sensitive and protean methodology, the findings demonstrate that approaches to practice are not as divergent as anticipated. On the evidence of this study, many aspects of action learning practice remain rooted in the principles originally established by Revans, sometimes termed.

The limitations of this study stem from its exploratory nature using small samples in the NHS and HE sectors. Nonetheless, the results could stimulate further empirical research on approaches to the practice of action learning in a range of other contexts.

The study provides a basis on which practitioners can critically reflect on their own professional practices, and a means to review their own purposes in making use of action learning in their work situations.

The study extends earlier research by confirming the persistence of Revans Classical Principles in the present practice across two professional practice contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.

Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.

The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.

Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to focus, explore, and provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between company resources and the process of enterprise risk management (ERM) in order to strengthen corporate structures against emerging uncertainties.

This paper proposes a strategic risk management framework for the development and sustainability of corporate performance by focussing on the dimension of firm resources extracted from the resources-based theory. This paper focussed on using Malaysia listed firms under Malaysian Bourse as sample frame using the random sampling technique whereby questionnaire were distributed among head of risk management department. Of the 600 questionnaires distributed, 223 were returned completed.

The survey results indicate that intangible resources play a significant roles in resources – performance relationship while the other two main dimension that are tangible resources and capabilities have shown contradictory results.

This paper only focussed on using Malaysia listed firms under Malaysian Bourse as sample frame.

The management of risk is a dynamic phenomenon and the change of management that parallel with its evolution demand a revisiting and revamping over and over again promptly. In order to adapt and survive the volatile environment time and again, the effort to ensure long-term sustainability has to be made by the firm as success and failure can quickly replace one another in a relatively short period. The results highlight the various insight that might be helpful to managers in terms of managing the performance of the firm by concentrating entirely on its risk management and resources managements process.

Overall it was shown that only certain dimension of resources within the firm has strong relationship with the performance variation. As such, the company has to ensure that deployment of resources has to be optimized accordingly by focussing on the types of resources that matters so that possibility of improving the outcome of the firm in the volatile global environment can be realized.