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Employers offer pension plans for two main reasons: paternalism and skills market competitiveness. Recent changes in legislation and business practice have prompted the scrutiny of the underpinnings for such a management tradition. Identifies several relevant factors that derive from: field work undertaken by the authors; the Pensions Act 1995; and recent changes to corporations tax. It is argued that what has emerged is a sharply focused trade‐off, relating to the asset and liability characteristics of employer‐based pension schemes. This questions the sustainability of all types of pension plans, and thereby has a place in strategies affecting financial planning and business development.

This paper sets out to explore the concept of creativity in the context of the retail store environment and the function of design in shaping this environment.

The paper uses a cross‐disciplinary approach to review theoretical approaches to creativity, and their relevance to the retail industry. It subsequently assesses types of retail spaces, and then moves on to compare the concept of retail design with product design and its implications for creativity and retailers.

It demonstrates the complexity of creativity as a concept, and the opportunities to create retail spaces through design‐led approaches. It defines retail design and its engagement with stakeholders within and outside the organisation and its impact on organisational creativity.

As a review paper it covers a number of perspectives on creativity, design and store environments. However, these are not exhaustive, and invite further discussion and scoping for future research.

The paper outlines ways to understand creativity in retailing, and provides guidance on how retailers can organize their organizations to engage with design projects.

The paper uniquely examines concepts of creativity and proposes how they might be applied to retailing. It demonstrates how creativity pervades the industry, in terms of design and the use of designed spaces. It proposes new areas for research relating to the definition of creativity in the retail industry, and the role of creativity and retailing in cultural and social contexts.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and contextualize the processes of leadership development through mentoring in a Leadership Learning Lab (“the Lab”) and to explore the implications and applications of the Lab's approach as a social learning space.

The authors used a constructivist grounded theoretical approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in the Lab, which operated out of a leadership center in a mid-sized Canadian business school.

The findings show that participants used their individual life experiences to practice leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space of prescribed uncertainty. The participants identified with becoming flexible, self-actualized leaders by learning to view their own experiences and those of their Lab partners through a leadership lens.

This study contributes to an understanding of the “doing” of leadership development in a social learning space and highlights three relational processes through which leadership development emerged through mentoring: rapport-building, democratization and reflection.

This paper aims at advancing a pragmatist perspective on entrepreneurial opportunities as an alternative to the traditional and predominant constructivist and objectivist perspectives. To this end, this paper advances a pragmatist definition of an opportunity and draws from empirical evidence to propose a pragmatist model of opportunity conception and exploitation.

A review of the entrepreneurial opportunity and pragmatism literatures yields a definition of an opportunity as a dynamic and unfolding experience which an entrepreneur conceives as a general market need to exploit it for financial or social gain. Drawing from this definition, and with the aim of developing a pragmatist model of an opportunity, a case study approach is applied to three radically innovative services conceived and developed by three high-performance computing (HPC) centers.

In each of the three cases, an entrepreneurial HPC center conceived a new, general market need (opportunity) and then acted to exploit it. Through its action, the HPC center learned something that enabled it to address barriers, develop an improvement or otherwise reconceive the opportunity. In turn, the HPC center learned more about and advanced the opportunity, and then acted again. After launching a new service based on the opportunity, the opportunity continued to evolve in response to the HPC center’s efforts and to market forces.

The pragmatist perspective and model of an opportunity can serve as a foundation for future pragmatist research into entrepreneurship and innovation. To this end, future studies could extend the model by examining in greater detail the acting-learning-reconceiving cycle, by exploring how an opportunity evolves and is reconceived after market launch and/or by investigating opportunity conception and exploitation within other types of markets.

From a pragmatist perspective, an opportunity is not some discrete object to be discovered. It is emergent and dynamic, and to the extent that it is “created”, it is never complete or finalized. It is experienced by the entrepreneur, and it continues to evolve, even after it has been launched as a new good or service.

The paper proposes novel value by advancing a pragmatist perspective on entrepreneurial opportunities. Such a perspective is an alternative to the constructivist and objectivist perspectives that have framed research into opportunities. The paper also proposes novel value by drawing from case study findings to propose a pragmatist model of opportunity conception and exploitation.

Resilience is the ability to snap back after experiencing trauma, and is increasingly important for leaders in today’s complex, global world. Resilience can be learned, which is a great news for leaders wanting to sustain through tough times. When adversity arises, resilience becomes the tool to help us grow stronger. Unfortunately, most organizations do not purposefully design themselves to foster a resilient workplace, leaving leaders to do this work on their own. By not investing in building resilience in employees, organizations are missing an important way to differentiate themselves from the competition. Workplaces that build resilience into their practices, culture, and development benefit from employees who sustain, even thrive, through complex change and market shifts.

This chapter explores how the habit of “stealing time” can build stronger, more resilient leaders, in adverse times. We will also discuss how reshaping our own mindset makes us stronger and ready to tackle daily challenges. Then we focus on spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental components of resilience. By increasing our resilience, we also gain a sense of cognitive freedom – a sense of empowered problem-solving and creativity – that can be a positive and contagious force throughout our teams and organizations. Finally, we focus on the organizational “streams” of resilience, which allow organizations to build greater resilience capacities at all levels. By using classic organizational design principles, we begin to see how we can help everyone live and work more fully and with more vigor.

We take an affect-based approach to theoretically introduce and explore the knowing-doing gap of leadership. We focus on the emotion of fear that managers may experience in the workplace, and how it may influence the transfer of their leadership knowledge into leadership action.

We use Affective Events Theory as our underlying theoretical lens, drawing on emotional, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms to explain the role of fear in the widening and bridging of the knowing-doing gap of leadership.

We theoretically explore the interplay between leader fear, the leadership contexts, and the knowing-doing gap of leadership. From this, we develop a multidimensional theoretical framework on the influence of leader fear on the knowing-doing gap of leadership.

We highlight how fear and the knowing-doing gap of leadership may be influenced by and potentially impact on individual managers and their leadership contexts.

Our initial theoretical framework provides a starting point for understanding fear and the knowing-doing gap of leadership. It has implications for future research to enhance our understanding of the topic, and contributes toward existing approaches on leadership development as well as emotions and leadership.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

This paper examines the role and effectiveness of worker director schemes in six employee‐owned bus companies. This form of industrial democracy, which is aimed at giving workers and their representatives a role in the strategic direction of the employing organization, has been in abeyance in recent years. However, it now seems to be making something of a comeback. Concern about corporate governance, the spread of employee ownership and recent initiatives by the EC have combined to generate renewed interest in employee representation in the formulation of company strategy. As industrial democracy edges back on to the industrial relations agenda it is opportune to reconsider the findings of earlier literature in the light of recent developments.