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Recent years have seen some significant changes to the psychology profession in Australia that have prompted debate about the role of specialist areas of practice. This study aims to investigate those attitudes and values that might be associated with one particular specialism, that of forensic psychology.

The influence of specialist forensic training on the professional identity of 30 correctional psychologists was examined in relation to their self‐reported level of stress, organisational membership, and organisational commitment.

The results suggest that exposure to specialist training in forensic psychology may not be directly associated with organisational commitment, membership or stress, although some differences between forensic psychologists and those who held other professional practice qualifications were observed.

The main limitations of the study include the small sample size and the use of a scale that has not been well‐validated. Replication and extension of the study is required.

The study has implications for the recruitment and retention of psychologists in correctional settings and for the development of professional identity in post‐graduate training programmes.

This study is the first to explore the differences in professional identity, organisational commitment, organisational membership and stress in a sample of psychologists who practice in the correctional setting.

The use of knowledge in organizations is largely a discretionary behavior that can be encouraged but not demanded. As such, the firm can only attempt to provide the right conditions for employees to endorse the role of knowledge workers. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the organization of the firm affects knowledge management.

This research proposes a new framework showing the prescriptive role of organizational characteristics onto knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Based on this framework, data were generated from nine semi‐structured interviews conducted in the American, British and Japanese offices of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company, using a Boolean approach and qualitative content analysis.

Organizational characteristics, specifically – structure, membership, relationship, and strategy affect KM, namely – knowledge acquisition, storage, diffusion, and application respectively.

Even though the departments of each local office under study were matched in terms of activity, the size of their own domestic market made comparisons sometimes challenging.

This research suggests that practitioners can increase the yield of KM when integrated upstream into the elementary business processes rather than when left voluntary.

This paper uncovers a possible link between the firm's organizational characteristics and KM, and the new practical framework can be useful to both scholars and practitioners.

This qualitative study aims to understand young professional newcomers' experiences of communication processes in membership negotiation in their first workplace after graduation.

Instead of a one-time interview, the participants were contacted five to ten times during the three to ten months, beginning when they entered the workplace. The data were analyzed using a constant comparative method.

Three communication processes during membership negotiation were identified: developing reciprocity, seeking and perceiving acceptance and becoming an active member. To experience membership, newcomers need to achieve acceptance and engage in reciprocal communication in early interaction situations with managers and coworkers.

Only the experiences of newly graduated newcomers were studied. This study illustrates the communication processes and social interaction evolving in membership negotiation during newcomers' entry.

Organizations need to re-evaluate their short orientation programs to support membership negotiations in workplace communication.

By recognizing the communication processes during membership negotiation, the practices of newcomers' entry can be developed to support the membership development.

This study contributes to membership negotiation by showing how newcomers join the flow of membership negotiation through the processes of developing reciprocity, seeking and perceiving acceptance and becoming an active member.

From Al-Qaeda to the IRA, almost all terrorist organisations have experienced splits in some shape or form. This can spell the dawn of violent spoiler groups, but it may equally play a significant role in the overall politicisation of a group. The purpose of this paper is to provide a greater understanding of these splits by assessing the issue from a political organisational perspective.

The author proposes that by addressing splits through the lens of organisational survival, we may gain a greater insight into the process which takes place in the lead up to, and in the aftermath of, organisational cleavage.

It is posited that the rationale behind schism can, at times, be the result of a desire from at least one side to maintain the survival of the organisation in a form they both respect and recognise. In order to achieve this, it might require forming an independent, autonomous organisation, or alternatively promoting the exit of internal factional competitors.

Within the paper, three organisational hypotheses are proposed. It is vital that in order to assess their validity, these are empirically tested by future researchers.

To be able to counter terrorist organisations, one must first have an understanding of the external and internal events and processes. While much of our attention is on understanding paid to the external violent activity of the groups, we must also develop a significant understanding of the non-violent internal activities as well. This paper provides a theoretical basis for understanding one of these process, organisational split.

By addressing splits from an organisational survival viewpoint, the paper challenges the previously held assumption that splits should be analysed as part of the “end of terrorism.”

This chapter explores the multiplicity, formation, and porosity of organizational boundaries in new, fluid forms of production. Conceptualizing them as “partial organizations,” we argue that both the intentional design of organizational elements (such as membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning) as well as unintended adjustments of “unorganized” aspects drive boundary formation and impact boundary porosity. In addition, we contend that structuring dynamics will create specific trajectories for boundaries over time. Empirically, we further our theoretical framework on the basis of an in-depth case study of the Apache open-source software community during its formative years (1995–2002). We find that both the salience and formalization of boundaries increase over time. However, different conceptions of boundaries (such as efficiency, competence, power, and identity) become salient at different points in time. While design and adjustment drive boundary formation with regard to all boundary conceptions in our empirical case, porosity develops differently for each of them. We also demonstrate that the formalization of boundaries does not necessarily reduce boundary porosity, but actually may increase it.

Churches require an active congregation to provide services to their members and community. This study aims to examine the conditions under which perceived voice in decision‐making is related to church satisfaction and when satisfaction is related to withdrawal.

A total of 193 congregational members from an urban African‐American ministry were surveyed about their responses to a recent decision.

Although members without perceived voice within the church were less satisfied when the amount of their financial contributions was high, the same association was not present when it came to the amount of hours spent volunteering within the church. Church members with low satisfaction levels scaled back their involvement in the church and considered terminating their membership. Among those who were dissatisfied, newer church members considered exiting from the church to a greater extent than did long‐term members.

Because only one congregation was used, the findings might not generalize to congregations drawn from other denominations or who have a different demographic profile. Also, using self‐reports about a single critical incident may limit the generalizability of the results.

In order to enhance congregational involvement, church leadership should create opportunities for member voice and especially for those who make large financial donations.

This is the first study investigating how congregational members react to perceived voice in church decision‐making. It also demonstrates how perceived voice is related to financial contributions to churches.

Without feedback from members and former members, professional organizations run the risk of being stalemated. This study sought to explore perceptions of current and former members of the Association of Leadership Educators (ALE) related to the organization and the climate within the organization. No statistical differences were found in the perceptions of dues paying and non-dues paying members related to the climate of ALE as measured by the Team Climate Inventory (TCI); however, perceptions of both groups were fairly neutral. Open-ended questions were asked to elaborate, enhance, and clarify findings. Five themes emerged as successes achieved by ALE including the members, the ALE annual conference, information and idea sharing, networking, and the Journal of Leadership Education. Five themes also emerged as challenges facing the organization including a lack of direction or identity, recruitment and retention issues, lack of cohesion, lack of communication, and lack of participation.

The concept of a “category” and the social process of “categorization” occupy a crucial place in current theories of organizations. In this introductory chapter to Research in the Sociology of Organization's volume on Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution, we review published work in various streams of research and find that studies of organizational forms and identities, institutional logics, collective action frames, and product conceptual systems have key commonalities and predictable differences.

We study organizational vocabularies as complex social structures emerging from the association between organizational participants and words they use to describe and make sense of their experiences at work. Using data that we have collected on the association between managers in a multi-unit international company and words they use to describe their organizational units and the overall company, we examine the relational micro-mechanisms underlying the observed network structure of organizational vocabularies. We find that members of the same subsidiary tend to become more similar in terms of the words they use to describe their units. Members of the same subsidiary, however, do not use the same words to describe the corporate group. Consequently, the structure of organizational vocabularies tends to support consistent local interpretations, but reveals the presence of divergent meanings that organizational participants associate with the superordinate corporate group.

Research on identity in organizations takes endurance overtime as a taken‐for‐granted expectation, but then often explores how identity changes. Conversely, research on memory in organizations takes change as a taken‐for‐granted expectation and then explores how particular memories might be maintained by purposeful action. We used both of these literatures as a basis for exploring what happened to two aspects of an organizational group's identity over the course of its first seven years. One aspect of identity centered on the group's mission and the other on the group's internal processes. Based on analysis of the processes involved in the evolution of the group's identity, we suggest several factors that foster stability in identity and several factors that foster change in identity. From the identification of these factors, and based on Lewin's Field Theory approach, we suggest a more complex depiction of what identity stability or change might mean overtime.