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After it introduced the extremely successful Droid smartphone into the market in 2009, Motorola quickly moved to develop the next-generation Droid 2 before the next wave of smartphones (including the rumored iPhone 4) flooded the market. The development process was moving smoothly for the company when Verizon, its biggest partner, dropped a bombshell. It wasn't happy with the mechanical camera button on the Droid 2 (citing customer feedback) and wanted it to be changed to a software button like the iPhone's. This request immediately placed Motorola in the proverbial horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it couldn't brush away the request of its biggest and most important partner. On the other hand, changing the camera button now would mean delaying the Droid 2's entry into the market. Should the Droid 2 team remove the camera's hardware button in favor of a software button per Verizon's request, or not?

John Smith, the product manager, leads the cross-functional Droid 2 team. The case setting is an emergency “war room” meeting to address this critical issue, just weeks prior to launch. John's objective is to obtain the salient facts and opinions of team members quickly so he can make an informed recommendation to his boss by the end of the day. He is concerned that this last-minute request for a design change will not only threaten to delay the launch, which would have significant financial implications, but could potentially create deep fissures in a hitherto effective team that had been running like a well-oiled machine.

The case puts students in a situation that simulates a real-world discussion and allows them to experience what it is like, as a product manager, to orchestrate a meeting with cross-functional teams that have conflicting priorities and agendas. It illustrates the challenges a product manager faces while striving to make important decisions with little or no direct authority over the various teams.

After reading and analyzing this case, students will be able to:

• Experience the dynamics of cross-functional teams in product management

• Practice running effective and productive meetings

• Practice bringing together various personalities and points of view

• Understand the importance of setting goals and clear expectations

• Internalize the importance of building relationships and influencing teams, even when you do not have direct authority

Experience the dynamics of cross-functional teams in product management

Practice running effective and productive meetings

Practice bringing together various personalities and points of view

Understand the importance of setting goals and clear expectations

Internalize the importance of building relationships and influencing teams, even when you do not have direct authority

Older people are vulnerable to fuel poverty on the island of Ireland. This paper seeks to explore the lived experiences of older people in cold weather with a view to informing fuel poverty policy and service responses.

A postal and online survey utilising an opportunistic sample of older people living in Ireland and linked with a range of services/community and voluntary groups was undertaken in January‐April 2011. Data on the experiences of 722 older people in the cold weather of winter 2010/2011 were analysed in the context of socio‐economic, health, and housing circumstances.

During the period of extreme cold weather half of the sample reported that they went without other household necessities due to the cost of home‐heating. In general, 62 per cent of those surveyed worried about the cost of home‐heating. Homes considered “too cold” were more likely to lack central heating and experience damp/draughts. Staying indoors, keeping the heating on, and eating hot food/drinks were common responses to cold weather but a diverse range of behaviours was observed. Associations were observed between living in a cold home and higher levels of chronic illness, falls and loneliness, and fewer social activities.

The sample cannot be considered nationally representative; single occupancy and social housing units were overrepresented.

This research found significant associations between living in a cold home/difficulty paying for heating, and aspects of ill‐health and social exclusion. While no causal association can be assumed, this phenomenon has implications for policies supporting healthy ageing.

This introduction provides an overview of the discourse on alternative agrifood movements (AAMs) to (1) ascertain the degree of convergence and divergence around a common ethos of alterity and (2) context the chapters of the book. AAMs have increased in recent years in response to the growing legitimation crisis of the conventional agrifood system. Some agrifood researchers argue that AAMs represent the vanguard movement of our time, a formidable counter movement to global capitalism. Other authors note a pattern of blunting of the transformative qualities of AAMs due to conventionalization and mainstreaming in the market. The literature on AAMs is organized following a Four Questions in Agrifood Studies (Constance, 2008) framework. The section for each Question ends with a case study to better illustrate the historical dynamics of an AAM. The literature review ends with a summary of the discourse applied to the research question of the book: Are AAMs the vanguard social movement of our time? The last section of this introduction provides a short description of each contributing chapter of the book, which is divided into five sections: Introduction; Theoretical and Conceptual Framings; Food Sovereignty Movements; Alternative Movements in the Global North; and Conclusions.

The health industry is rapidly adopting digital services and face-to-face offerings are being replaced by e-services. One example is peer-to-peer survivor networks for cancer patients. This study investigates the virtual exchanges in survivor networks and whether these exchanges are valued for economic, symbolic, or expressive worth. The research seeks to address whether the alleviation of loneliness is possible.

The qualitative work in this study utilizes netnographic explorations and in-depth interviews with cancer survivors, average age 62, to investigate the social exchange continuum in peer-to-peer online patient survivor networks.

This study shows that technological innovations can aid survivorship when the exchanges are meaningful. Meaningful interactions within gift systems are valued for expressive worth and are established upon the notion of selfless gifts where the giver expects nothing in return. For networks to operate via expressiveness, informants must be open and vulnerable to others. Findings show that biographical narratives are useful tools for creating an expressive environment and givers become more giving after engaging in selfless acts. The intangibility and immaterial nature of virtual gifts creates a collective identity and fosters an aggregate extended self.

Implications emphasize the need among survivors of trauma to connect with others. Digital technologies allow connections on a global scale, so survivors can find others with similar needs. Peer-to-peer networks provide a way for survivors to meet, interact with, and extend their aggregate selves through other survivors, while experiencing a transcendent sense that they are part of something bigger than self alone.

The concept of style is gaining momentum in organizational research. Focussing on its implications for strategy, this paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework to make the notion of style operational and applicable to both research and practice. Style is defined here as a combinatorial, socially situated and semiotic device that can be organized into typologies – recurrent combinations of stylistic dimensions exerting a normative and semiotic function within and across contexts. The empirical analysis, situated in the field of electronic music, considers the music genres and the colour dimension of artists' appearance as components of their style. Results show how coherent style typologies normatively dominate the field and how non-conformist but coherent typologies correspond to superior creative performance. Operating as unifying device, style can transform varied and potentially confounding traits into distinctiveness and shed light on competitive market dynamics that cannot be fully explained via other theoretical constructs.

Beginning with the premise that large corporations are legal entities but not members of the moral community, the paper examines how “corporate ethics codes” might facilitate ethical actions by employees. “Wide reflective equilibrium” is explored as a way of creating “corporate ethics codes.” I suggest how a wide reflective equilibrium mediated ethics code might be utilized to suffuse ethics throughout an organization. Before exploring how wide reflective equilibrium might facilitate the development and use of corporate ethics codes to promote ethical actions by members of a company, I consider another vision of a corporate code of ethics. Some proponents of such codes may reject my description of this alternative model as unrepresentative of their work, but I question their reasons for doing so. I call this alternative approach “The Ten Commandments” model, and I argue that any approach to developing a corporate code of ethics that is consistent with this model is unlikely to promote ethics throughout an organization – and may actually have the opposite effect.

A little over three years ago, Apple introduced a new kind of software called HyperCard. Then, as now, this program defies definition. The users of HyperCard essentially fix the boundaries of the program, making it a database, a graphics catalog, an audio resource, a book, or some combination of all of these categories. Apple, in its latest manuals for the program, calls HyperCard “an ”information tool‐kit,” and in its most creative applications, the program truly lives up to this billing.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework for the social pillar of lean (SPL), which is a neglected topic in the lean management literature.

The authors first identify shortcomings in research on the SPL that are attributable to neglect of relevant perspectives in organisational research. The authors then present a theoretical case outlining the factors that should be considered in SPL research, how they relate to one another and how they should be integrated in future studies of lean change implementation.

The theoretical framework for the SPL proposes a categorisation of factors and their relationships across levels of analysis that are relevant to the SPL. The inclusion of previously neglected perspectives, such as the relational coordination theory, within this framework offers new insights and directions for research.

By emphasising relationships, the SPL framework sheds light on the scale and complexity of the management challenges involved in lean implementation.

The proposed framework promises to enhance the efficacy of lean research by focussing on factors, such as relationships, that are most relevant to lean implementation.