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The purpose of this paper is to understand how high-performing schools develop and sustain improvement culture. While school culture has consistently been identified as an essential feature of high-performing schools, many of the ways in which culture shapes specific improvement efforts remain unclear. The paper draws on new research from social cognitive neuroscience and the anthropology and sociology of emotion to account for the relative impact of various meanings within school culture and how school commitment is enacted.

The analysis here draws on three years of ethnographic data collected in Harrison High School (HHS) in an urban public school district in River City, a large metropolitan area in the Midwestern USA. Though the school’s surrounding community had been socioeconomically depressed for many years, Harrison was selected for the study largely because of its steady improvement trajectory: in December, 2013, it was deemed a “Celebration” school under the state’s Multiple Measurement Rating system. The paper focuses on a period of time between 2013 and 2015, when the school was struggling to implement and localize a district-mandated push-in inclusion policy.

Study data suggest that the school’s eventual success in localizing the new inclusion policy was due in large part to a set of core interlocking feedback loops that generated specific emotionally charged meanings which guided its priorities, practices and direction. Specifically, the feedback loops explain how staff members and leaders generated and sustained empathy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, optimism in their capabilities and motivation to help them learn and flourish. Furthermore they show how school leaders and staff members generated and sustained confidence and trust in their colleagues’ abilities to collaboratively learn and solve problems.

The model of the school’s emotional ecology presented here connects two domains of educational practice that are frequently analyzed separately: teaching and learning, and organization and leadership. The paper shows how several key features of high-performing schools are actually made and re-made through the everyday practices of leaders and staff members, including relational trust, academic optimism and collective efficacy. In sum, the charged meanings described here contributed to leaders’ and staff members’ commitment to the school, its students and each other – and what Florek (2016) has referred to as their “common moral purpose.”

The research examines the simultaneous processes of value co-creation and value co-destruction in the implementation of a mobile banking application in rural Colombia. Rural communities experience digital and financial deficits and often become the object of technology-based initiatives. In the town, vulnerable female heads of household received a government subsidy through a mobile app, becoming an experimental group for this government–private bank collaboration. In an effort to create the first cashless society in Colombia, the bank engaged the entire town and local government to create a service ecosystem, constituted by operant resources.

This study uses a qualitative, ethnographic approach to investigate the experiences of stakeholders in engaging with a mobile banking app. The empirical data is drawn from 34 interviews, representing different layers of this service ecosystem. The study identified and analysed actor engagement behaviours that occurred in the micro-, meso-, macro- and meta-layers of this ecosystem that shaped the perception and usage of mobile payments and digital money for rural consumers.

The study found that simultaneous manifestations of the co-creation and co-destruction of value present in different layers ultimately diminished the value proposition for this digital money system. We shed light on how actor engagement transitions across different layers of the ecosystem and that negative interactions in the meta-layer of the ecosystem can affect perceptions of value in the micro-layer.

This study has contributed to the service literature by integrating epistemological cultural theory into value co-creation and co-destruction construct. In doing so, we provide a broader context for understanding how actor engagement can negatively impact on the value creation process and offer a meaningful contribution to the development of midrange theory of the value creation process.

While the relevance and rationale of strategic communication in organized religion are prevalent in academic and professional literature, there exists a dearth of both theoretical concepts and empirical knowledge, especially from a European perspective. Therefore, this chapter examines how strategic communication can be modelled in organized religion with its specific characteristics and logics by building a framework for strategic communication in this field of research. The framework questions perspectives of strategic communication and communication management that only concentrate on entities like famous persons, groups, movements or organizations and less on belief systems, organized and less organized entities interacting with each other. Religious organizations follow other rationalities like companies or non-profit organizations. Therefore, theories of corporate communication or public relations do not fit within the realm of organized religion, whose mission goes far beyond the organization. Taking into account religious institutions in strategic communication, this chapter delivers new theoretical insights by demonstrating how strategic communication can contribute to the specific purposes of organized religion. Furthermore, the study indicates the specific challenges communication professionals working in the area of religion are confronted with. Finally, it offers practical solutions for the specific field of organized religion by evolving specific target horizons of organized religion. Activating and developing the communication function of more or less independent bodies are main tasks for communication professionals working in organized religion and other meta-organizations.

This paper presents base‐line data about the incumbency or length of time spent in office by Australian vice‐chancellors who held appointments in the years 1963 to 1983. Principal findings of the analysis are that the average length of incumbency has declined from 13.6 years for 1963 to 8.0 years for 1983 vice‐chancellors, that the period 1983 to 1987 will witness an unprecedentedly high rate of turnover among vice‐chancellors, and that an increasing proportion of vice‐chancellors no longer regard their incumbency as their final full‐time professional appointment. The conclusions are related to apparent stratification and ranking among Australian universities in an emerging system of higher education which is becoming more complex.

A surface view of monotheistic or “Western” religions might lead some to infer a singularity to truth that is inconsistent with paradoxical thinking. The author explores a key Biblical narrative common to both Judaism and Christianity – the story of origins that unfolds in the Garden of Eden. The author posits that the foundations of those belief systems, and particularly those of Christian theology, are paradoxical as evidenced in their historic texts (i.e., the Old and New Testaments of the Bible). A foundational paradox of an “ought versus is” (ideal vs. actual) tension that underlies or intertwines in knot-like fashion with other paradoxes is identified in ways that account for a current world view marked by temporality (in tension with eternality) and becoming (in tension with being). These tensions are made salient as humans continually work toward ideals that seem always just out of reach. Paradox conceptualization is also expanded to propose the notion of mutual embeddedness rather than mutual exclusivity of opposites. Implications for organizational paradoxes are explicated, along with directions for future research based on novel insights provided by the juxtaposition of religion and paradox.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.