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This paper seeks to review the current literature in order to explore how performance of leadership in project management determines project outcomes. The specific causes of project success or failure have been an area of much debate in the project management literature. Performance of leadership has been cited as a critical success factor, determining either the success or failure of a project.

An extensive literature review has been undertaken to explore our understanding of how project leadership performance impacts on project outcome.

The mechanisms through which leadership may impact on outcomes are considered. Implications include the need for project managers to prioritize training in leadership skills, and the need for continuous professional improvement to enhance leadership outcomes. No single leadership model is appropriate throughout the duration of the project. Performance, therefore, must be modified to align with the stages of the project duration.

While the literature has given meaningful insights into leadership of projects, there has been little research into performance management of project leadership. The work is the basis of developing a research agenda and establishing a conceptual framework. The opportunity exists, based on this work, for carrying out research on project leadership performance and its effect on project outcomes.

Insightful learning has been achieved into project leadership and the failing of practitioners in appropriate training and development at various stages of the projects life cycle.

Projects and project‐based management, delivered nationally and internationally, are of significant importance to organizations. Increasing understanding of the implications of leadership performance, therefore, is of critical importance.

The literature review has identified significant limitation in project leadership performance management. It is anticipated that this work will trigger further research.

This commentary is a reflective discussion of how to use simple social media tools in college-level writing courses, and contains research elements such as effective examples of what is attainable and possible when incorporating blogs (e.g., Posterous) and Twitter in the college classroom. In order to do this, it uses reflective writing with a focus on failures/successes in past courses, and also incorporates students' own comments on blogging and Twitter. The chapter's findings include the following: The overall ease of use and relative simplicity of certain social media tools make for low barriers of entry for a majority of students. The mobile accessibility of these online communicative technologies should also be of specific appeal. These characteristics should encourage student participation in ways that content management systems like Blackboard do not. The convenience of and allowance for quick and easy sharing of information via blogging and microblogging can also mean that each is often quicker than email for contacting someone. What makes both better than Blackboard concerns how they, when taken together, sustain class discussion, keeping it alive, present, and continuous. If proper affordances are made in terms of framing and timing, social media can make for successful additions to college-level courses. Simple tools allow and encourage students to document and reflect on their own learning in ways that are meaningful and unique as they are.

With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the status of teaching has been moved towards the centre of concerns in the UK higher education (HE) sector. This interest develops further the notion of teaching excellence created through various institutional and sectoral schemes such as the Higher Education Academy (HEA) fellowship. Whilst excellence schemes and the TEF all highlight the importance of teaching, they also run the danger of reducing it to lists and simplified proxies.

This chapter argues that reductive characterisations of teaching, through metrics supporting the TEF, such as the national student survey, or ‘idealised’ descriptions of the foundational aspects of ‘excellent practice’, all lead to partial accounts of the teaching process. Such characterisations might lead to creeping performativity and increasing organisational attempts to control. An alternative account of teaching is proposed based on complexity theory. This sees teaching as emergent, multifaceted and contextually based. It refutes notions of ‘best practice’ and argues that any attempt to capture ‘excellent practice’ is to reduce the holistic nature of the processes that bring teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment together.

Can the worst time for an organisation provide the best circumstances for management learning? One UK local authority began a management development programme 18 months before a wholescale reorganisation. This was not regarded as a rational thing to do. Explores the messiness and the politics that had to be worked with by those believing that a programme was necessary. However, training anxious and cynical managers about rational strategic models of change would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, the programme addressed the often hidden struggles, messiness, anxiety, incertainty and politics which influence management learning in a complex and turbulent organisation. The article outline participants’ feelings about the learning processes, and explains how connections were made between personal learning and organisational change. Finally it assesses the programme’s outcomes, concluding that this “bad time” for the organisation resulted in the development of managers’ ability to handle a terrifying amount of change.

The importance of sanitary conditions in the production, manufacture, and distribution of foods was never greater than to‐day, for less of the food consumed by the individual is produced and prepared at home than ever before; and likewise, the necessity for sanitary laws in regard to foods was never more keenly realised. The disclosures of the insanitary conditions in our packing houses, exaggerated in many instances, has aroused public indignation. The newspapers added fuel to the flame by rehashing every case in recent history containing anything gruesome or revolting in connection with the preparation of food products. These reports, appearing day after day in the newspapers, gave the public the false impression that the manufacture of human bodies into food products was a matter of not uncommon occurrence, and that insanitary conditions prevailed in the manufacture of most foods. The discussion was continued until not only this country, but Europe, looked with suspicion on the food products of the United States.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

The concept of empowerment is very familiar to the human services world where the goal is to empower clients to manage their own lives as much as possible. In the corporate world, however, empowerment is a fairly new concept. There are issues involved in the infusion of empowerment into the corporate structure which are addressed in this paper. These include the process of developing an empowerment structure that will continue to function, the identification of qualified employees who can manage their workloads within an empowerment system, and the commitment of managers to empowerment as a way of meeting production goals. Within the human services system, empowerment is an accepted form of practice. The corporate world is trying to develop this practice in an era of downsizing and redefining of structures. This paper maintains that the development of empowerment found in human services can be transferred to the corporate system because the process of infusing empowerment into each system is relatively the same.