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The aim of this paper is to report on the findings of a systematic literature review‐seeking to elicit existing evidence of the nature of organisational culture in community pharmacy organisations.

This review takes a novel approach to systematically identifying and synthesising the peer‐reviewed research literature pertaining to organisational culture in this setting, its antecedents and outcomes.

The review provides an overview of the scope of and research methods used in the identified literature, together with a narrative synthesis of its findings, framed within five dimensions of organisational culture: the professional‐business role dichotomy; workload, management style, social support and autonomy; professional culture; attitudes to change and innovation; and entrepreneurial orientation.

There is a need for more detailed and holistic exploration of organisational culture in community pharmacy, using a greater diversity of research methods and a greater focus on patient‐related outcomes.

This paper demonstrates that, whilst little research has explicitly investigated organisational culture in this context, there exists a range of evidence describing aspects of that culture, some of the environmental and organisational factors helping to shape it, and its impact on the pharmacy workforce, services delivered and business outcomes. It highlights the importance of the business‐professional role dichotomy in community pharmacy; the influence of individual pharmacists' characteristics and organisational setting; and the impact on pharmacists' wellbeing and job satisfaction and the services delivered. It provides less evidence of the impact of organisational culture on the quality and safety of service provision.

Literature and textbooks about intercultural communication and management often feature cultural differences rather than similarities. Japanese culture is frequently distinguished in business and management contexts from Western culture. This process arguably leads to an overemphasis of the uniqueness of Japanese culture. A review of relevant literature, however, reveals that the tendency to overemphasise the uniqueness of Japanese culture is one shared by both Western and Japanese scholars. This paper discusses how the discourse has emerged in business and intercultural literature by tracing the influence of historical and economic factors. It also explores the implications of describing Japanese business culture in relation to practices in the West for both managers and students internationally. International students of business, who are grappling with intercultural communication literature as it pertains to Japan and the West, need to engage in critical ways with the discourse adopted in the literature. The intention therefore of the paper is to illuminate how a “differences‐focused” approach in texts could promote a stereotypical and potentially facile view of Japanese culture rather than one that encourages a more meaningful and informed understanding that appreciates the context in which the uniqueness of Japanese culture has hitherto been presented.

The aim of this paper is to identify the principles and characteristics of a learning conference which uses action learning and action research (ALAR) processes to create: optimal learning for all participants through a collaborative, inclusive conference culture; further knowledge creation in publishing conference papers post‐conference through a supportive research culture.

The 2010 World Congress of the Action Learning and Action Research Association (ALARA) is showcased to exemplify a learning conference, using the PIP (preamble–interview–postscript) framework to demonstrate the utility of this new genre for research and writing conference papers and action research models as frameworks to support publishing articles.

Discussion offers ways to enhance opportunities for conference learning through creative purposeful activities that promote collaboration, critical thinking and reflection, and models of action research cycles to progress research from conference presentation to journal article.

The paper makes the crucial link between conference procedure and publication of learning from conference to extend knowledge creation. The PIP model used here presents ways for novice researchers to network with experienced researchers through interview, for professional development, career advancement and publication.

Many students irrespective of level of study produce excellent course work which, if given support and encouragement, could clearly be of a publishable standard. Academic staff are expected to produce quality publications meeting peer-review standards although they may be relatively novice authors. All are engaged in some aspects of academic writing practices but not as frequently involved in co-production of publications emanating from student work. This activity is still at the margins of much of the student experience. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mindful of these issues, the authors designed and offered a writing programme including a writing retreat. This brought together undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of applied disciplines (health and art, design and architecture) and their supervisors with the aim of co-producing publications and participating in a community of scholarly practice. The project was delivered over nine months. It involved four days “compulsory” attendance and included a preparatory workshop, a two day off-campus writing retreat and a dissemination event. Student and supervisors applied to participate as a team. Kirkpatrick’s (2006) four-stage classic model: reaction, learning, changes in behaviour and real world results was used as a framework for the educational evaluation.

Key findings organised thematically were: supervisor-supervisee relationships; space and time; building confidence enabling successful writing and publication.

This paper will provide an overview of the design, content and approaches used for successful delivery of this innovative project. It will draw on examples that illustrate the different types of joint enterprise that emerged, illuminate experiences of co-production and co-authorship along with recommendations for future ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the organisational cultures of two different parts of the emergency service, the police and the ambulance service.

Semi-structured interviews with 45 police officers and ambulance staff sought to understand more about the relationships between these two distinctly different professions who work together closely and regularly in often very difficult situations.

Interviews with police officers and ambulance staff revealed the strong and harmonious working relationship between the two professions and an existence of both shared organisational characteristics and shared cultural characteristics. These cultural characteristics, identified as both explicit and tacit in nature provide the “glue” which not only binds each organisation together but which appears to cement a longer term, tangible link between the police and ambulance services.

This paper reveals a new dimension within cultural analyses of occupational groups by considering the shared cultural characteristics of two groups within the emergency services, police officers and ambulance staff. This potential for cultural boundary crossing is explored in detail.

Conferences, while central to academic endeavors, are an understudied research site. This purpose of this study is to describe the experience of an Arab Israeli teachers’ college in hosting a large international academic conference on multiculturalism, conducted entirely in English. Most of the academic staff and all of the students are Arabic speakers. This added a layer of challenge for all our faculty and students.

This reflective, retroactive and descriptive case study builds on the above points. It is a reflective “case story” told by the college head.

This paper describes the benefits and growth experienced by each of the involved parties, which resulted in a changing academic culture and new academic self-confidence and vision for all concerned. This paper also details weaknesses and opportunities missed. Envisioning, planning and bringing to fruition this conference was a crucible experience for the college, enhancing our multicultural understanding, learning and commitment.

This reflective description offers an original perspective on multiculturalism through the lens of an international conference hosted by an academic institution where the native language is not English.

The Internet and World Wide Web offer a rapidly increasing quantity of valuable resources on Asia‐specific information. In view of the vast scope of the Asian countries and the fast proliferation of good sites, this article offers only a sampling of valuable Internet resources as starting points for further exploration. It covers meta sites, Asian search engines, library resource pages, and electronic journals and newspapers. The first part of this paper includes the Internet sites of Asian studies, the second part contains selected East Asian country resources from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and the third part presents the leading Asian electronic journals and newspapers. Preference was given to comprehensive sites on countries or regions that have been the focus of recent academic study and research. All the sources are in English and some of them contain bilingual or multilingual versions.

This paper offers a synthesis of best practice on how to build, maintain or modify an organisation’s culture. The image of a company in which all employees strive towards common goals is now a well‐established theme of management rhetoric. Teamwork has always been considered an adorned virtue of an organisation, where staff endeavour to work collectively as one body and stick together – whatever the outcome. This idealistic view is, however, a far cry from the real world. This paper provides a set of general guiding principles for culture management in organisations. Leaders and managers are advised to formulate an overall strategy, develop cultural leaders, share the culture by communicating effectively with staff, measure performance and communicate culture in all dealings with customers. These five distinct, yet related, elements are essential if culture management is to be successful, and so this paper argues that for organisational success, all five must ultimately merge to form one unified whole.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of knowledge on how research evaluation in different national and organisational contexts affects, often in unintended ways, research and publication practices. In particular, it looks at the development of book publication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the Czech Republic since 2004, when a performance-based system of evaluation was introduced, up to the present.

The paper builds upon ethnographic research complemented by the analysis of Czech science policy documents, data available in the governmental database “Information Register of R&D results” and formal and informal interviews with expert evaluators and other stakeholders in the research system. It further draws on the authors’ own experience as scholars, who have also over the years participated in a number of evaluation procedures as peers and experts.

The number of books published by researchers in SSH based at Czech institutions has risen considerably in reaction to the pressure for productivity that is inscribed into the evaluation methodology and has resulted in the rise of in-house publishing by researchers’ own research institution, “fake internationalisation” using foreign low-quality presses as the publication venue, and the development of a culture of orphaned books that have no readers.

In the Czech Republic robust and internationally harmonised bibliometric data regarding books would definitely help to create a form of research evaluation that would stimulate meaningful scholarly book production. At the same time, better-resourced and better-designed peer review evaluation is needed.

This is the first attempt to analyse in detail the conditions and consequences the Czech performance-based research evaluation system has for SSH book publication. The paper demonstrates that often discussed harming of SSH and book-writing in particular by performance-based IF-centred research evaluation does not necessarily manifest in declining numbers of publications. On the contrary, the number of books published may increase at the cost of producing more texts of questionable scholarly quality.

With the worldwide growth of the Chinese tourism market, a number of studies have emerged, that attempt to understand the phenomenon, including the influence of Chinese culture on Chinese tourist behavior. This research aims to answer four questions: How has Chinese culture been adopted in tourism literature? What is the current state of tourism research on Chinese culture? What are the similarities, differences and research gaps between international and Chinese studies in this area of investigation? What are the directions that future tourism research will take?

The articles for this systematic review were published in major international hospitality and tourism journals and Chinese journals over a period of 20 years (1993-2012). A meta-review was carried out on 80 Chinese and English tourism literature dating from 1993 to 2012.

This review showed that Chinese culture has been fragmentally operationalized due to underdeveloped Chinese cultural theories in tourism, independent and unrelated extant cultural systems and perspectives and lack of empirical testing for theory development. Two major theoretical systems of Chinese culture in tourist research were revealed in this review: cross-cultural theory and traditional Chinese cultural framework. The current state of tourism research on Chinese culture was also analyzed. The similarities, differences and research gaps were identified between international and Chinese studies on this inquiry. Implications for future tourism research in this area were suggested.

Unveiling the evolving research progress of a single culture helps to provide a deeper insight into how culture was used to analyze the behavior of individual tourist markets, and hence to better understand a particular tourist market.

This research has synthesized a wide range of literature to unveil the extant understanding of Chinese culture as reflected in Chinese tourists and outline the ways forward in this area of investigation.