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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the humanitarian supply chain (HSC) as the backbone of the humanitarian operations. It further proposes feasible ways to overcome some of the main supply chain challenges identified by practitioners to achieve cost efficient and effective operations.

The challenges that the HSC faces and proposed changes to overcome them are gathered from interviews with nearly 40 practitioners.

Five critical issues that affect the future of HSCs are identified along with recommendations to address them.

It supports the fulfillment of the agenda for humanity’s five core responsibilities: global leadership to prevent and end conflict, uphold the norms that safeguard humanity, leave no one behind, change people’s lives – from delivering aid to ending need, and invest in humanity.

The original report was presented at the first World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May 2016. The reader can find it via the following link www.logcluster.org/sites/default/files/whs_humanitarian_supply_chain_paper_final_24_may.pdf

Considers how non‐Thais can negotiate successfully withe business and government executives in Thailand. Gives an overview of Thailand’s geography, climate, population, religion and business practice. Discusses important aspects of the social‐cultural environment that have a significant effect on the way Thai’s negotiate. Includes further tips regarding body language, entertainment protocol, how to dress, and favourite negotiating tactics by buyers and sellers. Provides conclusions and directions for further research.

Organization development is focused on implementing a planned process of positive humanistic change in organizations through the use of social science theory, action research, and data-based feedback methods. The role of personality in that change process, however, has historically been ignored or relegated to a limited set of interventions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a conceptual overview of the linkages between personality and OD, discuss the current state of personality in the field including key trends in talent management, and offer a new multi-level framework for conceptualizing applications of personality for different types of OD efforts. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.

In this article, the author begins with the assumptions that 1) groups are becoming an increasingly popular way of dealing with organizational challenges and problems and 2) organizations are becoming increasingly multicultural in their membership. Dr. Proehl seeks to demonstrate that the traditional ways of working with groups are not effective when the membership is multicultural. To support this contention, she identifies six commonly accepted assumptions about how to develop high performing groups and then challenges each assumption from a crosscultural perspective. The author closes the article by offering suggestions for working effectively with multicultural groups.

This paper examines the relationship between human resource practices in 173 hospitals in the United Kingdom and four organizational outcome categories – clinical, financial, employee attitudes and perceptions, and patient attitudes and perceptions. The overarching proposition set forth and examined in this paper is that human resource management (HRM) practices and delivery of care practices have varied effects on each of these outcomes. More specifically, the authors set forth the proposition that specific practices will have positive effects on one outcome category while simultaneously having a negative effect on other performance outcomes, broadly defined.

The paper introduces a broader stakeholder framework for assessing the HR–performance relationship in the healthcare setting. This multi-dimensional framework incorporates the effects of human resource practices on customers (patients), management, and frontline staff and can also be applied to other sectors such as manufacturing. This approach acknowledges the potential for incompatibilities between stakeholder performance objectives. In the healthcare industry specifically, our framework broadens the notion of performance.

Overall, our results provide support for the proposition that different stakeholders will be affected differently by the use of managerial practices. We believe that the findings reported in this paper highlight the importance of examining multiple stakeholder outcomes associated with managerial practices and the need to identify the inherent trade-offs associated with their adoption.

This chapter examines the emotional labor of food provisioning for women engaged in local food systems (LFSs), and considers how socio-demographic factors influence the emotional labor of food provisioning for women engaged in LFSs.

Qualitative data was used for analysis, and was gathered through in-depth interviews with 43 women across the state of Ohio who expressed concern with the agrifood system, but engaged in varied levels of LFS participation.

Results confirm that women engaged in LFSs experience heightened emotional labor in food provisioning. Showing care to family, community and the environment, transmitting values, sharing cultural traditions, and demonstrating skill were related to positive emotions that were heightened by LFS engagement. Women with higher incomes, those with partners and children, and those who were not employed were more likely to report these positive emotions associated with food provisioning.

Negative emotions associated with food provisioning were also heightened by LFS engagement. Women reported that LFS engagement heightened their sense of demand, burden, stress, and guilt with food provisioning. Low-income women, employed women, younger women, and women with children were more likely to report negative feelings connected with food provisioning.

This research helps fill a gap in existing literature and encourages agrifood scholars and LFS proponents to acknowledge the fact that women engaged in LFSs are performing significant emotional carework in their food provisioning. This research also confirms that considering intersectionality can be important to understanding the sphere of consumption in agrifood studies.

Volume 17 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains seven diverse, provocative and perhaps in some cases controversial papers. Preliminary versions of several of these papers were presented at Advances in Industrial Relations/Labor and Employment Relations Association ‘Best Papers’ sessions held at the 2008 and 2009 meetings of the Labor and Employment Relations Association.

Accumulated evidence suggests that efforts at diversity management (DM) yield mixed results or even fail in terms of promoting workforce diversity. Previous scholarly attempts to explain the mixed results of DM initiatives provided only partial understanding. This study applies a paradox perspective to better understand the challenges of DM from the vantage point of diversity managers, who play a central role in the promotion and implementation of diversity initiatives.

In-depth interviews with diversity managers in large business organizations in Israel explored practitioners' conceptions of the challenges underlying the implementation of diversity initiatives. A grounded theory approach was utilized.

The findings reveal the emergence of paradox: diversity initiatives generate organizational tensions that undermine their success and hence amplify the need for further diversity interventions. Three distinct paradoxes are identified: necessary change vs desire for stability; bureaucratic control vs flexible procedures; and long-term business gains vs short-term losses. Diversity managers utilize two opposing strategies to contend with these paradoxes.

This study does not represent voices of diverse employees or of top executives. The data focused on mid-level practitioners' descriptions of DM challenges and their methods of contending with them.

The findings shed light on an effective strategy of contending with paradox. Recognizing paradox and navigating it properly may greatly advance the success of costly DM change interventions. Implications are suggested regarding the academic education and training of DM practitioners.

Based on the paradox framework, which offers a novel vantage point for understanding the challenges of implementing DM, the findings contribute to the scholarly understanding of the limited success of DM interventions.