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The deputy principalship is one of the least understood roles in the schools of the restructured education systems of Australia. Little attention has been given by educational policy makers, academics and researchers as to how the deputy principal should contribute to the essential functions of the self‐managing school. Uses the research literature to identify the traditional role of the deputy principal and the factors which have constrained the evolution of the role. Assesses the effects of current policy initiatives for the deputy principalship in Australian education. An emergent facet of the role is proposed which gives greater emphasis to educational leadership in an administrative team. The failure of practitioners to make use of opportunities to reconceptualize the deputy principalship will marginalize the role to the central functions of the self‐managing school.

As more firms become interested in the idea of work restructuring to provide satisfying (or maybe just more satisfying) jobs, so the seminar construction industry is faced with a new challenge — how do we meet the need for practical training?

This paper explores organizational restructuring in corporate law firms. We review recent changes in law firms’ business models and structures, specifically as they relate to the externalization of work – or the unbundling of work and its placement with outside entities, which redefines the division of labor and the nature of the employment relationship. We draw from the extensive scholarship on the legal profession to raise empirical and theoretical implications of market-driven change to the careers of lawyers as well as the shifting patterns of stratification within corporate firms and the profession at large.

Organizations that adopt new practices employ managers to make decisions about how to materialize these practices. I examine how these managers move between the meanings and resources found in extra-local and local realms. I find that managers’ practices shift over time from adapting BPR practices to inhabiting BPR as an idea. Managers’ approaches are shaped by each organization’s history of efforts to introduce extra-local ideas. Rather than adapting BPR practices, managers draw on change tools, techniques, and methods that have worked in the organization and integrate BPR work into ongoing interactions, activities, and language in the local context.

The question of health and safety at work is a central issue for trade unions. In Britain it is an area of concern where there were important legislative initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, although surprisingly this has received relatively little attention in the debates about trade unionism. This neglect results in an aspect of union activity about which little is known. Explores through a detailed longitudinal study of a middle‐range engineering firm, from the late 1970s into the 1990s, the ways in which trade unions organize and act on health and safety questions. Argues that it is almost “routine” that workers face dangers and hazards at work, a central feature of the work and employment experience of most workers. However, this is often difficult to deal with as individual issues, or as matters which are subject to collective consideration. On the one hand, workers often appear to accept the dangers and hazards they face. On the other hand, managements are preoccupied with questions relating to production and finance, rather than the day‐to‐day problems faced by workers. This tension suggests that the future wellbeing of workers in unionized workplaces lies not so much with legislative provisions and rights at work, but in education and the organizing ability of workplace unions, raising and addressing what often seem like individualistic problems in collective ways.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of graph theoretic structural modeling for assessing the possible reduction in complexity of the work flow procedures in an organization due to lean initiatives. A tool to assess the impact of lean initiative on complexity of the system at an early stage of decision making is proposed.

First, the permanent function-based graph theoretic structural model has been applied to understand the complex structure of a manufacturing system under consideration. The model helps by systematically breaking it into different sub-graphs that identify all the cycles of interactions among the subsystems in the organization in a systematic manner. The physical interpretation of the existing quantitative methods linked to graph theoretic methodology, namely two types of coefficients of dissimilarity, has been used to evolve the new measures of organizational complexity. The new methods have been deployed for studying the impact of different lean initiatives on complexity reduction in a case industrial organization.

The usefulness and the application of new proposed measures of complexity have been demonstrated with the help of three cases of lean initiatives in an industrial organization. The new measures of complexity have been proposed as a credible tool for studying the lean initiatives and their implications.

The paper may lead many researchers to use the proposed tool to model different cases of lean manufacturing and pave a new direction for future research in lean manufacturing.

The paper demonstrates the application of new tools through cases and the tool may be used by practitioners of lean philosophy or total quality management to model and investigate their decisions.

The proposed measures of complexity are absolutely new addition to the tool box of graph theoretic structural modeling and have a potential to be adopted by practical decision makers to steer their organizations though such decisions before the costly interruptions in manufacturing systems are tried on ground.

The purpose of this paper is to study how job reductions affect product innovation and marketing innovation in a sample of 2,034 Spanish manufacturing firms in the period 2007–2014.

Poisson and logistic regression models with random effects were used to analyse the impact of downsizing on some innovation outcomes of firms.

The results of this research show that the stressful measure of job reductions may have unexpected consequences, stimulating innovation. However downsizing combined with radical organisational changes such as new equipment, techniques or processes seems to have a negative impact on product and marketing innovation.

This research has two original features. First, it explores the unconventional direction of causality from the planned elimination of jobs to innovation outputs. Secondly, the paper looks at the combined effect of downsizing and other restructuring measures on different types of innovation. Following the threat-rigidity theory, we assume that this combination represents a major threat for survivors that leads to lower levels of product and marketing innovation.

Over the past few years, there has been increasing concern about, and research into, the problems of the low quality of working life of the work force in the UK. This has found expression in the establishment of the Work Research Unit at the Department of Employment, the Work Research Group at Henley College, the Computer Research Unit at Manchester Business School, the work of the Tavistock Institute, the UK links with the International Council for the Quality of Working Life and the research and consultancy activities of many universities, polytechnics and professional bodies.

This paper uses ethnographic data from an Australian university to explore constructs of “otherness” focusing on women in lower‐level university work. The work of these women, who hold both academic and non‐academic staff positions, takes place in the spatial and symbolic locale we call the “ivory basement“. Poststructural feminism provides the basis for an examination of the contradictions and subtleties of their identity work as they respond to the pressures of restructuring and managerialism. Faced with a request from these women for certain aspects of their relational work to remain unseen, unrecognised and unspoken, this study assents to that request and focuses instead on options for how poststructural feminism might elaborate their identity work stories. The paper is concerned with the tensions between women's own struggle with being positioned as “other” and poststructural feminist theorizing of the same.

Post‐industrial predictions of a rapid growth in new technology homeworking have gained widespread currency to become part of the conventional wisdom. However the evidence, including primary research material, suggests that the claims for new technology homeworking, both regarding its extent and its alleged benefits, have been considerably overestimated. In particular, new technology homeworking by itself does not appear to open up opportunities for women to improve their position in the labour market; the demographic changes predicted for the 1990s may provide a better bet. Nevertheless, there is a danger in assuming that all firms apply the same strategy when employing homeworkers; at least three different variations can be identified and this has important implications for personnel managers. The overestimation of new technology homeworking stands in stark contrast to traditional homeworking where the extent has been considerably underestimated. This marginalisation of traditional homeworking stems in large part from the distortion caused by the conceptual split between private and public realms. The failure to find evidence to support the growth of new technology homeworking leads to a consideration of how the arguments may better be considered as rhetoric designed to advance a certain set of ideas – in particular that set associated with “privatisation” as a political ideology.