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Public schools operate in a changing and dynamic environment evident in technological innovations, increased social heterogeneity and competition, all contributing to school leaders’ uncertainty. Such changes inevitably influence schools’ inner dynamic and may therefore undermine schools’ organizational health. School leaders have a crucial role in buffering these external influences and promoting schools’ organizational health. The purpose of this paper is to assess the role transformational school leaders play in mediating the relationship between perceived environmental uncertainty and schools’ organizational health in a context characterized by uncertainty and instability which follow political instability.

The researchers administered questionnaires to 954 teachers coming from 191 randomly sampled public elementary schools in Israel.

Results indicate a negative impact that perceived environmental uncertainty has on schools’ organizational health evident in the degree of academic emphasis and staff affiliation with the school, in the school’s institutional integrity, and in the principal’s ability to both secure resources for the school and demonstrate collegiality toward teachers. Findings also show that transformational school principals are able to moderate the negative impact environmental uncertainty has on schools’ organizational health.

The findings validate the growing uncertainty characterizing the environment in which public schools operate. They further strengthen existing knowledge on the transformational leadership style in light of its unique capacity to buffer negative external influences imposed on schools and maintain their organizational health.

In a previous issue of Serials Review, I described the three international organizations that I then assumed were the principal ones concerned with the protection of threatened tribal peoples throughout the world. I now know that I had overlooked one very important organization that is in fact coterminous with the organized effort to eradicate slavery. Until very recently, that organization was known as the Anti‐Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights. Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations places the foundation of this society in 1839, a date that is off by fifty‐one years, inasmuch as it can be shown that the society under at least two earlier names is continuous with the society that emerged, reorganized, redefined, and renamed in 1839 and with the society that remains vigorously active today.

This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement. The intangibility spectrum is presented as a mental model for service managers to consider how to use cognitive computing to support augmenting their value proposition by moving across the spectrum.

Three frameworks are integrated: a five systems framework, a system's impact classification of types of cognitive computing and a tangibility spectrum.

Three examples illustrate the potential value of this integrative approach for service management.

This is the first integration of these frameworks, and two of them are the result of the first author's research.

In considering this subject, it is desirable to consult, and to go by, official documents and any comments made thereon by competent and unprejudiced persons who are recognised as authorities in their special line. In this connection it will be best to take, first, the text of the latest Imperial law as it stands (which is very explicit in regard to what is permitted and to what is not permitted to be done), secondly, the still more explicit official instructions as to how this law is to be carried out and enforced, and, thirdly, the comments of experts on the subject in some standard book intended for public guidance. Such a book is No. 68 of the well‐known Guttentag Law Series, edited by Doctors Lebbin and Baum.

This chapter explores the strategic motives behind the decision of hotels to internationalize. It approaches the subject from the perspective of the soft-service sector and aims to develop an understanding of this phenomenon. The literature covers several different factors that stimulate the decision to expand operations abroad. The process requires a trigger that will initiate the process and control the assignment until completion. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with international hotel chains to develop an understanding of the process. The findings reveal factors that can be distinguished between proactive and reactive and also be categorized under the four major motives behind internationalization: seeking natural resources, markets, efficiency and strategic assets or capabilities. The international strategy of hotel chains provides a roadmap for expansion and often acts as a trigger. The findings also reveal the significant role of vice presidents (VPs) of international development, development directors, agents and networks in initiating the process of internationalization and stimulating the chains towards specific parts of the world. One of the main differences between manufacturing and soft services is the wide variety of entry modes that are at the disposal of services. The findings are consistent with the literature published and provide an insight into the initial steps towards internationalization by hotel chains, in the post-COVID era.

Research question: What are the strategic motives behind the decision of hotels to internationalize?

Bose-Einstein condensation is a scientific innovation in experimental physics whose realisation required considerable time and resources. Its diffusion varied considerably between and within five countries that were comparatively studied. Differences between countries can be explained by the variation in the national communities’ absorptive capacities, while within-country differences are due to the impact of authority relations on researchers’ opportunities to build protected space for their change of research practices. Beginning experimental research on Bose-Einstein condensation required simultaneous access to the university infrastructure for research and to grants. The former is largely limited to professors, while the latter made researchers vulnerable to the majority opinion and decision practices of their national scientific community.

The purpose of this paper is to review the 1985-1991 project called “The Consumer Behavior Odyssey”, including a retrospective assessment of its context and role in influencing consumer research paradigms.

The study is based on personal recollections, introspective fieldnotes from the Odyssey and various publications and videos that emerged from the project. It also reflects on several subsequent “inside” and “outside” accounts of the project and its impact.

The paper concludes that the Odyssey was a critical event within a nexus of other critical events that helped precipitate what is now widely called Consumer Culture Theory. It was a highly visible project that acted as a lightning rod that attracted both supporters and opponents at the time, but that ultimately helped carve out a place for interpretive, qualitative, visual and ethnographic consumer research within business schools.

Although there were a number of methodological and research outputs from the Odyssey during the 1980s and early 1990s and there have been several recent “outside” appraisals of its influence since then, there has been only one subsequent “inside” account of its ontological and epistemological impact − a 2011 video made for the 50th anniversary of the major funding organization for the project, the Marketing Science Institute. This paper offers a more extensive appraisal by one of the project’s leaders.

This paper seeks to describe and analyse an approach to course design as part of a strategic, technology‐inspired, cross‐university intervention to widen participation. A curriculum framework was developed for students who wished to make their work the focus of their study and could not readily access current university provision. A deliberate assumption was made that this would require a technologically inspired response to teaching, learning and assessment.

The approach taken was one of action research, by planning the curriculum framework, validating a course, delivery and review through interviews. Cybernetics was applied post‐hoc to analyse the data generated.

Staff found the framework a useful source of inspiration and critique for current practices, although established practice and preconceptions could render the framework meaningless. The ideas in the framework are not enough to change the institution – authoritative sanction may be needed. The cybernetic concepts of variety and its absorption proved useful in analysing the framework, and highlighted weaknesses in the design of the framework regarding the organisation of teaching.

Clarity about strategic purpose when making a change intervention is vital – in this instance raising the level of critical debate was more successful than recruitment. The establishment of an independent unit may be a more successful strategy than embedding university‐wide. Further work is required to understand how to market novel approaches. The action research shows that the university has the capability to develop curriculum designs that offer new groups of students access to higher education while improving their work practice.

The findings from interview confirm the value that peers attach to this development. Although the pedagogical design in this action research is based on previous work, the cybernetic analysis and conclusions are new.

In 1984 the United Kingdom Central Council for Nurses, Midwifery and Health Visiting (UKCC) convened a project group whose terms of reference were to examine the professional preparation of nurses, to consider possible modifications of the nurse's role in the light of the anticipated health needs of the 1990's and through into the next century and to make recommendations for changes in nurse education to prepare nurses better for their future role. Following consultation the UKCC summarised its proposals in the document Project 2000: A New Preparation for Practice (1986), which analysed future health needs and set out twenty‐five recommendations for the reform of professional practice. Since that time, given the progressive implementation of many of these recommendations, general nurse training has experienced considerable change, a central theme being the way in which existing roles in hospital settings have been modified and new roles introduced. This article is based on a sociological study of nurse socialisation in three Welsh nurse education centres which was undertaken with the aim of addressing issues in role theory while also analysing the problem areas which will need to be tackled if the objectives of Project 2000 are to be fully and successfully achieved.