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An analysis of community health, its history, successes and failures, depends on an understanding of its scope, but there is little consensus as to precisely what the discipline entails. Some view it as a strict scientific discipline, others see it as a social movement, and still others conceive of it as a conglomerate of various disciplines. It is useful initially to identify the medical components of community health, and then to approach its interdisciplinary aspects. Community health, strictly defined, includes such fields as disease control, environmental sanitation, maternal and child care, dental health, nutrition, school health, geriatrics, occupational health, and the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse. This limited definition, though accurate, does not differentiate the field from the much older area of public health. Within community health, the disease focus of traditional public health epidemiology, the total health focus of community medicine, and the outcome focus of health services research are interconnected. Community health combines the public health concern for health issues of defined populations with the preventive therapeutic approach of clinical medicine. An emphasis on personal health care is the result of this combination. Robert Kane describes the field accurately and succinctly: “We envision community medicine as a general organizational framework which draws upon a number of disciplines for its tools. In this sense, it is an applied discipline which adopts the knowledge and skills of other areas in its effort to solve community health problems. The tools described here include community diagnosis (which draws upon such diverse fields as sociology, political science, economics, biostatistics, and epidemiology), epidemiology itself, and health services research (the application of epidemiologic techniques on analyzing the effects of medical care on health).”

This study explores a relatively new source of Australian executive pay information disclosed in published Annual Reports since 1989. It offers not only a different source from which to compare the results of US studies, but also an extension of the studies through the additional Australian disclosure requirements. The first section of the paper examines four possible determinants of Australian executive remuneration, accounting rates of return, firm size, industry and executive control through share holding. In the second part of the paper we used the data to analyse whether the structure of pay in Australian companies is consistent with a particular hypothesis derived from tournament theory.

Introduces a special issue on globalization and the welfare state. Asserts that economic globalization constrains national economic and social policy far more now than ever before, although the level of international trade has not increased that much compared to levels at the beginning of this century. Talks about the political consequences of economic globalization, particularly welfare state retrenchment in the advanced capitalist world. Outlines the papers included in this issue – comparing welfare system changes in Sweden, the UK and the USA; urban bias in state policy‐making in Mexico; and the developing of the Israeli welfare state. Concludes that economic globalization has a limited effect in shaping social welfare policy in advanced capitalist countries; nevertheless, recommends further research into which aspects of economic globalization shape social welfare policy.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate the use of a closed community for first year law students. The purpose of the closed community, which could be a wiki or a discussion board, is twofold. The first purpose is to assist new undergraduates in making the transition to University. Research tells us that socialising is an important part of this transition. A second purpose is to encourage students to learn from each other but to understand when the line is crossed and plagiarism results. The use of social networks for learning is an interesting subject for study both for its potential pedagogic value and as a means of developing “employability”, particularly for those considering a career as in‐house counsel.

This paper will evaluate three projects which aimed at establishing closed online communities.

From the authors' project results there seems to be a direct correlation between student interaction, student learning and assessment. It seems clear that student learning will not, of itself, be facilitated through the use of an online community. The learning is interlinked with student perceptions of a tangible benefit, usually in the form of an assessment item.

This paper will be of interest to those considering new methods of encouraging use of virtual networks to promote student learning.

Images are playing an increasingly important role in organizational life. This trend has spawned interest in how organizations can improve and protect their images. Yet, in our eagerness to study image promotion and repair, organizational scholars have overlooked the practice of image spoiling. Image spoiling occurs when an organization uses words and other symbols to attack the image of another organization. One of the most pervasive forms of image spoiling is interorganizational defamation. The purpose of this study is to explore some of the dynamics of interorganizational defamation. Data was collected from 68 interorganizational defamation cases that were adjudicated in the U.S. federal or state courts between 1964 and 1998. A model of interorganizational defamation was inductively derived from the defamation cases using grounded theory as a qualitative methodology. The model identifies some of the strategies of interorganizational defamation and their methods of implementation.

This paper proposes a hegemonic power hypothesis to examine the determinants of CEO compensation by drawing on insights from the field of international relations. It then reports results of an empirical test of this hypothesis. The results indicate a limited support for the hegemonic power hypothesis, indicating the importance of a cross‐disciplinary perspective in studying the determinants of CEO compensation.

This article notes the growing attractiveness of concepts “borrowed” from chaos theory in organizational studies. Many of these interpretations display sentiments broadly congruent with a “postmodern” approach to organization. Indeed chaos theory itself is presented as part of a similar postmodern shift within natural science. However, these sentiments have been subject to stinging criticism by scientists. Here, the deterministic underpinning of chaos theory is used to show that chaos theory is an entirely modernist enterprise. In this case the indeterministic messages taken by organizational theorists are something of a misunderstanding. Consequently, I discuss whether this is enough to threaten the interdisciplinary status of chaos theory, particularly when it is used in a self-consciously ‘metaphorical’ fashion.

By taking a social learning perspective, this study examines the trickle-down effect of empowering leadership across hierarchical levels in an organization. Specifically, this study aims to demonstrate that the empowering leadership of higher-level leaders promotes the task performance of employees through the mediation of the empowering leadership of lower-level leaders. It also seeks to confirm the role of performance pressure as a boundary condition in social learning process.

Under a moderated mediation framework, this study tests our hypotheses through a hierarchical regression analysis. The data used in the analysis is from the survey responses of 209 subordinate-supervisor dyads.

This study finds that the empowering leadership of higher-level leaders promotes the empowering leadership of lower-level leaders, which indirectly improves the task performance of employees. It also finds that performance pressure perceived by lower-level leaders moderates the relationship between the empowering leadership of higher- and lower-level leaders, thus moderating the proposed indirect effect.

This study complements the findings of previous studies by identifying the trickle-down effect of empowering leadership across different hierarchical levels in an organization and by highlighting its boundary condition. In addition, this study provides evidence for the presence of trickle-down effect of leadership in an Eastern culture.

This study suggests the necessity of leadership education and training programs within organizations by revealing the importance of social learning process for promoting empowering leadership. In addition, it also suggests that performance pressure in an organization not only dampens empowering leadership but also has a negative effect on the task performance of employees.

This study demonstrates the influence mechanism of empowering leadership through a systematic verification of its trickle-down effect, which has been lacking in previous studies. It also highlights the moderating role of performance pressure, as a contextual factor, in the social learning and influence process of empowering leadership.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This paper surveys the contribution of economics and industrial relations (E/IR) to the development of the field of personnel/human resource management (P/HRM). A brief review of existing accounts of the evolution of the field reveals that they give little mention to the role of E/IR. A re‐examination of the early years of P/HRM suggests, however, that this is a serious omission. It is demonstrated, for example, that E/IR was in fact the principal disciplinary base for research and teaching in P/HRM in US universities into the 1940s and that for the first two decades of the field’s existence the most influential and authoritative academic‐based writers came from the ranks of economists and economics‐trained IR scholars. After describing the reasons for this close relationship, The centrifugal forces that caused a gradual split between E/IR and P/HRM are described. This split had roots in the 1920s, became increasingly visible in the 1950s and beyond, and by the late 1980s had reached a point where the two subject areas had little intellectual or organizational interaction. The paper ends with a brief review of recent developments that herald a modest rapprochement between E/IR and P/HRM.