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The purpose of this paper is to identify, through empirical analysis, the factors affecting, and expectations of, postgraduate students in their choice of postgraduate programme in Greece.

A sample of 523 postgraduate students from various university departments in the Athens area completed the questionnaire (response rate: 70.2 per cent), which contained 14 questions designed to identify the reasons why postgraduate students had chosen their particular postgraduate programme and what their expectations were as to the outcome of their studies, on a self-reporting basis.

Two fields of postgraduate programmes were popular: business administration and educational studies. Quality and preference appears to influence business administration students, their choice was intrinsically motivated and self-determined, without any external pressures. By contrast, students’ choice in educational studies was influenced by the particular characteristics of the programme, their choice was influenced by institutional motivation whereas their options and autonomy support seemed to be less.

This study has some limitations, so data gathered from other Greek regions may be needed for a more thorough investigation and analysis as well as for the confirmation of the results.

There is only a very limited amount of empirical research concerning the identification of the factors affecting, and the expectations of, postgraduate students in their choice of postgraduate programme while the existing literature on the subject does not discuss the matter in substantial detail. Indeed, the present study moves the analysis forward as it considers both economic and psychological perspective in the choice of postgraduate programmes.

This chapter’s focus is on the disparate factors that are affecting higher education students that by circumstance not of their making are both displaced and seeking refuge within the fields of continuing their higher education. The fear of losing a young educated generation that can be part of the reconciliation process of the country in the post-conflict era has become close to reality, especially in Syria and in the neighbouring countries where the lost possibility of Syrian refugees’ returning to Syria is higher than other places. We have organized this chapter into three parts. The first part explores the history of higher education for Syrians with emphasis on the last half century. The second part describes the theoretical underpinnings of those displaced in today’s social political context through the lenses of Foucault and Maslow. The third part discusses a specific case study: the challenges Syrian students are facing in Lebanon, focusing on specific policies such as online education as a viable tool for serving displaced students, legal documents and the lack thereof, ability to get scholarships, policies and laws to understand.

Based on a description of the national features of the Israeli society and educational system, this chapter will briefly describe various attempts conducted since the 1970s to decentralize the Israeli educational system and promote school autonomy. It will focus specifically, on the School-Based Management (SBM) policy, borrowed by educational policymakers and implemented in the Israeli educational system during late 1990s. The decision to borrow this policy did not follow policymakers’ recognition in the limitations and shortcomings of the centralized structure of control, which characterized the educational system since Israel became an independent state in 1948. Rather, it followed pressures coming from various stakeholders who considered centralized policy plans irrelevant and not enough sensitive to the variety of local circumstances and needs (David, 1989; Hanson, 1984; Nir, 2002; Nir et al., 2016). Therefore, more than 20 years later, it appears that the implementation of SBM created limited effects in terms of teachers and school leaders’ degrees of freedom and that the educational system still maintains its centralized structure and features. The main argument the present chapter will attempt to make is that borrowed policies have a limited capacity to promote significant change in the borrowing system when policymakers do not fully believe in the policy’s values and ideas and are reluctant to abandon current patterns of organizational behavior. Specifically, it will describe the process that characterized the borrowing and implementation of the SBM policy in the Israeli educational system and will discuss the main symptoms that characterized the policy borrowing process when policymakers were not fully committed to the values and mode of operation brought by the borrowed policy.

The purpose of this paper is to de‐construct the traditional bifurcation of logic and emotion in the preparation of educational leaders which, following regnant business planning and management models anchored in economics, focuses almost exclusively on social science methodology and the tenets of normative decision theory in formal university based‐preparation programmes in the UK and the USA. This dominant approach has many drawbacks and does not reflect how educational leaders actually engage in decision making.

The paper is a conceptual/logical analysis of the apparent weaknesses in traditional preparatory curricula as well as a report of preliminary qualitative research derived from a non‐probability, convenience sample of 13 interviews in the UK and the USA of middle‐level managers in institutions of higher education.

The major findings lie in the development of an initial schematic that challenges the dominant binary in considered decisions in educational leadership. The binary regarding the separation of logic and emotion simply does not exist as emotion is always a factor in decision making. The schematic proposes a way to make emotion an inclusive part of considering decision making.

Traditional notions of effective decision making should be revised to include how decision makers come to understand the role their own emotions play in rendering educational decisions on the job, and university providers should begin to revamp courses and curricula which more accurately portray them.

The originality of the paper is in the analysis of decision making which suggests that the role of emotion is in fact, logical and rational, as opposed to non‐rational in educational decision‐making contexts. The value of this position is that it restores to decision‐making preparation a more “real world” perspective which is often not present when so‐called non‐rational variables are factored out in problem‐solving training in university preparation programmes.

Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, eds. New York, Modern Language Association of America, 1978. $17.00 cloth; $8.50 pa. 188p. LC 77–94918. ISBN 0–87352–256–7; 0–87352–257–5 pa. So many of us in the field of library science owe our jobs to the fact that others articulate their own need to know; reference work itself arises out of this logical need. Many questions we answer involve the simple, “what?,” “when?,” and “where?” More complicated question‐and‐answer interactions deal with “why?” and “how?” Through interviews with one editor and one chapter author, this essay will invert the reference process upon itself and show the why and how involved in the conception and realization of the reference work entitled Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research.

In 1979, Rosemary Pledger became the first female President of the Academy of Management (AOM). AOM, through scholarship and teaching about management and organizations, is well known for its contributions to the development of modern management theory. The purpose of this paper is to understand and analyze the human and social influencers which enabled Pledger’s career success. She climbed to the top of her profession and became a role model for other professional women, especially in the academic field; she successfully cracked the glass ceiling.

The authors used a qualitative methodology as most appropriate to examine the research question of how Pledger used human and social skills to overcome barriers to career success. In addition to her biographical data, the authors analyzed 1,593 pages of documents from the AOM Archives at the Khell Center, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Pledger succeeded because she developed strong human and social capital critical for career success and career mobility. Becoming part of the top management team in three organizations – the AOM, the Southwestern AOM and the University of Houston – Clear Lake City is evidence of her skill in using her capital to crack the glass ceiling.

The limitation of author interpretation of secondary data is recognized.

This work illustrates the appropriateness of qualitative research, specifically, in placing important management figures in context, and it makes clear how human and social capital factors are critical to career success for women.

AOM’s contribution to the development of modern management theory is widely recognized; however, there is a lack of studies related to the career successes of AOM’s female leaders. This paper chronicles the career life of Rosemary Pledger who became the first female president of the AOM and a successful Dean and examines the factors that contributed to her career success despite the presence of a glass ceiling.