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Using Johansson-Sköldberg et al.’s (2013) descriptions of design discourses, this study aims to analyze teacher interviews, research notes and teacher and student artifacts to determine if engagement in design practices led to changes in the teacher’s thinking.

This article presents results from a year-long study that explored how a teacher enacted design discourses to engage in curriculum learning within an elementary school makerspace. The design-based study involved a collaborative partnership where a teacher and researcher co-designed, co-enacted and co-reflected on three cycles of making featuring curriculum studies in science, mathematics and social studies.

The authors determined that engagement in all four design discourses led to transformative changes in the teacher’s thinking about herself as a teacher and her students as learners. The evidence suggests the school makerspace can serve as a liminal design space for professional learning, given that implicit in the makerspace is the embodiment of design practices such as problem finding, iteration and reflection.

Engaging in design discourses in the makerspace can lead teachers to question the frames they hold about teaching and learning. However, teachers need ongoing support in developing discipline knowledge and prioritizing the time required for designing, iterating and reflecting on learning in the makerspace.

The makerspace provides a liminal space for teachers’ professional learning in that implicit in the makerspace is the embodiment of design practices such as problem finding, iteration and reflection.

This study is unique, in that it places the importance of teacher learning in the elementary school makerspace on equal footing with student learning, thereby creating a culture of inquiry for all.

Algermissen, Virginia, Penny Billings, Sandra Grace, Barbara Guidry, and John Blair. “Subminute Telefacsimile for ILL Document Delivery.” Information Technology and Libraries, I (Sept., 1982), 274–5.

Using insights from attributions, planned behavior, and fairness theories, this study examines the effect of blame attributions of psychological contract breach on employees’ attitudes (affective organizational commitment) and behaviors (organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)). The purpose of this paper is to understand whether employees’ reactions depend on the attributions they make concerning who is responsible for the breach.

Cross-lagged design in which data were collected from 220 employees and their supervisors in a public company at two times. Moderated mediation was tested using the bootstrapping analysis outlined by Hayes (2012).

The results supported the authors’ predictions: employees’ blame attributions to the organization have a negative impact on OCBs (as rated by supervisors in time 2) through decreased affective organizational commitment, but blame attributions to the economic context act as a buffer to the relationship between blame attributions to organization and affective organizational commitment, with consequences for OCBs.

Attributions can also be made to concrete persons (i.e. supervisor, coworker, self) rather than to just the organization or context.

When hiring, recruiters should provide accurate and realistic promises to the candidates. When facing hard times, managers should provide additional information to employees and adjust their expectations to the current situation of the firm.

This study makes a unique contribution to the literature by questioning the “single story” perspective about reactions to psychological contract breach, in which it is assumed that employees always respond negatively to such event.

This chapter explores factors presented in romance novels that reify gendered assumptions of masculinity and femininity to present readers with narratives that serve as powerful agents of socialization.

We conducted directed content analyses of over 180 mass-market romance novels published by Harlequin and Silhouette over an approximate 30-year period to ascertain common themes regarding gender polarization and gender schematicity in the maintenance of family and work.

Our review of this literature illuminates the assumption of “naturalized” gender roles for men and women in the construction and maintenance of marriage and the family, calling attention to the ways in which we remain constrained to polarized gender roles in the depiction of romantic encounters.

This study is limited to romance novels published prior to 2006, although we see replications of gender schematic narrative in current romance narratives featuring paranormal encounters (Twilight) and erotica (Fifty Shades of Grey).

The purpose of this study is to explore which factors may explain the high or low percentages of satisfied employees in offices with shared activity-based workplaces.

The paper compares data on employee satisfaction from two cases with remarkably high satisfaction scores and two cases with significantly lower satisfaction scores (total N = 930), all of the same organisation. These cases were selected from a database with employee responses to a standardised questionnaire in 52 flexible work environments. In the four case studies, also group interviews were conducted.

Overall, there are large differences in employee satisfaction between cases with, at first sight, a similar activity-based office concept. The main differences between the best and worst cases regard employee satisfaction with the interior design, level of openness, subdivision of space, number and diversity of work places and accessibility of the building. Employee satisfaction shows to be influenced by many physical characteristics of the work environment and by the implementation process. Satisfaction with the organisation may have an impact as well.

Almost all cases regard Dutch organisations. Due to the lack of quantitative scales to define the physical characteristics of the work environment, the study is mainly descriptive and explorative and does not include advanced multivariate statistical analyses.

The data revealed clear critical success factors including a supportive spatial layout to facilitate communication and concentration, attractive architectural design, ergonomic furniture, appropriate storage facilities and coping with psychological and physical needs, such as privacy, thermal comfort, daylight and view. Critical process factors are the commitment of managers, a balance between a top-down and a bottom-up approach and clear instructions on how to use activity-based workplaces.

The study connects descriptive research with inductive reasoning to explore why employees may be satisfied or dissatisfied with flex offices. It is based on a combination of quantitative survey data from 52 cases and a closer look at two best cases and two worst cases based on qualitative data from interviews and personal observations. The study has high practical value due to the integral approach that incorporates many items of the physical environment and context factors like the implementation process.

This study aims to examine the combined effect of audit committee existence and external audit on earnings management.

The paper uses ordinary least squares regression model to examine the effect of audit committee existence, external audit and the interaction between these two monitoring mechanisms on earnings management for a sample of 33 non-financial listed Portuguese firms-year from 2003 to 2009.

In contrast to results of most previous studies, which assume that audit committees and external auditor act independently from one another, the paper finds a positive relationship between both audit committee existence and external audit and discretionary accruals. However, this study suggests that the existence of an audit committee and external auditor jointly reduces earnings management.

The findings based on this study provide useful information for regulators in countries with an institutional environment similar to that of Portugal. In addition, the results also provide useful information to investors in evaluating the impact of audit committee existence and external audit on earnings quality, especially under concentrated ownership.

The major contribution of the current study is that in contrast to previous studies, which have implicitly assumed that audit committees and external auditors act independently from one another, this study also examines the combined effects of audit committee existence and external auditors on earnings management. In addition, this paper is the first empirical study to investigate the effect of audit committee existence and external audit on earnings management in Portugal.

The purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of the “HRM process” as defined by Bowen and Ostroff (2004). The authors clarify the construct of “HRM philosophy” and suggest it is communicated to employees through “HRM messages”. Interrelationships between these concepts and other elements of the HRM-performance relationship are explored. The study identifies commonalities in the HRM philosophy and messages underscoring high-performing HRM systems, and highlights the function of a “messenger” in delivering messages to staff.

Case study of eight Australian hospitals with top performing HRM systems. Combines primary interview data with independent healthcare accreditor reports.

All cases share an HRM philosophy of achieving high-performance outcomes through the HRM system and employees are provided with messages about continuous improvement, best practice and innovation. The philosophy was instilled primarily by executive-level managers, whereby distinctiveness, consensus and consistency of communications were important characteristics.

The research is limited by: omission of low or average performers; a single industry and country design; and exclusion of employee perspectives.

The findings reinforce the importance of identifying the HRM philosophy and its key communicators within the organisation, and ensuring it is aligned with strategy, climate and the HRM system, particularly during periods of organisational change.

The authors expand Bowen and Ostroff’s seminal work and develop the concepts of HRM philosophy and messages, offering the model to clarify key relationships. The findings underscore problems associated with a best practice approach that disregards HRM process elements essential for optimising performance.

This chapter examines the implications of career achievement for divorce, and whether they differ for men and women. Consistent with theory suggesting that women’s workplace achievement violates traditional expectations of gender and marriage, therefore creating domestic strain, the authors predict that career achievement is associated with a greater risk of divorce for women, but not for men. Using data from the Academy Awards, the authors find that for women, a sudden shift in achievement from winning an Oscar increases their risk of divorce compared to Best Actress nominees. There was no difference in the risk of divorce between Best Actor winners and nominees. The authors additionally examine two potential mitigating factors: whether the actor was already successful at the time of their marriage, and whether their spouse was comparably successful. For Best Actress winners, but not for Best Actor winners, the authors find evidence for the latter, indicating that women’s marriages are more stable when spouses are equally successful, or when relative achievement within the couple aligns with broadly-held norms of traditional marriage.

This paper aims to examine the effect of shared leadership on both quantity and quality of team performance, predicting that shared leadership enhances performance by affecting quantity (level of performance) as well as quality (team errors). In addition, this paper also investigates the role of perceived task complexity in moderating the effect of sharing leadership on team performance.

In total, 26 teams (N = 78) were asked to work on an interdependent team-task, where they engaged in a laboratory team decision-making exercise.

Results revealed that teams sharing leadership made fewer errors. They achieved higher levels of quality of performance. As predicted, this effect was stronger when team members perceived the task as highly complex, even though objective task difficulty was constant.

This study extends current literature on shared leadership by documenting that sharing the lead in teams can also improve the quality of team performance and that perceived complexity of tasks is an important moderator of this effect.

Based on the findings, influencing perceptions of task complexity can be considered as an important strategy to stimulate shared leadership in teams.

Using social network approach, the authors showed that shared leadership is an important tool for preventing team errors and offer a new explanation for inconsistent findings from recent meta-analyses by showing that perceived task complexity moderates the effects of shared leadership. Additionally, this study offers an original team task for investigating shared leadership in teams.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.