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The multiple organizational factors impacting on a merger as well as those processes being impacted on throughout the merger process will be examined. First, the issue of constant and lucid communication and its importance throughout the merger and acquisition (M&A) process will be addressed. Second, an examination of the current corporate culture and its effects on employees when two companies merge is analyzed, while illuminating the realities of the new culture. An exploration of change in general is examined, as well as the reaction of employees (resistance) to these changes. Next, the article addresses the critical issue of stress, which is an M&A outcome within the new and uncertain environment. The article concludes with the process of managing and strategy throughout the phases. Furthermore, the five major sections (communications, corporate culture, change, stress, and managing/strategy) are sub‐divided into three sub‐sections: pre‐merger; during the merger; post‐merger.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how urban dwellers engage on an environmentally friendly lifestyle. A survey was conducted in the Klang Valley, Malaysia, to establish the sustainable lifestyle intentions of urban dwellers.

A survey was conducted to establish the sustainable lifestyle intentions of urban dwellers of the Klang Valley in Malaysia. Data collected were analysed using the Cronbach’s α reliability test, the factor analysis, and multiple regression analysis.

A sustainable lifestyle has to be environmentally friendly and conforms to the community’s livelihood. Attitude towards participation of environmentally friendly lifestyle, awareness towards preservation of resources, subjective norms to engage in an environmentally friendly lifestyle, perceived environmental control and government support were the key intentions of a sustainable lifestyle of urban dwellers.

The current lifestyle intentions of urban dwellers in the Klang Valley have yet to be fully transformed into lifestyle behaviours that are sustainable. The local government is not strict in implementing and enforcing an environmentally friendly lifestyle that is practical and sustainable. Other than relying on the existing non-profit organisation’s fortnightly collection of recyclables, the local government can refer to the UNEP’s four E’s to initiate an efficient and sustainable production behaviour that leads to a sustainable and healthy lifestyle.

Designing and developing responsible business practices can create various tensions for service organizations. The purpose of this research is to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between customer engagement (CE) and responsible business practices (e.g. environmental, social and/or governance [ESG], corporate social responsibility [CSR] and diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI]) and explore customer engagement tensions that service organizations may face.

This research develops a list of CE-related responsible business practice tensions and empirically explores their relevance through in-depth interviews with nine ESG professionals.

This paper makes three important contributions. First, we find support for nine distinct but related tensions with implications for CE that organizations must navigate when pursuing responsible business practices. Second, interview participants provide some suggestions for tackling these tensions, which we support with relevant theories. Finally, we develop a conceptual framework that may stimulate future service research and inform the implementation of ESG strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to conceptualize and empirically explore the tensions that emerge between responsible business practices and CE. The authors develop a novel analysis of the CE-related tensions that emerge when pursuing an ESG strategy.

The findings are based on a small sample of ESG professionals. Future research may take a quantitative approach to further evaluate the role that these tensions play in engaging customers.

This research provides a conceptual framework that may guide ESG professionals in understanding, framing and navigating CE-related tensions when pursuing responsible business practices.

A social benefit may be found when service organizations are better able to successfully navigate CE-related tensions when pursuing responsible business practices.

The American public greatly esteems their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but generally understands poorly its true ambit. Unfortunately, this defect in understanding permeates American educational institutions, from the lowest grades to higher education and even professional schools. Students’ pervasive ability to engage in technological speech and expression further complicates the issue, especially when inappropriate or offensive speech originating outside school crosses the geographic boundary and enters school. School administrators at all levels, challenged with maintaining atmospheres of safety and security conducive to learning, are being asked to respond to such student speech, but they fear to exceed the limits of their authority. Cyberbullying and harassing communications continue to distract victims and educators and detract from the quality of education at all institutions. The legal system and judiciary provide little guidance, and what guidance there is suffers from lack of consistent definitions and conflicting analyses. This chapter will review the jurisprudence pertaining to the First Amendment as applied to the school setting. The emphasis will be on legislative, judicial, and societal responses to cyberbullying and cyber harassment in the school setting, from the elementary level to higher education. Finally, recommendations for policies and procedures for dealing with cyberbullying and cyber harassment in schools will be presented.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between diversity in work group members’ employment arrangements and the actual performance of the work groups.

A field study was conducted on 31 work groups in a public plant belonging to the industrial sector that constitute a unique data set. The 441 employees are contracted under four significantly different employment arrangements and are mixed together in heterogeneous work groups, but perform similar tasks.

The results indicated that the influence of employment arrangement diversity on work group performance is best represented as variation, and work arrangements diversity is positively correlated with improved work group performance.

The study design prevented assessment of employees’ opinions. Rather, the authors used objective type of employment arrangements as the basis for calculating diversity as separation. Using mean Euclidean distance as suggested by Harrison and Klein (2007), the authors arbitrarily set the distance between two different employment arrangements as one.

The research results help in the stages of recruiting, structuring and development and application of necessary work team. Formal emphasis of diversity in work arrangements improves performance.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies using unique data set analyzing real-life team diversity and performance in the public sector. The research highly contributes to organizational decision-making processes regarding the importance of incorporating non-standard work arrangements in organizations. Management’s implementation of formal diversity seems to alleviate the negative sides of diversity and increases its positive performance effects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how employers can ease the job loss situation for employees.

The paper reviews an article on the subject.

The paper finds that job counseling and training programs may influence different levels in the labor market. At the macro level, such programs can be vehicles shifting human resources to where they are needed in the labor market. On the organizational level, they can enhance human resource utilization, decrease perception of psychological contract breach, and minimize internal strains and organizational conflict. On the individual level, they appear to be an efficient way for dealing with the dismissed or remaining workers and helping them in their quest for a new job or retraining. Consequently, many of the psychological, familial, and social disturbances brought on by the dismissals, or the organizational crisis, may be avoided.

The paper provides useful information on

The purpose of this paper is to extend the results of a Norwegian password security survey. Research, especially in the early 21st century, has shown that education is needed to change people’s behaviour regarding password generation, management and storage. As our daily routines and duties have become more dependent on electronic services in the last decade, one could think that qualitative education is nowadays given to users. This survey is to verify that assumption.

A nation-wide demographic survey among employees in Norway with a sample of 1,003 respondents at the ages of 18-64 years was conducted in October 2012.

The results show that the education or proper guidance seldom is given leading to the outdated users’ behaviour.

The results of the study are limited to the employed only and they do not explain behaviour of students, teenagers or children.

During the current year, the results of the study have been discussed several times in national media and, hopefully, have an impact to employees’ behaviour. The results have also been used in the National Security Month campaign in October 2013.

The questionnaire itself is not unique. However, the large amount of respondents gives higher value to the results.

Decolonizing the curriculum is an important topic in education but what does it really mean to decolonize the curriculum? In this self-study, I reflected, with the help of a critical friend, on what decolonizing the curriculum could mean in the context of my biology education classroom using the Pedagogical Content Knowledge model by Davidowitz and Rollnick (2011) as the guiding framework. From these reflections, I came to the conclusion that decolonizing the curriculum is not about erasing the known facts and principles of science but rather, it is about contextualizing it by replacing the Eurocentric stories, texts, and examples among other things, with our own Afrocentric ones. Contextualizing our curriculum is, however, fraught with challenges which include underdeveloped indigenous languages available to be used as languages of instruction, lack of locally produced teaching and learning resources including textbooks, and lack of documented indigenous knowledge that curriculum implementers can use in their teaching in order to make it contextually relevant. In this chapter, I share insights from my reflections.

Downsizing is a very pervasive organizational process. At these critical junctures many organizations do little to prepare their employees for a mass layoff. The main purpose of this study is to examine how the incorporation of job counseling and professional retraining programs during a period of downsizing affected the responses of both the employees who were dismissed and those who remained in the organization.

The study was conducted in a large metalwork factory in Isreal that underwent significant downsizing as a result of a major crisis. Interview data were collected from a sample comprising employees selected randomly from a list which the human resource department prepared. The analysis is based on a data set that included 229 employees.

Results indicate that that guidance and training programs have a two‐fold effect: first, dismissed employees who participated in these training programs had a more positive reaction to their dismissal than dismissed employees who did not participate in such training. Second, employability factors as well as personal and demographic attributes do not affect the participants' responses.

It is suggested that an appropriate downsizing process could produce effective responses on the part of the dismissed workers. Preparing individuals through participation in appropriate programs significantly promotes employee morale and reduces negative affective responses through consideration of the individual cost caused by the downsizing process. With appropriate downsizing plans, survivors' emotional reactions will not necessarily comprise only negative emotions but they may, under certain circumstances, also experience some positive emotions.

If what sociologists call “social structures” are understood to be recurrent patterns of joint action, then the charge that interactionism suffers from an astructural bias falls apart, because such patterns of joint action are what interactionists routinely study. The problem, then, is not that interactionism fails to grasp structure, but that much of the mainstream of sociology fails to grasp process. It is this aprocessual bias that impedes a full understanding of how inequality is created and reproduced. The case of capitalism is used to show how an interactionist focus on process can illuminate the workings of a large-scale economic system. I treat capitalism as a macro interaction order, à la Goffman, and then employ the tools of dramaturgical sociology to analyze the recurrent patterns of joint action of which capitalism consists. This form of dramaturgical analysis is applied to two fictional stories as a way to show how capitalism depends on normative and procedural rules, cognitive presuppositions, and ritual forms – all of which are typically rendered invisible by aprocessual bias. The concepts of side bets, identity stakes, and nets of accountability are developed to complete the analysis.