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The hypothesis that managers believe risk to be a major component of strategy formulation, with a corresponding effect on the strategic decision‐making process, was subjected to empirical examination. A total of 93 top executives of Israel's largest industrial companies, representing various business sectors, responded to the research questionnaire. Although the data supported the major research hypothesis, they also showed that managers are not inclined to use risk‐assessment models. In‐depth interviews with 21 participants supported the findings and suggested possible explanations. Recommendations regarding the formation of risk strategy and the incorporation of risk assessment models to strategic decisions are suggested.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between self‐leadership skills and innovative behaviors at work. Design/methodology/approach – The study's participants were employees and their supervisors, working in six organizations in Israel. Data were collected through structured surveys administered to the employees and their supervisors. A total of 175 matched questionnaires were returned. Path analysis, using AMOS program, was conducted to assess the research model. Findings – The results indicate that the three‐dimensional scale of self‐leadership skills is positively associated with both self and supervisor ratings of innovative behaviors. The findings also show that income and job tenure are significantly related to innovative behaviors at work. Practical implications – Organizations that seek ways in which to foster innovative behaviors in their employees, need to recognize the importance of building up self‐leaders who can successfully meet the required expectations and standards of innovative behavior. Originality/value – This research suggests ways for organizations to enhance their innovativeness through employees who possess high self‐leadership skills and receive appropriate extrinsic rewards for their leadership skills and innovative behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the experience of a white teacher to attain greater understanding of racial identities, especially whiteness, and reconsider the current understandings of whiteness and whiteness pedagogy. The author argues that notions of whiteness are social constructions, and that reconstructions of conventional understandings of whiteness could provide more nuanced understandings of whiteness that might facilitate more sophisticated considerations of how race and whiteness continue to influence schooling practices.

This paper uses autoethnography, a version of narrative inquiry, to consider issues related to the intersection of whiteness and education. The author recounts, reflects on and interprets a body of experiential knowledge to illuminate the experience of being a white teacher in both a racially diverse school and one that was more homogeneously white. These experiences are interpreted and placed in the context of scholarly work to frame an argument regarding a more sophisticated conceptualization of whiteness and its position in efforts toward inclusive and mutli-cultural education.

This paper closes with the argument that whiteness needs to be troubled and understood in more sophisticated ways than a traditional white privilege framework has allowed and accounted for directly in school settings in the USA.

This paper is original and valuable, mostly because it uses narrative to share the unique and complex experience of a white teacher who attempted to account for and consider the presence of whiteness over the 30 years in his career.

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

The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such a clear-cut divide does not hold in the case of the Ottoman Empire where the lines were much more nuanced and identities much more fluid. Still, I argue that contemporary studies on the Ottoman Empire productively intersect with the postcolonial approach in three research areas: the exploration of the agency of imperial subjects; the deconstruction of the imperial center; and the articulation of bases of imperial domination other than the conventional European “rule of colonial difference” strictly predicated on race. I conclude with a call for an analysis of Ottoman postcoloniality in comparison to others such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Mughal, and Japanese that negotiated modernity in a similar manner with the explicit intent to generate knowledge not influenced by the Western European historical experience.