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This chapter examines the use of social media within organizations in order to engage with both current and potential future employees.

It is commonly claimed that social media technologies can help organizations to engage with both current and potential employees. This chapter examines these claims through an examination of the use of social media within two organizations: a UK television company and an international UK telecommunications company. Data was gathered from the company websites and via 34 semi-structured interviews.

The two case studies confirm that social media has promise with regard to facilitating the engagement of existing employees. However, the findings suggest also that the use of social media to engage employees will not be successful unless the culture and leadership of the organization already embraces open communication and participation.

The findings are limited in that they rely on two case studies and therefore might not be applicable to other organizations. Despite the limitations, this chapter has significant implications for organizations considering the adoption of social media as a means to improve employee engagement. It suggests that when adopting social media for organizations, the very first step should be to assess the organizational readiness with a focus on culture and people rather than on the technology itself. This is because managerial behaviors and styles are central to the level of engagement individuals feel with an organization. For the same reason leaders need to be trained to lead collaboratively, and to be able to understand the new social practices.

The chapter makes an important contribution to an extremely sparse literature on social media as a means for engaging with employees through the provision of rare empirical data and is therefore valuable both for managers and for HR scholars and practitioners.

Knowledge transfer considers the company as a dynamic system dealing with different kinds of knowledge. As production becomes more knowledge-based, this increases the potential for capturing and taking advantage of knowledge. On the other side, these factors become more complex and difficulties increase for the effective transfer of knowledge across organizational boundaries.

Research on knowledge transfer has experienced substantial growth in the past 30 years and research on knowledge transfer is still increasing (Kumar & Ganesh, 2009). The literature argues quite unanimously that there is a positive link between knowledge sharing and competitive advantage. This is analyzed in several studies, but according to Dyer and Hatch (2006), this assumption has not been generally proven. In this chapter, we discuss the points of view from different contributions on this subject. In the empirical part of this chapter, we propose the idea that knowledge transfer is a way for organizations to be more competitive and implement changes essential to their survival. This is done by looking at five firms in the meat producing industry in different countries.

The facilitation of digital spaces, in lieu of urban material spaces, for social interaction through computer gaming and other play activities has become particularly important to children in the wake of the 2020–2021 Coronavirus pandemic, to combat the negative effects of physical lockdown restrictions. Pre-pandemic, autistic children living in urban areas may already experience exclusion from physical society and may consequently already be isolated from current imposed normative societal groupings due to their neuro-difference, sensory sensitivities to the surrounding environment, communication comprehension, and social understanding. However, an exploration into personally and independently chosen play activities by autistic youth has identified how such isolation can be overcome and positive social experiences created. A particular play practice, cosplay, and related companionable fandom activities are providing and creating digital spaces for autistic youth to be social. Character play is also enabling the use of limited physical spaces within urban contexts and as such combatting anxiety from sensory overstimulation. Thematic analysis of online content together with semi-structured interviews with autistic young people have indicated a positive connection between cosplay practice, increased social activity, and reduced levels of sensory overload, anxiety, and depression, with early findings suggesting transferrable elements that could inform more effective support for others with social, environmental, and communication challenges or restrictions.

Purpose – This paper examines the extent to which Saudi listed companies report online information about their corporate governance practice in light of the guidance issued by the Saudi Arabian Capital Market Authority (SACMA), thereafter.

Methodology – We adopted a content analysis approach, accordingly a corporate governance disclosure index is developed to analyse the content of every company's website.

Findings – We found that the majority of Saudi listed companies utilise the Internet to communicate some information about corporate governance to their stakeholders. We also found that the level of online reporting of corporate governance varies between sectors. In particular, the paper revealed that the banking sector has the highest level of corporate governance disclosure compared with other sectors. On the other side, companies in the industry and service sectors provide very little information about corporate governance on their websites. The results suggest that the nature of control over the sector, the involvement of government in the ownership and management of businesses and some social assumptions could have an impact on companies’ decision to disclose online information about their corporate governance in developing countries.

Practical implications – The importance of investigating online reporting of corporate governance in Saudi Arabia emerges from the fact that SACMA published a guidance in 2006 that recommends the disclosure of corporate governance information by Saudi listed companies. Therefore, it would be worthwhile informing SACMA about the extent of compliance with the guidance of corporate governance. This is essential taking into consideration two facts: first, the recent remarkable growth of the Saudi stock market which was accompanied by significant increase in the demand for additional information by stakeholders; second, the recent increase of the utilisation of the Internet by companies for disclosure purposes worldwide. Further, the results of this research study could add to our limited knowledge about the practice of corporate governance in developing countries.

Originality/value – This paper contributes to the limited literature on disclosure practices in developing countries in general and in Saudi Arabia in particular. Our review of the literature revealed that there is no study to date on online disclosure of corporate governance in Saudi Arabia and very limited research has been carried out in developing countries in general. This is important taking into consideration environmental factors of developing countries, which could bring different sight in the issue of the disclosure of corporate governance.

Gamification, the integration of game mechanics to influence behavior and engagement, is a much-touted method of improving participant action. Characteristics of online video games (e.g., World of Warcraft, Farmville, The Sims) have been shown to improve motivation, sustain learner engagement, and increase satisfaction. Gamification is used in websites, businesses, medicine, law enforcement, and increasingly in education. However, gamification is only beneficial to an activity if the relationship between the activity and the final goal are understood. This chapter looks at the gamification in education, in particular second language acquisition, and examines seven basic game mechanics: achievement, appointment, rewards, leaderboards, privacy, social engagement loops (or viral mechanics), and modifiers. The discussion describes implementation of game mechanics and potential pitfalls of gamification.

This chapter presents a rationale for the International Study of Principal Preparation, provides an overview of the study, offers descriptions of the assumptions that should underpin the pre-appointment experiences of school principals, and describes the context of the principalship. The chapter will close with commentary intended to assist and guide designers and providers of principal preparation programming.A central point of this chapter is that it is unlikely that a template for principal preparation can be designed for application in all settings. Indeed, attempts to create such a template are likely to result in culturally and educationally inappropriate approaches to leadership development and to ineffective principals. Instead, leadership development is best approached through a thoughtful and reflective awareness of a set of assumptions about leadership in cross-cultural settings and of the contextual variables impacting school leaders.

This chapter introduces the important connections between media, democracy, and development in Brazil. Brazilian thought has relied heavily on conceptual oppositions in attempts to understand the country, as if there were something mysteriously contradictory in our culture and history, forever set on a rift between modernity and tradition. However convincingly described, the origin of such oppositions has never been fully explained. Introducing media history and theory into this discussion, we present a material dichotomy that illuminates the more abstract and cultural explanations of our particular history. We look at the region of Minas Geraes, where a sophisticated and diverse culture developed after the gold rush in the eighteenth century, in the Americas, and contrast such cultural achievements with the insurmountable difficulties in establishing a compatible written culture, primarily due to the prohibition of printing in the colony. We take note of the particular experience of the Conversos in Brazil, Jews who adopted Christianity in the shadow of the Portuguese Inquisition, as key to understand our ambivalent relationship to the written word and to knowledge. We describe commercial and cultural networks and contrast them with the paucity of media networks, including those of books and mail, domestic and international. This material disconnect, constitutive of colonial times in general, was particularly important during the formative years of a national market and identity and continues to resonate in the present.