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Parents are sometimes perceived as barriers to providing comprehensive and inclusive sexuality education to young people. However, little is known about parents’ actual attitudes towards providing such broad information to young people. The purpose of this paper is to examine two different approaches to measuring parents’ attitudes towards sexuality information, a programme title approach and a topic-centred approach.

Illinois parents of adolescents (n=301) indicated their knowledge about and attitudes towards sexuality education programmes and 18 sexual health topics via online survey. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine whether parents’ attitudes were more consistent with a programme-centred (i.e. abstinence-only, comprehensive) or a topic-centred (i.e. physical health, sexual and gender identity, pleasure, and relationships) approach.

Parents were uncertain about what form of sexuality education was offered but most were equally comfortable with both abstinence-only and comprehensive programmes. Parents’ ratings of topics grouped significantly better by the topic-centred than the programme-centred approach. Parents rated all four subjects as important, with the highest mean ratings given to physical health topics. Further, parents’ ratings of importance by subject matter were largely independent of their reported programming preference. Together these findings provide evidence that parents believe it is important for their children to have access to a broad range of sexual health education information.

This study is one of the first to document parents’ support for information for young people that goes beyond being comprehensive to include topics such as identities and pleasure. In addition, parents’ lack of knowledge about sexuality education programming may obscure their support for sexual health information. Measuring support by specific topics, however, can help to overcome issues due to parents’ lack of knowledge about programming.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the epistemology of the strategic literature is dominated by a Modernist (scientific) and Cybernetic system approach and that other epistemological options especially critical management studies and complex self‐adapting systems, might provide greater insight for strategic thinking.

An extensive review of the literature was undertaken.

The current dominant way of thinking about management is based on closed system notions of causality in which good enough long‐term prediction is possible. The process PLOC depends totally on this foundation. If a system's long‐term behaviour is unpredictable, then using the PLOC model is questionable. In the current turbulent business environment long‐term prediction may not be possible.

The life expectancy of a firm is only 40 years. Using closed system concepts to drive businesses to the equilibrium of a business plan may be killing the business, because a complex self‐adapting system in equilibrium is dead.

Very little work, especially in strategy has been done outside the Modernist paradigm. This paper explores the possibility of incorporating open system ideas into a strategic methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge an over‐reliance on past experience as the cognitive underpinning for strategic decisions. It seeks to argue that, in complex and unknowable conditions, effective leaders use three distinct and complementary thinking capacities, which go beyond those normally learned during their rise to the top.

A conceptual model of thinking capacities is justified through a review of the psychology literature; the face validity of the proposed model is supported through six in‐depth interviews with successful CEOs.

A model of non‐conventional thinking capacities describes how strategic decision‐makers make choices that are better adapted to the conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction, which prevail in complex situations. These capacities are complementary to the more conventional approaches generally used in thinking about decisions.

The paper aims to stimulate awareness of the limitations of habitual mental responses in the face of difficult strategic decisions. It challenges leaders consciously to extend their abilities beyond conventional expectations to a higher order of thinking that is better suited to multi‐stakeholder situations in complex environments.

The paper responds to the challenge of McKenna and Martin‐Smith to develop new theoretical approaches to complex environments. It extends conventional approaches to decision making by synthesising from the literature some essential thinking capacities, which are well suited to the demands of situations dominated by uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizational leadership capability as a knowledge coordinating mechanism affects service organization activities towards different stakeholder groups.

The subjects in the case study are four Estonian service companies from the banking and retail industry providing high- and low-skill services, respectively. The data for the study were collected using the Organizational Leadership Capability Questionnaire with a total of 375 employees as respondents, and the organizations’ web sites to analyse corporate social responsibility (CSR). Assessment and analysis of the data included: the measurement of organizational leadership capability; the measurement of CSR communication; and analysis of the results gained from studying issues pertaining to organizational leadership capability as a knowledge coordination mechanism and innovative behaviour in terms of CSR.

Ultimately, the study reveals that organizations with higher intensity of knowledge use in high-skill service industries have greater ability to coordinate knowledge as expressed in terms of organizational leadership capability, which in turn, allows them to behave more innovatively in terms of CSR towards stakeholders.

This study suggests that innovative behaviour in organizations towards different groups of stakeholders depends on organizational leadership capability. However, the results of this study are only valid in the context of the Estonia service sector, and more precisely the retail and banking industry.

This paper demonstrates the role of organizational leadership capability in the coordination of knowledge to generate innovative behaviour in terms of CSR in service organizations.

School principals make sense of multiple messages, policies, and contexts within their school environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine specifically how school leaders make sense of hiring and subjective evaluation of on‐the‐job teacher performance.

This qualitative study drew from 42 interviews with 21 principals from a mid‐sized Florida school district. Two rounds of semi‐structured interviews (one to two hours each) were conducted with the informants over two summers (2005‐2006). The multi‐year study allows the authors to assess the consistency across principal participants.

Principals' personal beliefs, background, and experiences were found to shape their conceptions and preferences for teacher characteristics. School type (e.g. elementary, secondary, levels of poverty) also influenced principals' perceptions of and preferences for specific applicant and teacher characteristics. Principals in the sample, however, showed surprising consistency towards certain characteristics (caring, subject matter knowledge, strong teaching skills) and job fit (person‐job). Sampled principals reported that each vacancy is different and is highly dependent on the position, team, and individuals. Regardless of the position or school setting, federal, state, and district mandates strongly influenced how principals made sense of the hiring process and on‐the‐job performance.

The findings underscore the complexity of the human resource functions in education and raise important questions of how school leaders reconcile personal preferences and building‐level needs with demands from the district, state, and federal levels.

The authors' findings offer important insight into the complex conceptualizations that principals hold and the balances that must be struck in the face of policy and hiring constraints. How principals make sense of teacher quality, however, has not been examined. This study contributes to the extant research and makes a theoretical contribution to studies using a cognitive frame to understand school leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a coherent model of several schools of strategic ideas while utilising and building on the models extant in the literature, but also considering a change of epistemological and systemic paradigms.

An extensive review of the literature was undertaken.

The result of the analysis of the literature is that a seven‐school model is postulated. The seven schools being grouped within three categories. The first category is labelled the Classical Schools and includes the Design School, the Planning School and the Positioning School. The second category is labelled the Neo‐classical Schools and includes the Contingency School and the Resource School. The third category is labelled the Post‐Classical Schools and includes the Learning School and the Emergence School.

The concept of strategic emergence, a characteristic of a complex self‐adapting system, is developed.

Very little work, especially in strategy has been done outside the Modernist paradigm. This paper explores the possibility of incorporating open system ideas into a strategic methodology.

A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to understand his chosen profession it must necessarily be placed within its social context. Most students at some stage of their development reflect on the social problems that beset the human situation, and some, as the mass media would have us believe, are anxious to remould the “sorry scheme of things” as represented by the existing social structure.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

As staff are vital to successful re‐branding, particularly in the charity sector where restricted budgets limit reliance on external marketing, it is important to understand the impact of re‐branding on staff. This study aims to examine the effect of time on staff knowledge, attitudes and behaviour and, in addition, the interaction of time with seniority, tenure and level of support for re‐branding.

The paper first explores the literature from both the for‐profit and non‐profit sectors. A quantitative study was undertaken in nine leading, UK charities that had re‐branded two, three and four years ago; n=345. The data were analysed using one‐way and two‐way ANOVAs.

A negative relationship was found between time since re‐branding and the three constructs of knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. But this consistency was not mirrored by a consistency in the impact of interaction effects.

Re‐branding is not a one‐off event. To sustain its benefits, organizations need to re‐visit its outcomes on a regular basis to ensure staff retain new knowledge, remain positively motivated and maintain their recently adapted behaviours over time.

Thought to be the first empirical paper to explore the effects of re‐branding over time. Furthermore, the findings contradict those from the extant literature that claim that organizational change requires a “settling in” period. By contrast these findings suggest that the positive effects of re‐branding are best felt in the immediate wake of re‐branding and thereafter fade over time.