Search results

The average company in the UK loses £533 a year for each of its workers in the direct costs alone of absenteeism. Yet most companies have little or no idea how the issue affects them nor how to go about managing it to benefit the bottom line. In this extract from their new book Alastair Evans and Steve Palmer explain how to quantify the problem as a first step to controlling it.

Stress mapping is examined as a visual technique to help counselling and management training look at causes of personal or occupational stress. Stress mapping is demonstrated as a rating on a scale of 0 to 10 and is shown to assist management training and organisational conflict resolution when applied by an experienced facilitator.

THE INTRODUCTION of the pre‐recorded tape cassette in the 1970's made many predict that within ten years there would be no gramophone records or gramophones being marketed, and that the cassette would be the supreme means of distributing recorded sound. Just how wrong that prediction was can be seen in any audio shop in the country, where huge displays of the latest record albums are to be found next to racks of similar cassettes. Far from sounding the knell for records, cassettes have probably been instrumental in furthering their popularity, by way of the spin‐off in technical advances, marketing, and the ease of distribution.

Frederick R. Post’s response (2003) to our paper (“The Social Responsibility of Corporate Management: A Classical Critique,” 2003) is factually mistaken, inconsistent, and confused over: 1) the contents of our paper, 2) how corporate capitalism works, and 3) the consequences of what he advocates. This reply discusses these points, and revisits both our critique of the stakeholder paradigm and defense of shareholder primacy.

Given current demographic changes in the nature of the population, employers are increasingly attempting to find ways of retaining or attracting women into the workforce. A number of companies have now taken steps to provide child‐care arrangements which will hopefully encourage women with children to remain in or re‐enter employment. Developments in a number of countries are reported, and four separate options available to employers for resolving the child‐care dilemma are outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature, frequency, and duration of alcohol-related promotions and crowd alcohol consumption during major sports events broadcasted on the SKY Sport network between September 2011 and February 2012.

Content analyses for various categories of alcohol-related images were conducted, including a novel inclusion of analysing crowd alcohol consumption.

The results provide empirical evidence that sponsorship and activation-related activities of alcohol brands subvert national regulations that ban alcohol advertising during daytime television programming.

The results serve to sensitise researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and regulators to the prevalence of incidental alcohol promotional material within the overall televised alcohol advertising mix and the broader societal exposure to such images. This research also informs readers that alcohol companies and media outlets produce alcohol-related marketing that may not be in-line with the meaning and/or intent of laws.

Implementing treatment programmes with integrity requires a clear statement of what is to be done in treatment, and treatment manuals do this to a greater or lesser degree. In correctional work, many treatment programmes are formally accredited, yet changes may need to be made after accreditation. Updating accredited programmes is important, but there is little formal guidance on post‐accreditation revision. This paper aims to report on practitioner feedback on one accredited programme – Control of Violence for Angry Impulsive Drinkers (COVAID) – with the aim of illustrating how practitioner feedback might be interpreted and used in revising treatment programmes.

The authors surveyed 20 treatment managers in prison and probation services, of whom 11 (55 per cent) responded. Responses were analysed thematically.

Respondents indicated that COVAID met a need for offenders, met the responsivity principle, and was well supported by documentation and post‐training support audit. Respondents offered suggestions for improvement. Some changes to the manual were clearly required; however, many of the suggestions need to be addressed in training. While initial training can be amended for future use, developmental support is another means of maintaining treatment integrity.

The number of treatment managers approached was small and responses were obtained from only 55 per cent of those contacted. Therefore, the views of respondents may not be representative of all treatment managers.

This report addresses the issue of programme re‐accreditation and the basis for revising treatments and treatment manuals.

The purpose of this paper is first, to explore the role of institutional theory constructs in a case of international retail divestment. Second, to examine the potential of constructed metaphors as a means of analyzing and communicating the findings of managerial research.

The data were generated from participant observations and interactions with stakeholder groups during a three‐month ethnographic study based in a Sainsbury store in Egypt. Data were analysed and presented via a constructed metaphor – namely Robert Louis Stevenson's story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The case illustrated an apparent paradox between Sainsbury's technical superiority as a retail operator in the Egyptian market, and its social inferiority in its interactions with a variety of stakeholders, primarily customers and employees. The use of the metaphor to organize, analyse and present the findings proves to be a fruitful way to illustrate this issue, and parallels between the two “stories” provide further insights into behaviour – the denial of responsibility for (and the existence of) social inadequacies; and the implicit (and inevitable) existence of the capacity for social inadequacy in any business organization.

The potential to communicate managerial lessons by telling “stories” (the case) through well‐known “stories” (the novel) is highlighted.

The use of the constructed metaphor to analyse a case of international retail divestment is, to the authors' knowledge, unique and enhances the understanding of the legitimisation process and the role of socio‐moral codes in this process.

Store incentivisation and reward schemes are an increasingly common aspect of UK grocery retailing with most large‐scale operators investing in such schemes. Despite their popularity many researchers have questioned whether or not store loyalty schemes do, indeed, deliver in terms of encouraging loyalty behaviour from their customers. In this paper the authors take the consumers’ perspective and investigate whether one such scheme (Safeway’s ABC card) “delivers” in terms of equitably rewarding the loyalty of those customers that participate in the scheme. From the analysis it is concluded that the scheme does not appear to be operating in a fair and equitable manner, as consumer fidelity to the scheme is not rewarded above non‐fidelity. Areas of research are identified that may help to discover whether retailers are rewarding the loyalty behaviour of their customers in a fair and ethical way.