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The purpose of this paper is to analyze common emplotments of interpretations of the financial crisis of 2007‐2010.

The paper presents a text analysis.

The paper finds that the same “strong plots” are commonly used to explain financial crises to the general public.

The paper provides useful information on interpretations of financial crises.

The purpose of this paper is to consider three types of stories: media, personal accounts and fiction, and look for plots depicting situations of fundamental shift in the framing and basic definitions of reality. The authors examine them from the point of view of their usefulness for developing creative responses to systemic change.

The authors conducted a narrative study in three stages, aimed at identifying strong plots pertaining to systemic change. The analyzed material came from three different sources of narratives (fiction, media and creative stories) and was approached by the use of two different narrative methods: symbolic interpretation and narrative collage.

Currently many voices are being raised that the authors are living in times of interregnum, a period in between working systems. There is also a mounting critique of the business school as an institution perpetuating dysfunctional ideologies, rather than enhancing critical and creative thinking. The authors propose that the humanities, and, in particular, learning from fiction (and science fiction) can offer a language to talk about major (systemic) change help and support learning about alternative organizational realities.

The study pertains to discourse and narratives, not to material aspects of culture construction.

Today, there is a mounting critique of business schools and their role in society. Following Martin Parker’s call to transform them into schools of organizing, helping to develop and discuss different alternatives instead of reproducing the dominant model, the authors suggest that education should be based, to much larger extent than until now, on the humanities. The authors propose educational programmes including the study of fiction and film.

The authors propose that the humanities (and the study of fiction) can equip society with a suitable language to discuss and problematize systemic change.

This paper adds to narrative social studies through providing an analysis of strong plots showing ways of coping with systemic collapse, and through an examination of these plots’ significance for organizational education, learning, and planning. The authors present an argument for the broader use of fiction as a sensemaking, teaching, and learning tool for managing organizations in volatile environments.

The potential advantage of extreme value theory in modeling management phenomena is the central theme of this paper. The statistics of extremes have played only a very limited role in management studies despite the disproportionate emphasis on unusual events in the world of managers. An overview of this theory and related statistical models is presented, and illustrative empirical examples provided.

The purpose of this study is to show that the presence of strong personality traits in management teams may have limiting effects on the teams' ability to adapt to critical changes in their business environments.

The financial operations characterizing ten management teams have been traced over three years, and the personalities of all managers were measured during the first phase of the project. A critical incident in the market signalled a need to adapt after about 20 months. The ensuing adaptation was analysed and related to the presence of strong personality traits, plotting all data in two‐dimensional space to visualize the relationship between personality and business operations.

The intra‐team maximum traits were systematically related to a tendency to perform habitual business in the teams. Only intelligence and stability were related to better performance after the crisis, suggestion that other strong traits may impose rigidity.

The sample is limited to ten management teams, but these are followed for three years through 33 observation points. Also, a visualization technique based on factor analysis is used in addition to regression equations as one of the main methodological tools.

Managers composing teams should observe the presence of strong traits and take action to prevent obstructing adaptation after crises. This knowledge may induce efforts to overcome rigidity and understand the value of reflection‐in‐action for teams.

The paper presents a new way of conceptualizing the role of personality in management teams and shows its immediate impact on business performance in a real‐life setting.

Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question can be stated as follows: how is business action reconstructed in our narratives? The texts analyzed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field of marketing. To analyze how these texts depict business action, four narrative constructions are focused: space, time, actors, and plots. The categorization and analysis are summarized and followed by a set of concluding implications and suggestions for narrative practice aiming to reconstruct business action in the making.

The farm size-productivity relationship has long been the subject of debate among development economists. Few studies address this issue for China, and those that do only with outdated data sets poorly representing the current situation after the past decade of rapid change, which includes the rapid development of land rental markets, village labor out-migration and use of farm machines. Meanwhile, many studies have researched this relationship for Indian, which is undergoing similar changes except for the development of active land rental markets. The purpose of this paper is to measure the farm size-productivity relationship under the situations of rapid transformation in China and India.

Based on the data of 325 Jiangxi and 400 Allahabad rice farmers in 2011, the survey covered multiple plots of each household in one/multiple growing season(s). The authors use the production function approach and the yield approach, and control for farmland quality, imperfect factor markets, and farm size measurement error, to identify the farm size-productivity relationship.

The regressions show that land yields increase with plot size both by season and over the year in China. This may be one of the reasons that farm sizes are growing in some areas. In India, however, the inverse farm size-productivity relationship is observed by the study, despite recent changes. Moreover, land yields increase with farm machine use in both China and India. This result contributes to the debate over whether mechanization improves yields or just expands the land frontier.

The paper empirically estimates the farm size-productivity relationship under rapid agrarian transformation in both China and India based on a unique data set collected by the authors in a detailed primary survey. The paper considers measurement error in the analysis, which adds values to this type of analysis.

Participation in urban horticulture (UH) is increasing in popularity, and evidence is emerging about the wide range of social and environmental benefits “grow your own” can also provide. UH can increase mental and physical well-being, as well as improve nature connectedness, social capital and community cohesion.

This study focusses on allotments, which is one of the dominant forms of UH that takes place in the United Kingdom. 163 volunteers in England and Wales participated in keeping a year-long allotment diary as part of a citizen science project investigating activities on allotment gardens. This study examines the unprompted comments that 96 of these gardeners offered as observations when visiting their allotment plots.

Participants recorded high levels of social and community activities including the sharing of surplus food produce, knowledge exchange, awareness and interaction with wildlife, emotional connection to their allotment, appreciation of time spent outside and aesthetic delight in the natural world around them.

At a time when waiting lists for allotment plots in the United Kingdom are on the rise, and allotment land is subject to multiple pressures from other forms of development, this study demonstrates that these spaces are important sites not only for food production but also health, social capital and environmental engagement.

The failure of conventional, post-war development to bring about the housing-led regeneration of much of Glasgow’s vacant and derelict inner-city land has exacerbated the loss of middle-income households to car-dominated suburbs built on green-field sites. Plot-based urbanism offers an innovative approach to development, based on an urban structure made up of fine-grained elements, in the form of plots, capable of incremental development by a range of agencies. The historical and morphological study of traditional, pre-war masterplanning methods in Glasgow suggests that a typically disaggregated pattern of land subdivision remains of great relevance for development, and that the physical form and organisation of urban land may relate to the capacity for neighbourhood self-organisation. This study assists future masterplanning and investment in the regeneration of inner-city neighbourhoods by suggesting ways of making investment more informed, and the development process more responsive to urban change. We argue that the publicly-funded sector could take on the role of lead provider of development opportunity through the adoption of methods derived from traditional masterplanning processes, providing opportunities for small-scale house building, and thereby supporting resilient and adaptable communities in the sustainable reuse of vacant inner-city land.

Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) is a fully Bayesian approach to modeling with ensembles of trees. BART can uncover complex regression functions with high-dimensional regressors in a fairly automatic way and provide Bayesian quantification of the uncertainty through the posterior. However, BART assumes independent and identical distributed (i.i.d) normal errors. This strong parametric assumption can lead to misleading inference and uncertainty quantification. In this chapter we use the classic Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) mechanism to nonparametrically model the error distribution. A key strength of BART is that default prior settings work reasonably well in a variety of problems. The challenge in extending BART is to choose the parameters of the DPM so that the strengths of the standard BART approach is not lost when the errors are close to normal, but the DPM has the ability to adapt to non-normal errors.

To explore the issues surrounding the falling rates of MMR vaccination following the publication of a controversial study by Wakefield et al.

In order to take a fresh look at the MMR crisis, the Greek tragedy, Antigone, was used as a “strong plot” to de‐contextualise the underlying social and political issues. In this short paper, two themes are explored that emerge from reading Antigone with respect to the unfolding crisis of public confidence in the MMR vaccine: first, the challenge to government in the form of a decrease in public trust in government and government policies; and second, how such a challenge assumes significance and, arising from that, the question of how one might respond to the challenge.

The MMR debate throws issues of importance to society into relief – for example, public trust in government and science; and notions of public good versus rational choice in public policy on vaccination, However, much of the debate has been polarised into good versus evil – good and evil being subjective positions that are interchangeable, depending on the side one favours. It is argued that the issues are more complex than this, and are as much to do with political consent and the bargain between citizen and state.

Using “strong plots” to theorise about current issues is powerful because it allows one to explore them from different angles and challenge one's understanding. Antigone provides us with a way of standing back from the MMR crisis and re‐conceptualising the issues to capture the essence of the underlying debate.