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This paper aims to describe the design and evaluation of a pilot leadership development programme for infection prevention and control (IPAC) professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme’s aim was to improve IPAC knowledge and capacity in the health-care system by developing the leadership skills and capacities of novice and advanced Infection Control Professionals (ICPs), to respond flexibly, and competently, in their expanding and ever-changing roles.

The leadership programme was piloted with seven nurses, who were part of a clinical nursing team in New South Wales, Australia, over a 12-month period between 2021 and 2022. The programme was designed using a leadership development framework underpinned by transformational leadership theory, practice development approaches and collaborative and experiential learning. These principles were applied during programme design, with components adapted to learners’ interests and regular opportunities provided for collaboration in active learning and critical reflection on workplace experiences.

The authors’ evaluation suggests that the programme was feasible, acceptable and considered to be effective by this cohort. Moreover, participants valued the opportunities to engage in active and experience-based learning with peers, and with the support of senior and experienced ICPs. The action learning sets were well-received and allowed participants to critically reflect on and learn from one another’s experiences. The mentoring programme allowed them to apply their developing leadership skills to real workplace challenges that they face.

Despite a small sample size, the authors’ results provide empirical evidence about the effectiveness of using a practice development approach for strengthening ICP leadership capacity. The success of this pilot study has paved the way for a bigger second cohort of participants in the programme, for which further evaluation will be conducted.

The success of this leadership programme reflects both the need for leadership development in the IPAC professions and the applicability of this approach, with appropriate facilitation, for other professions and organizations.

ICP leadership programmes have not been previously reported in the literature. This pilot study builds on the growing interest in IPAC leadership to foster health system responsiveness and change.

This compact case provides a relatively large data set that students explore using visualization and a Tableau dynamic dashboard that they create. Students were asked to describe what the data set contained in relation to employee attrition experience of Baca Beverage Distributors (BBD). The application and managerial questions are set in human resources and a company that is facing high attrition during the pandemic.

BBD shared their data and problem scenario for this compact case. The protagonist, Morgan Matthews, was the authors’ contact and provided significant clarification and guidance about the data. Both the company and the protagonist have been disguised. Some of the job positions have been rephrased. All names of employees, supervisors and managers have been replaced with codes.

During the 2020–2022 pandemic years, BBD experienced, like many companies, a higher than usual employee turnover rate and Morgan Matthews, Director of People, was concerned. Not only was it time-consuming, expensive and disruptive but the company had prided itself on being a good place to work. Were they hiring the right people, people that fit the company culture and people that fit the positions for which they were hired? The company had been using the Predictive Index [1] when on-boarding employees. In addition, there were results from self-reviews and manager reviews that could be used. Morgan wondered if data visualization and visual analytics would be useful in describing their employees and whether it would reveal any opportunities to improve the turnover rate. Before seeking a solution for the high turnover, it was important to step back and learn what the data said about who was leaving and the reasons they gave for leaving.

This compact case can be used in courses that include visualization using Tableau and dashboards. As it is a compact case, it requires less preparation time from the students and less class time for discussion. The case is for students who have been recently introduced to business analytics, specifically visualization and data storytelling with Tableau. For this reason, significant guidance has been provided in the case assignment. The level of the case can be adjusted by the amount of guidance provided in the case assignment. Courses include introduction to business analytics, descriptive analytics and visualization, communication through data storytelling. The case can be used for all modalities – in person, hybrid, online. The authors use it here for visualization and dynamic dashboards but using the same data set and compact case description, exploratory data analysis could be assigned.

Supplementary material for this article can be found online.

This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH) journals. In particular, it seeks to detect patterns in authors' countries of work and languages in co-authorship networks.

Through an in-depth co-authorship network analysis, this study analysed bibliometric data from three canonical DH journals over a range of 52 years (1966–2017). The results are presented as visualised networks with centrality calculations.

The results suggest that while DH scholars may not collaborate as frequently as those in other disciplines, when they do so their collaborations tend to be more international than in many Science and Engineering, and Social Sciences disciplines. DH authors in some countries (e.g. Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, and the UK) have the highest international co-author rates, while others have high national co-author rates but low international rates (e.g. Japan, the USA, and France).

This study is the first DH co-authorship network study that explores the apparent connection between language and collaboration patterns in DH. It contributes to ongoing debates about diversity, representation, and multilingualism in DH and academic publishing more widely.

This paper aims to investigate whether Kazakh small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that claim to compete with the informal sector are more likely to invest in innovation than their competitors who do not perceive such pressure.

Logistic regression and classification trees are performed on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (2018–2020) to examine whether the degree of informal competition correlates with a firm's propensity to innovate.

The findings show that informal sector competition is a critical factor that shapes the organizational behaviour of Kazakh SMEs. There is a stimulating positive effect of informal competition on both product and process innovation, depending on its perceived intensity.

This study challenges conventional thinking that still views informal sector competition as a barrier to innovation and entrepreneurship by assessing whether innovation is compatible with informal entrepreneurial practice.

Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.

The communications industry faces a recruitment crisis. Despite the pivot to hybrid working and the ever-increasing number of young people opting to study the discipline, over half of recruiters in the public sector and three quarters of those recruiting for agencies struggle to fill vacancies. This chapter examines these trends from a radical feminist perspective, arguing the communications industry is squandering young, female talent by failing both new entrants and mothers returning to work after childbirth. This analysis is based on a series of surveys undertaken between 2020 and 2022 to examine the expectations and lived experience of women, and in particular communications students and mothers, working in or aspiring to work in the sector. Over 73% of the women surveyed had experienced gender-based discrimination and harassment, and 66% had been forced to choose between their careers and having a child. Of the young entrants to the profession surveyed, 88% believed becoming a mother would negatively impact their career, while 32% had experienced discrimination while undertaking their student placement. Analysis of these data indicates the sector faces a crisis of its own making by failing to provide a workplace culture worth working in. The chapter concludes only a direct challenge to male hegemony can redress the gender imbalance, free up talent to meet skills shortages and provide lasting change for women working in communications. It offers a series of recommendations for how professional bodies can address these issues and empower young women to achieve the career outcomes they deserve.

This study clarifies how intra-organizational social capital (IOSC) and unit-organizational ambidexterity (UOA), using resource-based view and dynamic capability theory, together support organizational value creation. While there is research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) exploring the role of resources and its uses, there remains limited understanding of how resources are linked and their effective utilization in the service sector. This study aims to examine the mediating process linking employee-experienced service-oriented high-performance work systems (SHPWS) experienced by employees and service performance by integrating IOSC and UOA.

This study uses time lagged data from managers and employees of different branches of Chinese state-owned banks. To test the proposed hypotheses, path analysis was applied.

The path analysis results reveal that employee-experienced SHPWS is an important antecedent of service performance. Moreover, IOSC (as resources) and UOA (uses) strongly mediate the theorized relationship.

This study attempts to refine theory and practice with clearer, more insightful and coherent means to better understand and help unpack the ‘black box’ between SHPWS-performance relationships through a new linkage model.

This study examines the direct and indirect effects of organizational environmental orientation (EO)/culture, quality management practices (QMP) and sustainability experience (SE) on the relationship between organizational green practices (GP) and the triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability performance (SuP).

To test the seven hypotheses, a structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The responses of 365 managers from various USA businesses in the service industries were analyzed using IBM SPSS and structural equation modeling (SEM)-AMOS.

The empirical results indicate that positive SuP in the economic, environmental and social dimensions and organizational GP can be improved by a strong culture of EO, effective QMP and substantial SE.

This research fills the gap in existing research between important organizational and environmental priorities and SuP. Consequently, the study provides managers with important strategic guidance: for environmental practices to achieve profitability and sustainability success, companies must promote an environmental-mindful culture and strategically invest in integrated QM systems.

This research is one of the first that explores how organizational environmental culture and QMP affect directly and indirectly the relationship between GP and SuP. These results provide empirical evidence to support the claim that environmental culture and QMP have significant direct and indirect effects on the relationship between GP and SuP dimensions.

The foreword to Women's Work in Public Relations discusses the multitude of ways that women experience public relations (PR) work. Each women's experience depends on, for instance, location, culture, the presence (or otherwise) of a union or professional association, the support of colleagues, the practitioner's domestic circumstances and more. There is not just one female experience of PR.

This foreword reviews the chapters in Women's Work in Public Relations and points to the parallels, contradictions, and struggles faced by women working in the little-understood occupation of PR where the everyday work of women is largely invisible. It explains how women working in PR carry out tasks which can at once be necessary, unnecessary, the whim of a client or management, performative, or exploitative – such is the varied and unstructured occupation of PR.

Women face barriers and discrimination at work but past research has not always explained the form that this takes. The foreword notes that much discrimination takes place in plain sight (for instance in terms of erratically applied flexible working policies, unpredictable workloads, or language in professional documents that accepts inequality) and observes that unless we recognise discrimination it's difficult to vocalise opposition to it.

The foreword's discussion of methodology shows that there is no one way to study women working in PR and this book represents a small but rich range of largely qualitative research methodology. It demonstrates that, just as there are many experiences of women in PR, there are also many ways to research them.

Public relations (PR) research has given little space to the opinions, innovations and experiences of those working in marginalised or ‘dirty’ roles or occupations. To ensure that the worlds of these ‘others’ are represented this chapter explores the lives and work of women working in PR and communication roles in the ‘adult’ industry (worth an estimated $15 billion worldwide). Tibbals notes that ‘the voices and experiences of women working in the adult film industry are often overlooked’ (2013, p. 21) and dismissing a highly profitable but ‘dirty’ sector is to overlook and denigrate the people who work in it and the experiences and knowledge created therein. To explore my research questions I gathered informal interview data from women working in PR and combined this with published literature which recorded the lives of women who carried out PR and communications roles in the adult industry. My research demonstrates that high quality PR work is carried out within the adult industry and that the industry attracts women from diverse backgrounds, many of whom progress quickly within a meritorious environment. Nonetheless, these women often feel difficulty in explaining or justifying their work to family and friends and have strategies to avoid discussing their work to those outside the industry. They also have to work within a media environment where adult industry issues are not well or correctly reported.