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The purpose of this paper is to focuses on the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to acquire and analyse student's life-centric experiences in an undergraduate early childhood course entitled, “Philosophy in Action”. The course has as a foundational belief that a teacher's sense of identity is central to effective teaching. As such, this research sought to capture the essence of the connection between students’ beliefs about early childhood teaching and the real world of practice.

Using an AI approach peak performances were analysed for causes of success and emergent themes, after which provocative propositions and an action plan were co-constructed.

The findings of this research evoke discourse around the influence of the student-teacher relationship as a means of enhancing life centric learning experiences in educational programmes.

The authors wondered whether an AI approach to a course evaluation might open themes that show a taken-for-granted depth of the learning experiences. The authors were not disappointed.

“The dark” has long been associated with women. An attempt is made here to show how the “dark” can be seen as a valuable and significant concept for women understanding themselves as women and their situation for developing a view towards the concept of “power”. Women, as women, have a responsibility to themselves and others to make their voices heard and to become aware of their particular strengths and to develop these strengths both inside and outside existing organisations. Most current organisations are “male‐dominated” and “male” in approach. Both men and women are frequently unaware of the extent to which they are influenced and operating from a gender‐specific approach. Men and women can equally shape their organisations when women reclaim their strengths and refuse their position as a less important, less informed, “minority” status. The issues of conflict and trust in organisations and problem areas in relationships between women are explored.

This article explores aspects of separation from “post-traditional” religiosity characteristic of certain late/post-modern affiliations. To do so, I analyze in-depth interviews with 44 individuals who formerly identified with straightedge – a clean-living youth-oriented scene tightly bound with hardcore music that is centered on abstinence from intoxicants – about their experiences transitioning through associated music assembly rituals. While features of hardcore music assemblies – e.g. moshing, slamdancing, sing-a-longs – have long been treated as symbolic connections that potentially conjure the religious as conceptualized in Émile Durkheim's “effervescence” and the liminality of Victor Turner's “communitas,” data on transitions from these features of ritual remain scant. Ex-straightedgers generally believed the sorts of deep connections they professed to experience in hardcore rituals as youths were not necessarily currently accessible to them, nor were they replicable elsewhere. Findings then ultimately suggest some post-traditional religious experiences might now be profitably considered in terms of the life course, which has itself transformed alongside the proliferation of newer late/post-modern affiliations and communities.

This study aims to explore the formation and consequences of a cross-selling initiative climate, as well as how a service climate, which provides an important boundary condition, affects both its formation and its ultimate impact on service-sales performance. This article identifies two important predictors of a cross-selling initiative climate: frontline employees’ perceptions of supervisors’ bottom-line mentality and their own sense of accountability.

The multilevel data set includes 180 frontline staff and supervisors (team leaders) from 31 teams employed by a spa/beauty salon chain. Hierarchical linear modelling and partial least squares methods serve to analyse the data.

Supervisors’ bottom-line mentality disrupts a cross-selling initiative climate. A sense of accountability exerts a positive impact at both individual and team levels. A service climate at the team level weakens the impact of a sense of accountability on a cross-selling initiative climate. A cross-selling initiative climate has a positive effect on team-level service-sales performance, but this effect is weakened by the service climate.

This study conceptualises an important frontline work unit attribute as a climate. It offers an initial argument that a cross-selling initiative climate is a central factor driving a work unit’s service-sales performance, which can increase firms’ productivity and competitive advantages. With this initial attempt to explore the antecedents and consequences of a cross-selling initiative climate, the study also offers novel insights into the interplay between a service and a cross-selling initiative climate.