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Spending constraints in state budgets have resulted in a need to evaluate the effects of alternative budgeting techniques. We study public school administrations, where improvements in budgetary processes could help align system goals with reduced levels of funding. A budgeting technique, called strategic budgeting (SB), emphasizing information symmetry and mutual monitoring, is investigated in a nonprofit setting by comparing it to a traditional budgeting (TB) method. The experiment finds that the effect of reduced spending previously discovered in a corporate setting are also evident in a not-for-profit setting. Results indicated an overall cost savings with SB of almost 25 percent. Public school administrators made spending decisions in a hypothetical three-year task and provided comments to justify their decisions. These comments along with anecdotal evidence from prior field research indicate that collaborative characteristics in a budget format may reduce unnecessary spending.

The purpose of this paper is to extend awareness that workplace bullying impacts on the health of individuals both within and outside the workplace and that there are implications for workplace health management.

The paper contextualises the problem of workplace bullying and workplace health management and introduces the five articles in the special issue.

Workplace health management is becoming more prominent in some organizations and workplace health management, and a corporate culture based on partnership, trust and respect, offers considerable potential to move the agenda forward. Moreover, there appears to be a paucity of knowledge available as to how workplace health management strategies and programmes impact on organizational culture and assembling and sharing such a knowledge base could be a useful step.

Further research is required to extend the studies presented and to address workplace bullying from the perspective of workplace health management.

Research is required to explore the extent to which the potential of workplace health management programmes to impact positively on corporate approaches to bullying and harassment has been realised and how those programmes have influenced corporate culture.

A partnership approach to knowledge creation and sharing has the most potential for successful outcomes and accords closely with the inferred ideals of the Luxembourg Declaration for Workplace Health promotion.

The paper addresses a perceived gap in the literature linking workplace bullying to the impact on individual health and the implications for workplace health management.

The self‐reports of bullies or victims of workplace bullying appear to result in confused responses that fail to clarify who is doing what to whom. The research reported in this paper aimed to examine how staff from human resources and occupational health conceptualized and assessed cases of alleged bullying.

The research relied on semi‐structured interviews with managers, human resource staff, occupational health staff, mediators, trade union representatives, and staff members who were both victims and alleged perpetrators of bullying. The staff contributing came from an NHS trust, two universities and a criminal justice agency.

Staff were reluctant to document or reveal information about the frequency and severity of bullying within their services. Despite this, three key themes emerged from the interviews that seemed to inform individual and organisational responses: the ethos of professionalism, the ambiguous role of human resources and the presumption of mutuality.

Reliance on interpretations of workplace bullying that defend both individual staff members and the organization had implications for victims. By not naming reported problems as bullying, the organization could limit its responsibility to act. Failure to identify and document bullying limited the research but also poorly served victimized individuals.

Services require training to help them move beyond a presumption that the self‐reports of bullies are a reliable source of assessment data.

Effective identification and assessment of bullying situations would be the first step towards reducing the psychological impact of the problem. Experience of workplace bullying is highly correlated with health and mental health problems of targeted individuals.

This paper capitalizes on insights from the field of domestic violence in highlighting the need for clarity about the nature of coercive control. The paper will be valuable to individuals and organisations charged with the task of tackling workplace bullying.

This study investigates restaurant patrons' comfort level with the sudden shift in the dining-in climate within the state of Massachusetts during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An exploratory study utilized learning algorithms via gradient boosting techniques on surveyed restaurant patrons to identify which restaurant operational attributes and patron demographics predict in-dining comfort levels.

Past consumers' eating habits determine how much their behavior will change during a pandemic. However, their dining-in frequency is not a predictor of their post-pandemic dining-in outlook. The individuals who were more comfortable dining in prior to the pandemic dined in more often during the COVID pandemic. However, they had a poorer outlook on when dining in would return to normal. Although there are no clear indicators of when and how customers will embrace the new norm (a combination of pre-, peri-, and post-pandemic), the results show that some innovative approaches, such as limiting service offerings, are not well accepted by customers.

The study offers several managerial implications for foodservice providers (i.e. restaurants, delivery services, pick-up) and investors. In particular, the study provides insights into the cognitive factors that determine diners' behavioral change in response to a pandemic and their comfort level. Operators must pay attention to these factors and consider different offering strategies when preparing to operate their business amid a pandemic.

This is a study of a specific location and period. It was conducted in Massachusetts before a vaccine was available. The restaurant industry was beset with uncertainty. It fills a gap in the current literature focused on the COVID-19 pandemic in customers' transition from pre-COVID-19 dining-in behaviors to customers' refreshed COVID-19 outlook and industry compliance with newly established hygiene and safety standards.

This paper aims to highlight how workplace bullies manipulate services by presenting themselves as victims. In the absence of robust screening and assessment tools to distinguish between bully and victim, personnel staff are at risk of being coerced into perpetuating the abuse of victims. The paper also aims to argue for an in‐depth investigation of the psychological motivations of perpetrators to inform the development of a specialised assessment tool.

The paper contains two short case studies drawn from staff attending a workshop on responding to domestic violence in the workplace. Similarities between the coercive behaviour patterns of the domestic violence perpetrator and the workplace bully were striking. The approach taken to discussing the case studies closely follows the approach used in the assessment of domestic violence perpetrators where controlling behaviours and coercive control are captured.

The case studies used in the paper illustrate the dangers of taking a neutral stance in situations where bullying is ongoing. A lack of clarity about who is doing what to whom allows the bully to use any intervention to further abuse. The important issues of victim safety and abuser accountability are absent from the processes employed by personnel staff in the management of these two cases.

There are limitations in the process and the scale of the project, but the case studies are indicative of wider issues, and point towards the central dilemma faced by personnel departments generally.

The domestic violence field offers many insights into the motivations for abusiveness. This paper draws on those insights and shows how they can be used to think more systematically about accusations of bullying in the workplace. The paper argues for increased caution around accepting the self‐reports of bullies who may be presenting as victims.

This paper focuses attention on the ways in which bullying individuals attempt to coerce services into perpetuating their abusiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the effects of a major disaster on the management of human resources in the construction sector. It sets out to identify the construction skills challenges and the factors that affected skills availability following the 2010/2011 earthquakes in Christchurch. It is hoped that this study will provide insights for on-going reconstruction and future disaster response with respect to the problem of skills shortages.

A triangulation method was adopted. The quantitative method, namely, a questionnaire survey, was employed to provide a baseline description. Field observations and interviews were used as a follow-up to ascertain issues and potential shortages over time. Three focus groups in the form of research workshops were convened to gain further insight into the feedback and to investigate the validity and applicability of the research findings.

The earthquakes in Christchurch had compounded the pre-existing skills shortages in the country due to heightened demand from reconstruction. Skills shortages primarily existed in seismic assessment and design for land and structures, certain trades, project management and site supervision. The limited technical capability available nationally, shortage of temporary accommodation to house additional workers, time needed for trainees to become skilled workers, lack of information about reconstruction workloads and lack of operational capacity within construction organisations, were critical constraints to the resourcing of disaster recovery projects.

The research findings contribute to the debate on skills issues in construction. The study provides evidence that contributes to an improved understanding of the industry’s skills vulnerability and emerging issues that would likely exist after a major disaster in a resource-limited country such as New Zealand.

From this research, decision makers and construction organisations can gain a clear direction for improving the construction capacity and capability for on-going reconstruction. Factors that affected the post-earthquake skills availability can be considered by decision makers and construction organisations in their workforce planning for future disaster events. The recommendations will assist them in addressing skills shortages for on-going reconstruction.

Although the study is country-specific, the findings show the nature and scale of skills challenges the construction industry is likely to face following a major disaster, and the potential issues that may compound skills shortages. It provides lessons for other disaster-prone countries where the resource pool is small and a large number of additional workers are needed to undertake reconstruction.

In March 2015 Vanuatu experienced Tropical Cyclone (TC) Pam, a category 5 cyclone with estimated wind speeds of 250 kph and one of the worst disasters in Vanuatu’s history. Prior to the cyclone, one-third of water in Vanuatu was collected by means of rainwater harvesting systems; around one quarter of these systems were damaged due to the cyclone and no longer functional. The purpose of this paper is to investigate social and organisational complexities in the resilience of water systems in Vanuatu following TC Pam, focussing on rural areas.

The resilience of water supply in rural responses to TC Pam was examined using the three following approaches: review of existing documents, a case study of a village and interviews with specialist local and international non-governmental organisation staff working in Vanuatu.

People’s reaction to the cyclone and its consequences at the village or community level in Vanuatu was impressive. The capacity of the locals, their involvement in the community and the low level of violence and high level of trust within society contributed to a quicker water supply restoration than expected. Despite severe shortages of water in some areas due to physical vulnerability of the system, the communities dealt with the issue calmly and the country did not experience any chaos due to water shortages.

The research results provide a benchmark for planners and decision makers in the South Pacific based on the social, organisational and technical dimensions of rural areas in Vanuatu that can be generalised to other countries in the region. This study also recommends potential tools to improve assessment of the role of social capital in fostering water supply resilience.

Joint commissioning is an important part of the current health and social care context and will continue to be crucial in the future. An essential component of any commissioning process is priority setting, and this paper begins to explore the idea of integrated priority setting as a key element of health and social care commissioning. After setting out the key terminology in this area and the main priority‐setting processes for health and social care, the paper describes a number of barriers that might be encountered in integrated priority setting. We argue that there are significant barriers in financing, accessibility, evidence and politics, and it is important that such barriers are acknowledged if priority setting is to become a component of joint commissioning. While these barriers are not insurmountable, the solution lies in engagement with a range of stakeholders, rather than simply a technical process.