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This article examines how contact with the police led to the death of Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old Black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot and killed during an altercation with a police officer). And, how Darren Wilson (the White police officer from the Ferguson Police Department who shot and killed Michael Brown) was portrayed in mainstream newspaper articles covering the story of Brown’s death.

Using both frame analysis and Hall’s framework of discursive domains for organizing and making sense of events in social life, we analyzed news coverage of Brown in three of the top circulating daily newspapers in the US: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. The Lexis Nexis database was used to retrieve a set of newspapers using the search term “Michael Brown.” Articles from the three leading newspapers were collected from the day the event occurred, August 9, 2014, through the end of the year, December 31, 2014.

The news articles used in this study were mostly written with an episodic frame. The articles presenting the socioeconomic background of Brown and Wilson were described as profiles on each individual and the neighborhood they came from, rather than a discussion about where they fell on the economic structure of this country and the larger, upstream forces that might influence those positions. The feelings and attitudes of the reader are also likely to be influenced by details included in the articles and how they were presented.

The findings contribute to the broader literature looking at the relationships between police and Black communities. Public health can play a role in advocating and facilitating programs that build better linkages between police and community. The public health field can take a leadership role in holding the news media accountable when they are engaging in frenetic inaction. Only by having difficult and challenging conversations that examines the upstream causes of violence and deaths like Brown’s, can we make progress in preventing them.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

Although companies are increasingly embracing the sustainability discourse in their external reporting and disclosures, little is known about how management control systems support sustainability within organizations. This is unfortunate, given the important role that properly designed Sustainability Control Systems (SCS) may play in helping firms to better face their social and environmental responsibilities. Starting from these premises, the aim of this essay is twofold. On the one hand, we present a review of the emerging stream of research on sustainability and management control mechanisms, in order to identify and discuss the link between the two. On the other hand, we try to illustrate the main unaddressed issues in this literature as a premise to exploring one possible way to advance research in this area. Specifically, we make a call for a more holistic approach to the study of SCS, which considers also their organizational and cultural dimensions in addition to their technical properties. A framework for informing future work on the topic is proposed, based on the concept of ‘control package’ (Malmi & Brown, 2008; Sandelin, 2008) complemented with notions from the complementarity-based approach developed in organizational economics (Grandori & Furnari, 2008; Milgrom & Roberts, 1995). By enhancing our understanding on how SCS operate as a package, the application of our framework should allow researchers to develop better theory of how to design a range of controls to support organizational sustainability objectives, control sustainability activities, and drive sustainability performance.

A creative identity, the incorporation of creativity into self-definition, is associated with creative outcomes. Given the importance of creativity to organizational success, understanding creative identity and in particular creative identity work (the formation and maintenance of creative identity) can be useful in understanding creatives within organizations. To be considered creative, individuals need to not only produce unique artefacts, but these artefacts need to be assessed by legitimate judges as being creative. Judges may be within an organization (e.g., senior researchers within a laboratory) or may be external to an organization (e.g., award judges in international advertising competitions). Underpinning creative identity work is the creative assessment, however this assessment is ambiguous and contextual. In other words, what is considered creative in one context or by one judge may not be considered creative in another context or by different judges. The ambiguity of the creative assessment makes creative identity work a precarious undertaking. Based on two case studies – a R&D laboratory and an advertising agency – this research explores the strategies which creative individuals employ in their creative identity work in response to the ambiguity of the creative assessment. This research contributes to the growing area of creative identity research by unpacking three specific strategies used as part of identity work of creatives: defending, emotional distancing and differentiating. These strategies assist the creatives in maintaining a coherent sense of who they are within the organizational context despite the unpredictability of the creative assessment.

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the role of organizational reflectiveness as a possible enabler for innovation. In order to support the process of innovation, we need to understand organizational learning on a more detailed level, including reflection as an elemental sub-process in experiential, transformational, and action learning.

We present a tool and preliminary empirical findings for measuring an organization’s level of reflectiveness. We also provide some preliminary empirical results regarding whether reflectivity results in the generation of new innovations relating to work practices and processes.

The chapter fills two research gaps, and in doing so contributes to measuring and controlling organizational learning and innovation activities. First, we complement the existing conceptualization of reflective practice by utilizing the management control system (MCS) (Malmi & Brown, 2008) in the analysis of reflectiveness on the organization level. Finally, in the conclusion, we present reflective practice as a potential concept and practical tool for enhancing the interactive use of MCS. The interactive use of MCS has been recognized for its potential in boosting learning, creativity, and innovations in certain contexts (Davila, Foster, & Oyon, 2009), but so far the definitions for interactive use remain descriptive and varied among management accounting theorists.

The approach in this study is predominantly conceptual, with empirical and exploratory findings derived from measuring the level of reflectiveness in three organizations. The study enhances the understanding of management control based on the theoretical notion of multilevel reflection on a practice-based level. Empirically, reflective practices are often studied as a learning phenomenon on the individual and collective levels. However, such an approach generally does not incorporate managerial pragmatism regarding the causes of institutionalized learning or the means of managerial control for enabling reflection and, in consequence, innovations.

This chapter reviews empirical studies into the relationship between management control, strategy and sustainability.

The review explores the theoretical frameworks and models used in previous empirical research as well as the research questions and methods applied to empirically explore this emerging research area.

Even if a growing body of empirical research has emerged over the last decade, our knowledge of how companies design or use management control to support sustainability strategy appears to be limited, providing considerable scope for further research.

This review structures the state of our empirical knowledge in the area of management control, strategy and sustainability and makes suggestions for future research paths.

This study examines challenges to the retrospective financial evaluation of continuous improvement (CI) activities. Through a review of the literature and active engagement with CI implementations, we identify several issues that may lead to divergence between operational and financial assessments. Out of this conflict emerges a set of concepts that we find important − the delineation of soft versus hard capacity benefits, the distinction between capacity used and capacity paid for, and the data gaps that relate to these benefits – and recognize operational improvement and financial improvement as distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical constructs. This study helps explain a series of persistent gaps in the management accounting literature: Conflict between operations and accounting managers, the divergent perspectives of Johnson and Kaplan after their publication of Relevance Lost (Johnson & Kaplan, 1987), and the need for both operational control (including detailed capacity control) and accounting control in CI firms. Instead of one control system being at odds with the other, or co-existing despite each other, each of these systems support a different component of the financial improvement process. Operational control systems in CI firms emphasize non-financial information and social and behavioral controls that empower decision-making by employees, while accounting control systems seek to motivate and translate operational gains into financial gains. Soft and hard benefits linked to capacity play an integral role in understanding the difference in focus of each control system, while data limitations help to explain why these systems remain loosely coupled in practice (or absent, as seems to be the case with detailed Capacity Management Systems).