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The purpose of this study/paper is to highlight emerging themes in CRE capabilities and organizational models. The authors explain a Lean Six Sigma-based staffing optimization and integration methodology which ensures organizational design is aligned with enterprise requirements. The ultimate objective is a CRE organizational model that sets resourcing requirements for years ahead while yielding innovative new savings. These priorities set an archetypical precedent for emerging organizational models. The emerging organizational blueprint demonstrates a clear move away from the traditional CRE model by optimizing functional service delivery toward a model that drives business integration, strategy development and creative solution deployment.

Throughout numerous assessments of corporate CRE organizations in the past year, the authors have witnessed emerging themes in CRE priorities and the capabilities required for achieving those priorities. The authors have utilized a Lean Six Sigma-based staffing optimization and integration methodology which ensures that organizational design is aligned with enterprise requirements.

Whereas previous models were built to emphasize functional service delivery, the emerging model is structured to enable a core team to focus on developing strategic relationships and delivering strategic solutions. Functional service delivery is managed directly through a strategic partnership with an outsourced service provider. The emerging model suggests a small, centralized core leadership team. Careful governance and communication protocols must be developed to ensure the duplication and redundancy does not become an issue.

Lean Six Sigma has evolved into a business improvement system that has taken hold within many high-performing real estate and facility services – a methodology that emerged from mechanized manufacturing might seem ill-adapted to CRE organizational development. Yet, with guided implementation and disciplined use, we have observed that Lean Six Sigma yields high-impact results in service environments and even with non-technical areas like organization design. This is a unique vantage point that combines engineering technicality against cultural aspects of organizational development.

To provide a roadmap for corporate real estate (CRE) directors to effect change in the way they deliver services through enhanced relationships with their “customers,” the users of CRE.

Previous studies and discussions of customer relationship management are combined with the authors' extensive experience to make a case for formalized change management processes and analyze specific methods for enhancing the effectiveness of these processes.

Relationship management integrates real estate processes into larger corporate processes, converting real estate opportunities into competitive advantages. The transition from a reactive to a proactive mode of service is aided by adoption of new mind sets and new skills sets, including tools and processes for communicating within the organization, enhanced financial/analytical acumen, and metrics for determining successful outcomes.

Every CRE department faces unique challenges and opportunities which cannot be fully addressed in a paper designed for broad applicability.

CRE directors will recognize the challenges and opportunities they face and will learn about specific actions and initiatives they can implement to enhance their effectiveness though internal customer relationship management.

Applicability of change and customer relationship management processes to the CRE environment is a new area of focus and is mostly uncharted territory. This roadmap delves deeper than previous papers into specific methods for aligning real estate processes with the “voice of the customer” to further corporate objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a practice guide for where to apply six sigma process improvement methodology to the corporate real estate function.

Based on years of direct experience provide practical guidance on how to get started and to overcome resistance that process improvement is not for service organizations like CRE.

World‐leading CRE departments are addressing cost pressure and performance expectations using process improvement, and the method of choice is six sigma. A methodology that emerged from mechanized manufacturing might seem ill‐adaptive to CRE and similar service cultures. Yet, with guided implementation and disciplined use, six sigma yields tangible results in service environments.

Documenting and benchmarking process improvement results across CRE departments; surveying the level of business adoption of six sigma methodology compared to the level of CRE adoption within the same company and how this leads to business misalignment

World class benchmarks will be set in the future by CRE organizations that adopt six sigma process improvement methodology.

A provocative discourse furthering the cause six sigma within an industry that famously resistant to change.

This essay provides an overview of key contemporary issues researched by scholars of Language Issues in Comparative and International Education. The authors present this scholarship around three main themes: L1-based multilingual education; language revitalization and education; and the power dynamics between dominant and non-dominant languages in educational settings. Research in all three themes challenges the view of monolingualism as the norm and invites the view that all languages are resources. These perspectives are relevant to the goals of educational development, particularly to equitable access to quality schooling. Recent research examines some stakeholders’ resistance to supporting and sustaining local languages and cultural practices. While language-in-education policy change may be slow, there are promising directions in research on how educators and communities exercise agency in transforming educational institutions to support plurilingualism and intercultural understandings. Scholars highlight the ideological, pedagogical, and policy-level supports needed for sustainable development of multiple languages, literacies and learning across contexts.

This article employs a system analytic framework to categorize the available research literature on the politics of education in order to explain the inter‐relationship of private and public interests and of different levels in primary and secondary American schools. The objectives are several: to explain and develop the analytical framework of David Easton; to illustrate its heuristic utility by categorizing empirically‐based research within the components of that framework, and to suggest and encourage future research directions in the subject. Education has escaped application of traditional policy analysis in America because educators have convinced scholars and laymen that they are “non‐political,” a label which even most political scientists have accepted without challenge. However, during the 1960s, a few scholars in education and political science began to apply political analytical methods to public school conflict. This research has begun to change perceptions of education and to provide a beginning set of research projects whose data support tentative generalization about the policy‐making process and the total system of public schools. This orientation is bound to increase because of increasing national government intervention in local schools, both through integration and financial policies. These have provoked growing conflict locally over the proper direction of school policies. In this article, we see how such stress is transmitted in the form of “demands” and “supports” into the “political system”, that persistent social mechanism known in all societies in different forms provides an “authoritative allocation of values and resources”. The political system, in this case public school bodies, “converts” such “inputs” into “outputs” of public policy, which in their administration create outcomes which later cause a “feedback” into the political system as the material for new policy demands. For each component of this Eastonian system, this article examines relevant research, providing an extensive annotated bibliography. From this review, it is possible to suggest lines of needed research.

The purpose of this paper is to further develop the epistemological base of interventionist research (IR) as a valid accounting and management research methodology, through the identification of intervention theory and an IR framework derived from social sciences. Moreover, this paper seeks to contribute to empirical knowledge of IR through a critical review of limited empirical evidence relating to intervention theory and the extant IR frameworks derived from action research.

Texts and academic journal papers that judiciously review intervention theory, intervention research frameworks were identified systematically; along with empirical research addressing theoretical and methodological deficiencies of IR and, providing evidence to inform practical considerations when undertaking IR.

The key findings include rare empirical evidence addressing theoretical shortcomings and application of intervention theory, an IR framework derived from social sciences with extremely limited use in accounting and management research, deficiencies in action research oriented frameworks labelled as alternative forms of IR, an alternate perspective to positivistic validity and reliability issues and other practical considerations to facilitate the conducting of IR.

The novelty of this paper lies in the diminution of the fragmented nature of IR that undermines its scientific value through the identification of an intervention theory and IR framework experiencing extremely limited use in accounting and management research, with the exception of a cross‐disciplinary (management accounting and information systems) doctoral study, optimising IR utilisation with greater degrees of validity and reliability and, finally, a proposed alternative research design for utilisation in IR.

Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced relations when imbalance offers the opportunity to reap material rewards. We argue that balance is preferred because it functions as a “compression heuristic,” allowing networks to be more easily encoded in, and recalled from, memory.

We present the results of a novel randomized laboratory experiment using nearly 300 subjects. We evaluate the independent and joint effects of degree of balance/imbalance and presence/absence of kin compression heuristics on network recall.

We find that memory for relationship valence is more accurate for balanced, rather than imbalanced, networks and that relationship existence and relationship valence are separable cognitive elements. We also use comparisons between kin and non-kin networks to suggest that humans are implicitly aware of the conditions under which imbalanced networks will be most durable.

We show that the tension/strain postulated to generate mental and behavioral responses to increase balance likely stems from cognitive limitations. More broadly, this connects balance theory to models of human cognition and evolution and suggests that human general processing ability may have evolved in response to social, rather than physical, challenges.

This chapter reviews and synthesizes three major strands of recent research, alongside discipline-specific research design, from scholars of Language Issues in Comparative and International Education. The first strand is mixed methods research on the policy and practice of L1-based multilingual education programs, and their contribution to raising educational quality and addressing equity and inclusiveness worldwide. The second strand is qualitative, community-based research of educational programs aimed toward revitalization of minoritized, indigenous, and/or endangered languages. The third strand is empirical and theoretical research that seeks to document, contest, and reconceptualize the dynamics among dominant and non-dominant languages within and between international contexts. The authors explore points of synergy between studies, examine publication in the field from a meta-perspective, and suggest encouraging directions of future research, while highlighting the value of non-dominant languages as resources for education and life.