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The selection process used by an organisation employing the autonomous work group (AWG) structure is reported. What makes this company′s approach worthy of consideration is the fact that they now have more than 14 years of successful experience using the team concept. Plant personnel and training specialists have identified a group of salient characteristics which, in their experience, have played a major role in facilitating high performance and contributing to the compatibility of the individual within the team structure.

Describes the application of open systems theory in a manufacturing plant. Outlines the theoretical foundation on which the intervention was based, as well as a description of the team design, compensation system and plant organization.

American Eagle, a new United States regional carrier affiliated with Metro Airlines of Houston, Texas, has announced that it is to order 10 British Aerospace Jetstream 31 light turboprop aircraft.

The technical report released by the National Transportation Safety Board, along with the primary flight cockpit voice recorder data and archival interview data, were used as the basis for this case. Other available public data such as news reports were used to round out the synopsis of the case study.

United Express Flight 5925 was a scheduled commuter passenger flight operated by Great Lakes Airlines with a Beechcraft 1900 twin turboprop. It was a regularly scheduled flight from Chicago O'Hare International Airport to Quincy, Illinois, with an intermediate stop in Burlington, Iowa. Drawing from various first-hand accounts (cockpit voice recorder) and secondary evidence (news reports, archival interview data, and online sources) of the tragedy, the case provides a detailed account of the key events that took place leading up to the accident at Quincy regional airport. The case describes how the radio interactions, a jammed door and degradation of situational awareness all contributed to the accident. Through many of the quotes in the text and eyewitness accounts, readers gain an understanding of the impressions and perceptions of the pilots, including how they felt about many of the critical decisions in the last minutes of the flight and the situation at the airport.

When the authors teach this case, the students are required to read it as pre-reading before class. Various readings and materials (see supplemental readings below and Exhibit 3) are made available to students before class, and the instructor can choose to use some of these materials to further explore areas of interest. This case is best explored over a 90-min session but could be expanded to take up one 3-h session. This case can be covered in an undergraduate senior capstone organizational behaviour seminar, any general organizational behaviour class (including introductory in nature), an undergraduate communication theory class or an MBA class that focuses on applied organizational behaviour concepts. It works particularly well in the MBA class, as students with work experience can make the links between the behaviours explored in the case and their everyday workplaces.

In this study we investigated the effects of news reports on acquirer short-term performance. Our focus was on the extent to which key deal characteristics – the type of deal, during a merger wave or not or the presence of a significant premium – are made explicit. Moreover, we looked for the effect of the assessment of the deal characteristics by different key informants: board members, top management team members, and analysts. Configurations derived using the set-theoretic approach suggest that media-transmitted signals form complex interrelations among content and informant. We found that investors react positively to deals that are surrounded by unequivocal signals of synergy potential: they contain explicitly stated deal characteristics as well as deal endorsements from the boards and/or top management of acquirer and target companies. Analysts’ assessments of the deals seem to bear little influence on investor reaction. Meanwhile, investors react negatively to deals with low or absent media coverage as well as deals surrounded by signals of ambiguous synergy potential.

Scant attention has been paid to the influence of professors on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students' learning and lives at the tertiary level. To fill this void, this chapter examines the influence of professors on students' entering and remaining in the STEM disciplines and pursuing STEM careers within the context of six funded STEM grants in the southern United States. We examine professor–student interactions using the students' storied experiences as the fodder for our narrative inquiry. We present narrative exemplars from which the following themes emerged: (1) agency as a student and agency as a human being, (2) development of students' multilayered identities, and (3) professors' engagement of themselves in their interactions with students. A discussion of learner-centeredness and professors' professional development in higher education concludes this study of professors' influence on students' learning and intended careers.

The purpose of this study is to consider why firms use different disclosure outlets. The authors argue that the firm's choice of disclosure outlet can be explained by voluntary disclosure theories and investigate whether the market response around different disclosure outlets varies.

The authors investigate differences in the characteristics of firms purchasing analyst research, holding investor presentations or Open Briefings and compare market reactions around each disclosure event.

The authors find that firm incentives to reduce information acquisition costs or mitigate disclosure risk affect firm disclosure outlet choice, and mixed evidence in support of talent signalling motivations. There is a lower absolute abnormal return around Open Briefings and a higher signed abnormal return around purchased analyst research.

The research is exploratory in nature and only considers a small subset of disclosure outlets. There may be differences in information content across disclosure outlets.

They show disclosure outlets are not homogenous and provide empirical evidence voluntary disclosure theories help explain differences between firms’ use of disclosure outlets. Considering the growing number of disclosure outlets available, disclosure outlet choice is likely to be an increasingly important topic in accounting research.

While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the “black box” of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum with transformational sustainability ambitions.

Realist evaluation was used as an analytical frame that takes social context into account to unpack learning mechanisms and associated learning outcomes. A socio-cultural perspective on learning was adopted, and ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations, were used.

Three context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations were identified, capturing what students placed value and emphasis on when developing capabilities for leading sustainability transformations: engaging with complex “in-between” sustainability challenges in society with stakeholders across sectors and perspectives; navigating purposeful and transformative change via backcasting; and “whole-person” learning from the inside-out as an identity-shaping process, guided by personal values.

The findings of this paper can inform the design, development, evaluation and comparison of similar educational initiatives across institutions, while leaving room for contextual negotiation and adjustment.

This paper delineates and discusses important learning mechanisms and outcomes when students act as co-creators of knowledge in a sustainability-oriented educational initiative, working with authentic challenges together with societal actors.

The purpose of this paper is to review Wilson's (1981) seminal article, “On user studies and information needs” (Journal of Documentation, 1981, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 3‐15) as part of a series celebrating the Journal's 60th anniversary.

This paper adopts a literature‐based conceptual analysis, taking Wilson's paper as the starting point, and evaluating the significance of, and later developments in, the issues dealt with in that article.

Wilson's article has had a significant effect on the development of information science. It dealt with several fundamental issues, including the nature of information itself and of information need, models of information seeking and information behaviour, particularly those based on phenomenological or “whole life” concepts, appropriate research methods for these areas, and the nature of information science as an academic discipline.

The paper provides a perspective on the development of information science over 30 years, with particular emphasis on the study of human information behaviour.