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This paper shares the conclusions of the authors with respect to a comparison of Beer’s viable systems model (VSM) and modern business process thinking. These conclusions have been arrived at as a result of extensive empirical research over the past five years. Modern business process thinking and the VSM provides the foundations for a viable business structure which maximises opportunities for managing agility. The paper provides a brief background to the research and explains VSM and modern business process thinking. It then goes on to demonstrate how VSM and modern business process thinking combine to provide a powerful structure for planning and managing today’s modern organisation in an uncertain and dynamic environment. In developing the theorythe paper also provides empirical evidence to support and demonstrate the application of the theory. The paper concludes with a summary of key messages and lessons learned.

The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent a person’s psychophysiological well-being is affected by misinformation and whether their level of information discernment has any positive or negative effect on the outcome.

Participants (n = 48) were randomly and blindly allocated to one of two groups: control group participants were told a person they were working with was a student; experimental group participants were additionally led to believe that this other participant had extreme religious views. This was both stigmatising and misinforming, as this other person was an actor. Participants completed a pre-screening booklet and a series of tasks. Participants’ cardiovascular responses were measured during the procedure.

Participants with high levels of information discernment, i.e. those who are curious, use multiple sources to verify information, are sceptical about search engine information, are cognisant of the importance of authority and are aware that knowledge changes and is contradictory at times exhibited an adaptive stress response, i.e. healthy psychophysiological outcomes and responded with positive emotions before and after a stressful task.

The findings indicate the potential harmful effects of misinformation and discuss how information literacy or Metaliteracy interventions may address this issue.

The first study to combine the hitherto unrelated theoretical areas of information discernment (a sub-set of information literacy), affective states (positive affect negative affect survey) and stress (challenge and threat cardiovascular measures).

This introductory chapter surveys institutional experimentation that has emerged internationally in response to the contraction of the traditional model of employment protection. Various initiatives are discussed according to the particular challenges they are designed to address: the emergence of non-standard employment contracts; increasing sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; intensification of exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; the growth of intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and the emergence of entities that subvert the employment relationship entirely. Whereas post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model as a ‘web of rules’, we argue that nascent institutional experimentation is indicative of an emergent ‘patchwork of rules’. The identification of such experimentation is instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This paper draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.

Felicitous writing is enormously important. However, the art of writing well is rarely addressed by marketing scholars. This paper seeks to argue that the marketing academy has much to learn from historiography, a sub‐discipline devoted to the explication of historical writing.

Although it is primarily predicated on published works, this paper is not a conventional literature review. It relies, rather, on the classic historical method of “compare and contrast”. It considers parallels between the paired disciplines yet notes where marketing and history diverge in relation to literary styles and scientific aspirations.

It is concluded that marketing writing could benefit from greater emphasis on “character” and “storytelling”. These might help humanise a mode of academic communication that is becoming increasingly abstruse and ever‐more unappealing to its readership.

If its argument is accepted by the academic community – and, more importantly, acted upon – this paper should transform the writing of marketing. Although the academic reward systems and power structures of marketing make revolutionary change unlikely, a “scholarly spring” is not inconceivable.

The paper's originality rests in the observation that originality is unnecessary. All of the literary‐cum‐stylistic issues raised in this paper have already been tackled by professional historians. Whether marketers are willing to learn from their historical brethren remains to be seen.

In this paper we narrate a story of working on a large project funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant the ‘Keeping Connected: Young People, Identity and Schooling’ project. The purpose of the study is to consider the social connection and schooling of young people who have experienced long‐term chronic illness. While the research involves both quantitative and qualitative elements, the qualitative component is the largest and involves the most researcher time and diversity. At an early stage of the project, three of the researchers working on the qualitative team consider why the study was framed as a series of case studies rather than as ethnography. The second issue considered in this paper is the different approaches to data collection, data analysis and truth claims we might take.

While the positive health benefits of fitness apps, which motivate and track physical exercise, are widely acknowledged, the adverse connection between these technologies and wellbeing has received little attention. The purpose of this paper is to determine how the social dimensions of fitness apps predict the type of passion (harmonious and obsessive) one has for physical exercise, and what the resulting positive and negative implications are for wellbeing.

Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of social influence and the dual model of passion (DMP), this study develops a model depicting how fitness apps relate to the causes and consequences of harmonious and obsessive passion for exercise. Survey data were collected from 272 fitness app using cyclists and analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling techniques.

Different social influence aspects of fitness apps appeal to different types of exercisers. A harmonious passion for physical exercise is predicted by the positive reciprocal benefits attained from one’s fitness app community, while an obsessive passion is predicted by positive recognition. In turn, a harmonious passion for exercise is negatively associated with life burnout, while an obsessive passion strongly affirms that relationship. In addition, the relationship between social influence and life burnout is fully mediated by the type of passion a fitness app user possesses.

Underpinned by the DMP, the study provides a theoretical framework explaining how the use of fitness apps can result in opposing wellness outcomes.

The design and introduction of new pay programs may be particularly challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) because, given their diverse employee base, they face varied employee expectations regarding pay. We offer a model of how national cultural norms affect employee expectations for, and judgments about, pay fairness. We also describe how firms can best use two international compensation strategies for MNCs (a global integration strategy and a local responsiveness strategy) to optimize employees' justice judgments regarding new pay programs. More favorable justice judgments should improve the chances of new pay program survival and, subsequently, contribute to firm competitiveness.

This paper intends to explore the relationship between participants' eye fixations (a measure of attention) and durations (a measure of concentration) on areas of interest within a range of online articles and their levels of information discernment (a sub-process of information literacy characterising how participants make judgements about information).

Eye-tracking equipment was used as a proxy measure for reading behaviour by recording eye-fixations, dwell times and regressions in males aged 18–24 (n = 48). Participants' level of information discernment was determined using a quantitative questionnaire.

Data indicates a relationship between participants' level of information discernment and their viewing behaviours within the articles' area of interest. Those who score highly on an information discernment questionnaire tended to interrogate the online article in a structured and linear way. Those with high-level information discernment are more likely to pay attention to an article's textual and graphical information than those exhibiting low-level information discernment. Conversely, participants with low-level information discernment indicated a lack of curiosity by not interrogating the entire article. They were unsystematic in their saccadic movements spending significantly longer viewing irrelevant areas.

The most profound consequence is that those with low-level information discernment, through a lack of curiosity in particular, could base their health, workplace, political or everyday decisions on sub-optimal engagement with and comprehension of information or misinformation (such as fake news).

Ground-breaking analysis of the relationship between a persons' self-reported level of information literacy (information discernment specifically) and objective measures of reading behaviour.