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The purpose of this study is to investigate the barriers that prevent workers in the software industry from experiencing flow in their work.

This study was conducted by using a qualitative critical incident technique-inspired questionnaire.

The findings suggest that workers in the software industry perceive that the most obvious obstacles to experiencing flow are related to work not presenting enough cognitive challenges and situational barriers related to the characteristics of the job (e.g. workdays having too many interruptions and distractions, timetables often being considered too tight for creative exploration and problem solving and having negative user experiences with development tools).

The findings provide insights into flow barriers, specifically barriers that prevent workers in the software industry from experiencing flow.

The purpose of this paper is to explore barriers to employment for visually impaired (VI) women and potential solutions to those barriers.

Mixed methods, comprising three phases; first, exploratory interviews with VI women (n=6) and employers (n=3); second, a survey to assess the barriers to employment experienced by this group (n=96); and third, in-depth interviews with VI women (n=15). This paper reports phases 2 and 3.

The most commonly reported barriers to work were: negative employer attitudes; the provision of adjustments in the workplace; restricted mobility; and having an additional disability/health condition. Significantly more barriers were reported by women: who reported that their confidence had been affected by the barriers they had experienced; with dependents under 16; and women who wanted to work.

Key solutions to these barriers included: training for employers; adaptive equipment; flexibility; better support; training and work experience opportunities; and more widely available part-time employment opportunities.

This paper adds to the literature in respect of the key barriers to employment for VI women, together with providing key solutions to these barriers.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

The aim of this study is to unveil how professional trainers and training managers describe the learning conditions of their workplaces, what informal and formal learning activities they intend to accomplish and what barriers to learning at work they encounter.

Barriers to learning in the workplace fall under individual, team or organizational aspects that hinder the initiation of or interrupt successful learning, delay proceedings or end learning activities much earlier than intended. Professional trainers (N = 16) and training managers (N = 10) participated in this interview study. Their answers were recorded, transcribed and analyzed via qualitative content analysis.

The participants assessed their work tasks as highly complex and balanced between new challenging tasks and routines. Their formal and informal learning activities were also fundamental to maintaining high performance. The trainers described a broad range of situations in which they suffered barriers to learning at their workplace, with most identifying external learning barriers such as vague supervisor requirements or disruptions from others.

The results of this study describe workplace complexity, which offers stimuli for learning through learning conditions, possibilities to engage in learning and also barriers to learning. To understand workplace complexity, all of these dimensions have to be understood and addressed.

This paper seeks to investigate barriers faced by women in acquiring higher positions in a Malaysian multinational oil company.

Data were obtained through a survey involving 78 executive women in the Malaysian oil company. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data. The study used gender role theory, which argues that women are viewed and treated unfavourably when they do not act according to their expected gender roles.

Shows family structure and women's commitment to the family are the most significant barriers perceived by the executive women. This research reveals that women in various job positions do not differ in their perceptions with regard to barriers they face for career progression.

The study was conducted among executive women in one company only, hence it cannot be generalized to other oil companies in Malaysia.

Provides evidence on family‐, organizational‐ and societal‐related barriers to career progression. The organization should aware of these barriers as they will affect women's professional development.

This is a first study of this nature conducted in a large oil company which focuses on women‘s barriers to career progression.

In recent years, recognition of environmental influences in public health has expanded to include more components of the environment such as the built environment, attitudes, and public policies. This environmental attention has addressed the need for healthier housing, schools, roads, and work sites, as some examples. Paralleling the development of awareness of the impact of environment on health and health behaviors, the influence of the environment and its contribution to the experience of disability has become more apparent. This national descriptive analysis of environmental barriers contributes to our understanding of the extent of environmental considerations for the entire U.S. adult population, not just older individuals, and will document those problems for those with self-reported functional limitations (i.e., disability).

This analysis uses the 2002 National Health Interview data to examine physical, social, and policy barriers experienced by the U.S. national population of adults age 18 or over. Focusing specifically on those who report a physical, activity, participation, or mental health limitation, the experience of barriers in the home, workplace, school, and the community is examined using descriptive analyses.

Results indicate that approximately 11% of the population with disabilities and 2% of the nondisabled adult population experience barriers in their daily lives. Severity of limitations and poor health status among those with disabilities increase the experience of barriers. The only sociodemographic factor related to reporting barriers was income. Depending on the kind of limitation, up to 28.6% of the population with disabilities experience barriers. The two most frequently reported types of barriers were building design and attitudes of other people.

This analysis provides an indication of how the environment is experienced by adults with disabilities and identifies perceived barriers found in the home, the work/school environment and the community. It starts to provide a baseline for understanding of the environment as experienced by persons with disabilities and suggests the most pressing areas for attention.

To our knowledge, this is among the first nationally representative analysis of barriers that interfere with daily activities experienced by adults in the United States. It highlights the experience of adults with disabilities and describes numerous types of potential barriers.

The objective of this paper was to identify and analyze barriers to hiring persons with disabilities from the perspective of employers and persons with disabilities.

A scoping review was used to evaluate both evidence and grey literature. An integrative analysis was employed to explicate the most salient macro and meso level barriers that limit the hiring of persons with disabilities.

A total of 38 articles from 6,480 evidence literature and 19 documents from grey literature were included in data extraction. Barriers included: negative attitudes in society, by employers and coworkers (macro and meso); workplace barriers (meso) were about lack of employer knowledge of performance skill and capacity of persons with disabilities, and the lack of awareness of disability and the management of disability-related issues in hiring and retention; and service delivery system barriers (macro) were focused on the lack of integration of services and policies to promote hiring and retention.

Knowledge gained furthers the understanding of the breadth of social, workplace and service delivery system obstacles that restrict the entry into the labor marker for persons with disabilities.

Barriers to employment for persons with disabilities at the macro and meso level are evident in the literature and they remain persistent over time despite best efforts to promote inclusion. Findings in this review point to the need for more specific critical research on the persistence of social, workplace and service delivery system barriers as well as the need for pragmatic approaches to change through partnering and development of targeted information to support employers in hiring and employing persons with disabilities.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding opportunities and barriers to starting their own engineering/construction company in Kabul through three career trajectory chokepoints related to training through higher education, the engineering workplace and entrepreneurship, through the lens of feminist theory.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. A Web-based survey was also conducted to collect data from participants who were not able to participate in the in-depth interviews. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the collected data.

As a result of the analysis, three main themes were developed related to “chokepoints” that Afghan female engineers face along the path to starting their own construction companies: “entering and studying engineering,” “career development” and “starting her own engineering business”; the authors address the subthemes of barriers and opportunities confronted by Afghan women at each chokepoint.

Due to civil unrest, the authors are only able to reach a sample of Afghan female engineers working in the capital city of Kabul.

Afghanistan shows, perhaps, the most severe underrepresentation of female engineers of all countries in the world, yet no research gives them a voice to explain the challenges their face to starting their own engineering/construction businesses. The authors are able to report their perceptions and articulate recommendations to encourage female entrepreneurship in the engineering/construction sector in Afghanistan.

Afghan women face significant barriers to having meaningful careers in the science, technology, engineering and medicine professions. The findings provide information for regulators regarding why Afghan women do not start their own engineering firms.

As physical security and resource constraints generate difficulty in accessing Afghan women in general, this is the first paper to report the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding the barriers and opportunities they perceive on the path to engineering entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to evaluate a range of best practice knowledge management (KM) ideas used to manage knowledge flows and enablers. In total, four KM toolkits and 23 KM tools were tested over a five-year period (2008-2013), as part of a large-scale longitudinal change project. Each tool was assessed against an evaluative framework designed to test criticisms of KM: strategy, implementation and performance. The results provide empirical evidence about what KM tools work and which do not and why, and outcomes for practitioners, researchers and consultants.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of a large Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant in the period of 2008-2013. The case study organisation (CSO) was a large public sector department, which faced the threat of lost capability caused by its ageing workforce and knowledge loss. The project aimed to solve this problem by minimising its impact via achieving learning organisation capacity. The CSO participating in the study was selected because it was a knowledge-intensive organisation, with an ageing workforce. All 150 engineering and technical staff at the CSO were invited to participate, including management and staff. An action research methodology was used.

The results provide empirical evidence that KM can be used to manage knowledge flows and enablers. The highest rating toolkit was knowledge preservation, followed by knowledge usage. The most value was created by using KM to provide “why context” to structural capital (e.g. reports, databases, policies) (meta-data) and to create opportunities to reflect on experience and share the learning outcomes (peer assists and after action reviews). The results tended to support criticism that KM is difficult to implement and identified the main barriers as participation located at the tactical action research level, i.e. why is this useful? Evidence that KM works was found in progress towards learning organisation capacity and in practical outcomes.

The action research cycle and learning flows provide opportunities to examine barriers to KM implementation. The research also presents opportunities for further research to examine the findings in other organisational and industry settings, for example, the relationship between the KM toolkits and organisational change and performance, presents an important area for further research. Researchers might also consider some of the toolkits which rated poorly, e.g. knowledge sharing, and challenge these findings, perhaps selecting different KS tools for testing. The paper has limitations. It is based on a single case study organisation, offset, to some degree, by the longitudinal nature of the empirical evidence. It is ambitious and the findings may be controversial. However, the depth of the study and its findings provide rare longitudinal empirical evidence about KM and the results should be useful for practitioners, researchers and consultants.

For practitioners, the research findings provide management with an evaluative framework to use when making decisions regarding KM. The findings provide discussion of KM toolkits and tools that may be used to manage knowledge flows and enablers. In addition to the discussion of each tool, there is analysis of what works and what does not and why, barriers to implementation as well as explanation of their impact on organisational change and performance, and a scorecard to guide toolkit choices. This method should allow managers to make sensible decisions about KM.

The paper addresses criticisms of KM by examining the KM toolkits within the context of whether knowledge can be managed, implementation barriers may be addressed and improved organisational performance can be demonstrated. This approach allows generalisability of the findings to enable others to apply the research findings in their organisational contexts. The outcome is three sets of guidelines: strategy: which KM tools work; implementation: addressing barriers; and organisational performance: how to measure value. In doing so, the paper provides a systematic framework for evaluating KM tools. It also provides a rare opportunity to present empirical evidence gathered over a five-year longitudinal study.

This issue has an extended Benefits section. Manchester Advice provide a service to 48,000 people a year and for the last three years have been building a dossier of the rules, procedures and practices within the main benefit system which act as barriers to paid work and to activities, such as volunary work, study and training. Jean Betteridge (Welfare Rights Officer for Take Up, Training & Publicity, Manchester Advice) has produced a comprehensive analysis of benefit barriers to work. This article summarises the main points. A full version can be obtained from the author. Judy Scott