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Purpose – This chapter examines how gender, parenthood, and partner's employment are related to individual's employment patterns, analyzing paid work at individual and household levels.

Methodology/approach – Analyses use individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) wave 5 for 19 countries, for adults aged 25–45. We use logistic regression and a two-stage Heckman sample selection correction procedure to estimate the effects of gender and parenthood on the probabilities of employment and full-time employment.

Findings – The variation between mothers and childless women is larger than that between childless men and childless women; differences in women's employment patterns are driven by gendered parenthood, controlling for women's human capital, partnered status and household income. Fathers and mothers' employment hours in the same household vary cross-nationally.

Mothers' employment behaviors can identify important differences in the strategies countries have pursued to balance work and family life.

Research implications – Important differences between childless women and mothers exist; employment analyses need to recognize the variation in employment hours among women, and how women's hours are related to partners' hours. Further research should consider factors that shape employment cross-nationally, as well as how these relate to differences in wages and occupational gender segregation.

Practical implications – Employment choices of women and mothers must be understood in terms of employment hours, not simply employment, and within the context of partners' employment.

Originality/value of paper – Our chapter clarifies the wide dispersion of employment hours across countries – and how men's and women's employment hours are linked and related to parenthood.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

In the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, and particularly in the software sector, knowledge change, the development of expertise and the construction of professionalism are crucial factors for understanding institutional patterns related to professionalization. This paper draws upon research on professionalization in the ICT industry conducted in Germany to explore how time regimes regarding innovation, qualification requirements, and working time regulations are linked to the structuration of expertise in different organizational settings and correspond to particular and contextual professionalism. Project deadlines play a crucial role in the structuration of expertise as common pattern for IT and telecommunication firms, whereas ongoing education and quality standards integrated into management systems serve to stabilize professionalism in large IT enterprises.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred major, and possibly enduring, changes in paid work. In this chapter, we explore the continuity and change in several work day dimensions, including where it is performed, the amount of time spent working, the length of the work day, and who people are with when they work, as well as variation across population subgroups. We use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to analyze change across the 2019 to 2021 period. While the shift to working primarily at home in 2020 is dramatic and continuing into 2021, working primarily at the workplace remains the modal experience for Americans. We find differences by gender, education, parental status, and age in which workers perform their jobs at home, and we find much more continuity in how much people work and when they work.

One thing is to get a project organization in place. Another thing is to bring it alive. This is the subject of this chapter. Most project work is teamwork, in the core teams and work groups, and also in the steering committee, reference groups, and focus groups.

Because projects are temporary, it is a challenge quickly to establish effective cooperation in the groups and teams of the project organization, internal as well as external with surrounding organizations. Five elements of cooperation in the project team will be presented, including collaboration, coordination, communication, coalition, and control. Different work patterns will be discussed, and methods for carrying out project work will be presented, e.g., coping with limited rationality and handling project complexity.

A section will deal with work patterns in the steering committee, and a section will discuss cooperation with interested parties (stakeholders). Also, the maturity of the project organization will be treated.

A final section will discuss learning in the project organization.

A work orientation represents a person’s beliefs about the meaning of work – the function work plays in the person’s life and the constellation of values and assumptions the person holds about the work domain. Research has suggested that adults tend to favor one of three primary work orientations: job, career, or calling. Empirical studies have shown that adults with different primary work orientations tend to experience different work and career outcomes; however, scholars have not analyzed how or why an individual first develops a work orientation. In this study, we take a first step toward investigating the origins of adults’ work orientations.

We propose hypotheses drawing on extant literature on the development of work values and occupational inheritance. We test hypotheses using a retrospective research design and survey methodology, with a sample of working adults.

Work orientations are developed through socialization processes with parents during adolescence. There are different patterns of development across the three work orientation categories: stronger calling orientations are developed when both parents possess strong calling orientations; stronger career orientations develop in accordance with fathers’ career orientations; and job orientations are related more to the nature of the adolescent’s relationship with parents than with parents’ own work orientations.

This research provides the first empirical study of the origin and development of work orientations.

This research offers insight into ways generations are connected through the perceived meaning of their work, even as the nature of work changes. We encourage future scholars to use this as a starting point for research on the development of work orientations, and to continue exploring these questions using additional methods, particularly longitudinal study designs.