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The purpose of this Real Impact Research Article is to empirically explore one of the most controversial and elusive concepts in knowledge management research – practical wisdom. It develops a 10-dimensional practical wisdom construct and tests it within the nomological network of counterproductive and productive knowledge behavior.

A survey instrument was created based on the extant literature. A model was developed and tested by means of Partial Least Squares with data obtained from 200 experienced employees recruited from CloudResearch Connect crowdsourcing platform.

Practical wisdom is a multidimensional construct that may be operationalized and measured like other well-established knowledge management concepts. Practical wisdom guides employee counterproductive and productive knowledge behavior: it suppresses knowledge sabotage and knowledge hiding (whether general, evasive, playing dumb, rationalized or bullying) and promotes knowledge sharing. While all proposed dimensions contribute to employee practical wisdom, particularly salient are subject matter expertise, moral purpose in decision-making, self-reflection in the workplace and external reflection in the workplace. Unexpectedly, practical wisdom facilitates knowledge hoarding instead of reducing it.

Managers should realize that possessing practical wisdom is not limited to a group of select, high-level executives. Organizations may administer the practical wisdom questionnaire presented in this study to their workers to identify those who score the lowest, and invest in employee training programs that focus on the development of those attributes pertaining to the practical wisdom dimensions.

The concept of practical wisdom is a controversial topic that has both detractors and supporters. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first large-scale empirical study of practical wisdom in the knowledge management domain.

All of us are born critical thinkers; some perfect this talent; others ignore it as useful in daily life. This chapter follows those who perfected this talent in order to learn from them the art and models of critical thinking in terms of its optimal inputs, processes, and outputs. According to great critical thinkers in business management, critical thinking questions – or should question – the obsessive generalizations, constraints, and “best” practices of the prevailing system of management, and try to replace them with more valid assumptions and more meaningful generalizations that uphold the dignity, uniqueness, and inalienable rights of the individual person and the community. After setting out some cases illustrating the lack of critical thinking, in Part I of this chapter, we introduce some representative management thinkers on critical thinking, and in Part II, we introduce eight models or practical approaches for critical thinking.

Gillette’s historically successful “razor and blade” business model (RBM) has been a promising benchmark for multiple businesses across diverse industries worldwide in the past several decades. The extant literature deals with very few nuances of this business model notwithstanding the fact that there are several variants of this business model being put to practical use by firms in diverse industries in grossly metaphorically equivalent situations.

This study adopts the 2 × 2 truth table framework from the domains of mathematical logic and combinatorics in fleshing out all possible (four logical possibilities) variants of the razor and blade business model for further analysis. This application presents four mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive possibilities on any chosen dimension. Two major dimensions (viz., provision of subsidy and intra- or extra-firm involvement in the making of razors or blades or both) form part of the discussion in this paper. In addition, this study synthesizes and streamlines entrepreneurial wisdom from multiple intra-industry and inter-industry benchmarks in terms of real-time firms explicitly or implicitly adopting several variants of the RBM that suit their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of evolution in situations that are grossly reflective of the metaphorically equivalent scenario of razor and recurrent blades. Inductive method of research is carried out with real-time cases from diverse industries with a pivotally common pattern of razor and blade model in some form or the other.

Several new variants of the razor and blade model (much beyond what the extant literature explicitly projects) have been discovered from the multiple metaphorically equivalent cases of RBM across industries. All of these expand the portfolio of options that relevant entrepreneurial firms can explore and exploit the best possible option chosen from them, given their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of growth.

This study has enriched the literature by presenting and analyzing a more inclusive or perhaps comprehensive palette of explicit choices in the form of several variants of the RBM for the relevant entrepreneurial firms to choose from. Future research can undertake the task of comparing these variants of RBM with those of upcoming servitization business models such as guaranteed availability, subscription and performance-based contracting and exploring the prospects of diverse combinations.

Smart entrepreneurial firms identify and adopt inspiring benchmarks (like razor and blade model whenever appropriate) duly tweaked and blended into a gestalt benchmark for optimal profits and attractive market shares. They target diverse market segments for tied-goods with different variants or combinations of the relevant benchmarks in the form of variegated customer value propositions (CVPs) that have unique and enticing appeal to the respective market segments.

Value-sensitive customers on the rise globally choose the option that best suits them from among multiple alternatives offered by competing firms in the market. As long as the ratio of utility to price of such an offer is among the highest, even a no-frills CVP may be most appealing to one market segment while a plush CVP may be tempting to yet another market segment simultaneously. While professional business firms embrace resource leverage practices consciously, amateur customers do so subconsciously. Each party subliminally desires to have the maximum bang-to-buck ratio as the optimal return on investment, given their priorities ceteris paribus.

Prior studies on the RBM have explicitly captured only a few variants of the razor and blade model. This study is perhaps the first of its kind that ferrets out many other variants (more than ten) of the razor and blade model with due simplification and exemplification, justification and demystification.

This conceptual paper explores the complex, and neglected, area of mentor development in initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia. It focuses on the emotionality of mentoring, drawing on concepts of emotional labour and emotional intelligence to develop a framework of effective mentoring that helps explain the essence of a mentor’s role in supporting preservice teachers.

This conceptual paper draws together mentor-support practice wisdom and research literature from several relevant areas. It draws on constructive developmental theories and complex stage theory to reaffirm the intricate nature of mentor learning and development. This paper critiques the current utilitarian emphasis on mentoring as a way to improve student outcomes without first having clarity on how to improve mentoring itself.

We introduce the mentoring as emotional labour framework as a way to better understand the nature of mentoring within ITE and as a tool for developing more effective mentor supports. We present “exemplar cases”, which are amalgamations of field observations to illustrate aspects of the framework – however, we do not claim they provide evidence of the utility or accuracy of the framework.

Previous research and policy have tended to gloss over the skills required for effective mentoring, whereas this paper places the emotional labour of mentoring front and centre, explicitly conceptualising and describing the personal and interpersonal skills required in a way that aims to support and empower mentors to recognise existing strengths and areas of potential growth.

In Hawaiʻi, two public library systems exist – a traditional municipal branch system and a Native Hawaiian rural community-based library network. The Hawaii State Public Library System (HSPLS) is the traditional municipal library system that services the state’s diverse communities with 51 branch locations, plus its federal repository, the Hawaii State Library for the Blind and Print Disabled. The HSPLS primarily serves the local urban communities of Hawaiʻi, diverse in its citizenry. The Native Hawaiian Library, a unit of ALU LIKE, Inc. (a Hawaiian non-profit social services organization), boasts multiple locations across six inhabited Hawaiian Islands, primarily serving rural Hawaiian communities. The HSPLS focuses on traditional public library services offered by MLS-degreed librarians. In contrast, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE) focuses on culturally oriented literacy services offered by Hawaiian cultural practitioners. As the state’s only library and information sciences (LISs) educational venue, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s LIS program (UHM LIS) is a nexus point between these two library systems where LIS students learn the value of community-based library services while gaining the traditional technical skills of librarianship concerning Hawaiʻi as a place of learning and praxis.

This book chapter focuses on outcomes from the IMLS-funded research project called “Hui ʻEkolu,” which means “three groups” in the Hawaiian language. From 2018 to 2021, the HSPLS, the Native Hawaiian Library (ALU LIKE), and the UHM LIS Program gathered as “Hui ʻEkolu” to create a community of praxis to share and exchange knowledge to learn from one another to improve professional practice and heighten cultural competency within a Hawaiian context. Native Hawaiian values were leveraged as a nexus point for the three groups to connect and build relationships for sustainable mentorship and culturally competent connections as a model for librarian professional development. The result is a model for collective praxis that leverages local and endemic cultural values for sustainable collaborative professional development for public librarianship.

Work is central to human life. It requires high mental and emotional involvement from organizational leaders, whose decisions have far-reaching impacts. Currently, industrial and technological societies struggle with growing problems of trust in leadership, mental health, feelings of emptiness and the search for relevant meaning, which highlights the importance of attending to spirituality at work. This study aims to fill two main gaps: the need for empirical research on spirituality in organizational leaders, and access to the meanings and experiences of leaders themselves.

Qualitative data from 25 Portuguese organizational leaders were collected through in-depth interviews. We followed a phenomenological approach to reveal participants' own meanings and experiences of spirituality. Content analysis was performed to identify emergent categories and a framework of spirituality development.

The results suggest the participant’s plural views and spirituality practices, which generate common achievements – Ways to Inner. Relations of leaders’ spirituality with their development and integration at work are also evidenced – Ways to Wisdom. A spirituality development framework is presented with aspects revealed in leaders’ ways, from deepening individual issues to the orientation for existential impacts.

This study proposes a framework of spirituality development based on empirical data, with the potential for adaptation to various professional contexts. Spirituality is approached as a human dimension in leaders, as whole beings and a decisive dimension of present organizational change towards a holistic work paradigm.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

The world needs more Eastern knowledge and, ergo, more consciousness. Humanity will unlikely experience a quantum leap in consciousness if we keep ignoring Eastern and other sources of perennial wisdom in the design and development of our socioeconomic and ecological systems. This chapter aims to bridge the consciousness gap by exploring the meaning and application of Buddhist and Taoist systems thinking to regenerative systemic leadership, design, development and sustainable transformation.

Teaching is seen as a morally significant endeavor, but there is a lack of clarity about the entire domain. While teachers usually do not develop a refined professional knowledge base or vocabulary of the moral work of teaching (Sanger, 2017) during pre- and in-service teacher education, there is a need to explore more in detail what kind of expertise is required and employed in the moral work of teaching, and how the components of that expertise are related to each other. The purpose of our theoretical chapter is not to present the “foreground,” that is the results of “what works” but instead to highlight the “background” of teaching profession. We note that the complexities of teaching can be structured through the relational viewpoints of ethical principles, moral judgments, and virtuous policies. From these three standpoints, which often appear separate and disconnected, we try out a constructive synthesis. Our framework denotes that teaching is a peculiar kind of relationship that brings with it special ethical guidelines, moral judgments, and constant considerations of how to realize human well-being in the real-world dilemmas of teaching.