The State of the Field in UK Management Research: Reflections of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel

This paper reviews the state of the field of the sub-disciplines within UK management research, based upon the submissions of 94 UK higher education institutions to the Business and Management Studies Panel in the UK's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It offers observations on the UK model of the assessment of quality in, and funding of, research conducted in publicly funded higher education institutions.     

Collective Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap in the Printing Industry

This paper considers the effect of collective bargaining on the gender pay gap in the printing industry. This sector was subject to multi‐employer bargaining for around 90 years, until 2010. The article analyses gendered collective bargaining processes through the mechanism of symbolic power, that is, the power of interpretation and definition, and utilizes Walton and McKersie's seminal work on bargaining behaviour to understand the processes that have prevented the closing of the pay gap. It finds that symbolic power operates within the sub‐processes of attitudinal structuring and intra‐organizational bargaining to de‐legitimize women's role in equal pay bargaining, alongside distributive bargaining tactics that preclude equal pay bargaining, thereby creating the impression that women are irrelevant to bargaining processes and ensuring relative invisibility for issues of importance to equality bargaining.     

Open Dialogue: Frequently Asked Questions

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with people and their families experiencing psychosocial distress. Interest in Open Dialogue in Australia has been growing recently, raising questions about its adaption and implementation to local contexts. This article is an attempt to answer some of the frequently asked questions we have encountered in training and discussions about Open Dialogue. We attempt to provide responses to questions of how Open Dialogue is different to what is done already, how it fits with current approaches, how you know if you are doing it, whether it is passive or just about doing reflections, issues about including the social network, and concerns about the evidence base. This article aims to present a variety of viewpoints in relation to these questions and to hopefully further discussions on how Open Dialogue can be implemented and adapted to Australian health care and social care contexts.     

Is it Pleasure or Health from Leisure that We Benefit from Most? An Analysis of Well-Being Alternatives and Implications for Policy

International policy now constantly advocates a need for populations to engage in more physical activity to promote health and to reduce society’s health care costs. Such policy has developed guidelines on recommended levels and intensity of physical activity and implicitly equates health with well-being. It is assumed that individual, and hence social welfare will be enhanced if the activity guidelines are met. This paper challenges that claim and raises questions for public policy priorities. Using an instrumental variable analysis to value the well-being from active leisure, it is shown that the well-being experienced from active leisure that is not of a recommended intensity to generate health benefits, perhaps due to its social, recreational or fun purpose, has a higher value of well-being than active leisure that does meet the guidelines. This suggests rethinking the motivation and foundation of existing policy and perhaps a realignment of priorities towards activity that has a greater contribution to social welfare through its intrinsic fun and possibly social interaction.     

Stories of Non‐Becoming: Non‐Issues,Non‐Events and Non‐Identities in Asexual Lives

In contrast to conventional models of positively “becoming” an identity through social interaction, this article explores the inverse, negational process of “non‐becoming,” whereby actors start but do not continue along an identity career trajectory. Through cumulative attrition, interactions and encounters at key moments create an overall pattern of non‐progression. Using asexuality as an example, we identify three main trajectory stages of non‐awareness, communicative negation and non‐consolidation, each involving interactional contingencies. With a wider applicability to other repudiated identities, this model shows how even negational symbolic social objects (non‐issues, non‐events, and non‐identities) are constituted through social interaction.     

Competing Values Framework: A useful tool to define the predominant culture in a maternity setting in Australia

Objective

To identify the predominant culture of an organisation which could then assess readiness for change.

The Consistent System

The Consistent System (CS) is an interactive computer system for researchers in the behavioral and policy sciences and in fields with similar requirements for data management and statistical analysis. The researcher is not expected to be a programmer. The system offers a wide range of facilities and permits the user to combine them in novel ways. In particular, tools for statistical analysis may be used in combination with a powerful relational subsystem for data base management. This paper gives an overview of the objectives, capabilities, status, and availability of the system.     

Learning across Communities of Practice: An Examination of Multidisciplinary Work

Communities of practice (CoPs) have been identified as important sites of learning. Novices learn from masters whilst participating in situated practice and becoming more central members of the community. Empirical studies highlight the difficulty of learning across CoPs, although few studies specifically examine how learning develops in such a multidisciplinary context. We examine the processes of learning occurring when members of different CoPs, in this case various cancer specialists, are required to meet together as a formally constituted multidisciplinary team, and to establish multidisciplinary collaboration as a basis for decision making and action. Our paper highlights that while learning in CoPs develops through repetition, gaining legitimacy and achieving mastery, learning across CoPs in multidisciplinary contexts emphasizes key boundary processes to negotiate and broaden meaning. As such, multidisciplinary collaboration is not so much to learn from each others' talk, but to learn to talk in this new arena. We identify three practices which facilitate learning across CoPs: organizing discussions, acknowledging other perspectives and challenging assumptions. We also discuss the boundary processes which are promoted through brokers and the use of boundary objects in facilitating multidisciplinary work.     

Household Claiming Behaviour

Social security benefits provide an essential resource for most families on low incomes. This paper examines the life cycle of claiming activities, from the initial decision to claim through to routine claiming. New empirical evidence is drawn from a study of relatively low income households in South East England carried out by the Alvey DHSS Demonstrator Project. A number of analytical stages which comprise the “claiming process” are identified for the purpose of describing the complex sequence of events associated with claiming behaviour. The paper shows how adequate explanations of the life cycle of claiming activities need to be located within a broader analysis of decision-making within relatively low income households.     

Hair loss and electability: The bald truth

This study probes one particular component of the well documented linkage between personal appearance and impression formation by investigating the extent to which and the mechanisms through which bald and balding men are underrepresented in high elective office. Study 1 compares the prevalence of hair loss among governors and members of Congress, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other, and concludes that officeholders are much more likely to have a full head of hair than would be expected of men of their age. Study 2 poses an experimental test of voter bias against bald and balding candidates by presenting voters in a simulated congressional race with materials depicting otherwise identical candidates in either their natural bald or balding condition or wearing a professionally fitted hairpiece. No voter bias against bald or balding candidates is apparent, a finding that suggests that the causal mechanism underlying underrepresentation of bald and balding men is not voter bias.Ugly is a field without grass, a plant without leaves, or a head without hair (Ovid, quoted by Klenhard, 1986, p. 11).Politics represents an area of public life in which the effects of appearance may lead to very important social consequences and in which the idea of special privilege for the pretty is particularly repellent (Efran and Patterson, 1975, p. 352).The authors thank Judee Burgoon, Michael Burgoon, and Carol Sigelman for useful comments and suggestions, and Brandt Baker, Henry Ewbank, Jeff Gardner, Henry Kenski, Dan Singer, and David Williams for their assistance with this project.