East‐End Warehouse: a case study of ‘organisational capture’ and cultural conflicts

This case study is about a warehouse in London’s Dockland with predominantly local staff. It stored and distributed food and drink for contractors. Its market was expanding; the site well positioned. Nonetheless, since takeover by a large shipping company, contracts went unrenewed, ‘stock shrinkage’ mounted, losses increased. The author, part of a small team of consultants, was hired ‘to study and advise’. Customer intrusions are normal in service organisations. But here conflicting and group‐based short‐term interests inhibited staff co‐ordination: serial crises involved ad hoc responses. Fieldwork entailed charting work flows, administering an attitude survey, conducting a census and assessing both the workforce’s collective East‐End culture and top management’s culture: their values conflicted. In Dockland, kinship and neighbourly obligations were strong. Obtaining and distributing pilfered goods reflected this; they celebrated group enterprise, collective support and autonomy – values evident in the warehouse that we made integral to proposals for reorganisation. This paper thus addresses intrusions: from customers – evident in disruptive work flows; two externally derived and opposed cultures and the culture of consultants.     

The validity of an index of leisure-time physical activity

An index of leisure-time physical activity is presented for use in health promotion research. Based on the values of metabolic equivalents (METs), this index is found to have a high degree of concurrent, construct and predictive validity when it is related to a measure of perceived health status. It is useful in investigations of the impact of exercise and other types of leisure-time physical activity on health.     

Elder abuse research: a systematic review

The purpose of this research was to provide a systematic review of, and assign an evidence grade to, the research articles on elder abuse. Sixteen health care and criminal justice literature databases were searched. Publications were reviewed by at least two independent readers who graded each from A (evidence of well-designed meta-analysis) to D (evidence from expert opinion or multiple case reports) on the quality of the evidence gained from the research. Of 6,676 titles identified in the search, 1,700 publications met inclusion criteria; omitting duplicates, 590 publications were annotated and graded.     

Further specification of the leader political skill–leadership effectiveness relationships: Transformational and transactional leader behavior as mediators

The present investigation was a three-source test of the intermediate linkages in the leader political skill–leader effectiveness and follower satisfaction relationships, which examined transformational and transactional (i.e., contingent reward behavior) leader behavior as mediators. Data from 408 leaders (headmasters) and 1429 followers (teachers) of state schools in the western part of Germany participated in this research. The results of mediation analyses, based on bias-corrected bootstrapping confidence intervals, provided support for the hypotheses that political skill predicts both transformational and transactional leader behavior, beyond other established predictors, and that transformational and transactional leader behavior mediate the relationships between leader political skill and leadership effectiveness. The contributions to theory and research, strengths and limitations, directions for future research, and practical implications are discussed.     

No Compelling Evidence That Newborns Imitate Oral Gestures

Newborns (N = 83) were presented with 3 conditions, each for 160 sec: tongue protrusion (TP), mouth opening (MO), and control (CO). In TP and MO, a female model alternated between demonstrating the gesture for 20 sec and presenting a passive, motionless face for 20 sec. In CO, she presented a passive face in both the “demonstration” and “passive” intervals. The participants' eyes were more widely open in the demonstration intervals of TP and MO than in the passive intervals, indicating that they were attending to the gestures. In TP, the participants produced more TP responses than MO responses, but in MO there was no effect, undermining the neonatal imitation hypothesis.     

Altitude and early child growth in 47 countries

Population and Environment - The relationship between altitude of residence and child linear growth is studied using data for 630,499 children below age 5 years born between 1992 and 2016,...