Sacred time: Ensuring the provision of excellent supervision

In this study, the authors explore the beliefs and attitudes regarding what constitutes “excellent supervision” from the perspectives of frontline workers and supervisors employed by one voluntary services organization in Northern Ireland. Several themes emerged from focus group narratives, regardless of participants’ agency position, and a concept map provides an understanding of the relationships of the identified themes. This study reflects the important role of organizational context and culture in relation to staff’s ability to provide excellent supervision, as well as in sustaining organizational change efforts regardless of organizational setting. The potential of peer and/or group supervision to address improving staff support with limited resources is also suggested.     

Equalities in freefall? Ontological insecurity and the long‐term impact of COVID‐19 in the academy

This intervention focuses on the impact of the global crisis resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic on existing racialized and gendered inequalities within the academy and in particular our discipline of Politics and International Relations. We argue that responses to recent crises within the academy have exacerbated ontological insecurity among minoritized groups, including women. When coupled with increased caring responsibilities, the current crises call into question who can be creative and innovative, necessary conditions for knowledge production. While university managers seek to reassure university staff of the temporary nature of COVID‐19 interventions, we argue that the possibilities for progressive leaps at a later state of institutional regeneration is unlikely when efforts to address structural inequalities are sidelined and crisis responses are undertaken which run counter to such work.     

New ethnicities and old classities: respectability and diaspora

This article explores the contrasts between the flexibility and openness of interethnic and diasporic identifications and the fixity of class distinctions in contemporary Britain. The author draws on fieldwork conducted in the Midlands area and a suburban town in the south east of England and traces the ways in which project participants mobilised their biographies and ancestries to express feelings of empathy and relatedness across black, white and Asian identities. The author discovered the same people articulated a strong sense of classed distinction between themselves and others who were thought to lack respectability, social ambition and mobility. These observations have led me to reflect upon the theoretical contrasts between what Stuart Hall has famously called ‘new ethnicities’ and what the author calls ‘old classities’.     

Innovationsverhalten in Familienunternehmen

Family businesses are publicly believed to be highly innovative and to be the “Hidden Champions” of the German industry. In recent times scholars have begun to examine this thesis and have come to starkly opposing results. On the one hand family businesses are attested to have a special ?entrepreneurial “spirit” which makes them highly innovative. On the other hand the lack of separation of ownership and control and insufficient diversification of family-investors are said to lead to less innovation activity. In this study we investigate the innovation activity of 384 German manufacturing firms differing in legal structure, size, age, industry, and—most importantly—in the degree of family ownership, family management and family control. The results of our analysis reveals differentiated results. Fundamentally, family ownership and family management are detrimental to firm innovation, at the same time family control has a positive impact on innovation activities. Our Results point to the fact that owner-managed businesses tend to innovate less due to risk aversion while a focus on controlling instead of managing a corporation by the owning family lead to an increase in innovations.