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This paper discusses the rapid internationalization (mainly by Chinese students) of a business degree and its impact on one course in that degree programme. The purpose of the course is to develop reflective capabilities in students and the paper considers how staff involved in the course reflected on their own practice and made changes to the course to accommodate the new contingent of students from outside the host country. Initial perceptions by staff of the Chinese‐originating students are described, as are tensions that emerged regarding the philosophical/cultural assumptions under‐pinning the course. The paper shows how staff reconsidered their teaching practices and assessment tools and reports on an empirical study conducted to explore how students experienced the course’s teaching methods and assessment. The course’s reflective philosophy was adjusted to accommodate the new student cohort.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to argue that an enriched understanding of texts would enable more informed and responsible management practice. The authors present an approach to the analysis of management texts that enjoys, rather than contests, multivocality with the aim of making our approach to defamiliarising texts an accessible change management tool.Design/methodology/approachWorking with a reader‐response methodology we provide comment on, and analysis of, a popular management book, Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks. The authors context a response to this text in a discussion of commodity fetishism and deconstructed management theory texts. The interpretation of the subject text highlights its rhetorical suasion and pulls buried meaning into view.FindingsThe authors demonstrate that rhetorical analysis and satirical play, a mode of defamiliarisation that is employed in their own reading and incorporated into their classroom praxis, enables managers to better understand and control their own sense‐making. The authors argue that where their enriched understandings challenge embedded assumptions, changed management practices are enabled.Originality/valueThe authors offer their own construction of a Lovemark text, a satirical echo of the Roberts original, as an example of the distancing effect of humorous textual play.

In a narrative built around our experience of art placed in the lobby of a corporate edifice, we argue that a city bureaucracy is actively participating in the legitimised abduction of community resources by urban developers: that however well‐intentioned, subscription to the notion that social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities can be expected of, and accounted for, by corporate business, is naive. Our intention is to signal the outcome—corporate control of our aesthetic environment—that our discussion foreshadows.

This paper examines the pre- and post-entry attitudes and expectations of university tourism students. A longitudinal study was conducted over three years to determine the degree of “fit” between employment and employee in the tourism industry, an industry often thought of as providing less than satisfactory working conditions. The study found that students are generally satisfied with their working conditions, but that students tend to have unrealistic expectations about the salary they will attract at graduation. In addition results show a significant increase before and after job entry between the importance given to intellectual challenge and the opportunities for promotion. There was also a significant decrease in the perceived importance of opportunities for travel, combining work and leisure, and outdoor work and an active lifestyle. Students' comments on their employment and educational experiences are included and the implications of this study for educators, researchers, students and in...

Explores the theme of nothingness in the lives and work of two women writers, Simone Weil and Marion Milner. Ways in which Milner and Weil were able to make a contribution to philosophy and psychoanalysis by embracing nothingness; Paradox of how the writers' influence continues to grow while that of more apparently successful theorists declines.

Sir Charles (Charlie) Spencer Chaplin was a comedic actor, film director, composer, and musician. He was born in the United Kingdom and moved to the United States in 1913 and eventually became one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music-hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer until his death at the age of 88. Chaplin's most prolific creative activity occurred in the United States from 1914 to the mid 1940s. His most well-regarded movies were made with United Artists and include City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), although he made many other classic movies. Chaplin was critical to the development of film as an art form and he showed the potential of the medium to communicate complex themes. Chaplin, in his mature period, made intricate films, and provided an abrasive exploitation of paradox and ambiguity. He was the premier comedian and film maker of his time, and remains influential in the present day. His contribution as a creative person himself and as an inspiration to countless other people has been unique, widespread, and timeless.

Published studies of the relationships between personality, affect, and organizational change have been overwhelmingly quantitative, while clinical and psychodynamic approaches have seldom dealt with the context of organizational change. We used semistructured interviews to explore the “middle ground”, by researching how participants in change believed aspects of their personalities contributed to their responses, particularly on an affective level. We found that traits such as openness to experience, resilience, pragmatism, change self-efficacy, and locus of control influenced participants' perceptions of how they reacted to organizational change. The findings point to the important role that qualitative research into personality can play in improving understanding of emotional responses to organizational change.

This paper shows how banter helps forge organizational culture by facilitating socialization of work group members and presents original research conducted in three IT companies. Informants identified their style of humor as “taking the piss,” a colloquial term meaning to use jocular abuse to deflate someone else's ego to bring them to the same level as others. The IT organizations studied were young, creative and energetic and the banter was lively and almost always enjoyed. Six main functions of banter were identified: making a point, boredom busting, socialization, celebrating differences, displaying the culture, and highlighting and defining status. Banter occurred more readily when it involved popular and well-liked colleagues that were fully socialized into the organizational culture. Personal characteristics and traits—such as ethnicity, gender, age, height or dress style—were the target of much banter. Much of the literature discussing banter has focused on the negative effects of jocular abuse at work. This paper emphasises how banter helped facilitate functioning cultural systems in the organizations studied. However, for those not socialized through the banter into the in-group, banter was often experienced as painful, exclusionary and even insulting.

This paper discusses the movie Babe: The Gallant Little Pig, to show how the movie provides an interesting and provocative commentary on cross-cultural communication in the contemporary world.

This paper presents a research approach based on irony, rather than certainty. Using Richard Rorty's conception of irony, we contend that much traditional research in management presents a final language which is implicit in both the construction of a research method and its final presentation as findings. This paper suggests we should take irony more seriously, and deliberately construct research to allow and encourage re-description by our research's final arbiters - its readers, and even its subjects. Further, we advocate that by inviting irony into our work, we encourage greater identification between ourselves, our audience of readers, and the subjects of our work. We illustrate our argument by reflecting on a recent photographic research project which was a collaborative effort between management researchers and an artist. We show how the simple architecture of this project was built from doubt and how irony is communicated through the pictures. We then show how photography can be a useful technique that encourages readers to engage in re-description of petit rcits (small stories), told through images. We discuss our reflections by focusing on the implications of our research for management education.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show that the way home‐based internet businesses (HBIBs) are operated and the reasons for which they are started enable HBIBs to bring about variety, and to argue that this variety has a broader impact on the industry and the economy.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a multiple case study approach, studying the best practices of eight HBIBs.FindingsThe study finds that HBIBs generate variety because of the unique way in which they operate, and because of the reasons why they are started. How HBIBs operate can be captured in the acronym SMILES: Speed, Multiple income, Inexpensive, LEan, and Smart. They are founded (amongst other motives) for reasons of autonomy, freedom and independence. Both aspects – the how and why – of HBIBs are conducive to the creation of variety as they facilitate trial‐and‐error commercialisation of authentic ideas.Research limitations/implicationsFive theoretical perspectives posit that variety is important for the industry and the economy: evolutionary theory, strategic management, organic urban planning, opportunity recognition, and the knowledge economy. The findings are discussed in the context of each perspective, showing how HBIBs play a role in each perspective.Practical implicationsPolicy makers should be aware of the importance of HBIBs, which can be promoted, providing generic facilities for business information, training, and mentoring, and by making compliance burdens more proportional to business size.Originality/valueThe paper shows how and why HBIBs are drivers of variety. This paper argues, by means of five theoretical perspectives, that because of the variety HBIBs generate, they contribute to the economy over and above their direct and indirect contributions in terms of revenue and employment.