Tour guiding, organisational culture and learning: lessons from an entrepreneurial company

This paper examines the impacts of organisational culture on the learning and development of tour guides. Drawing on a case study of a small entrepreneurial tour company, the paper considers the nature of the organisation's culture, the tours it provides, including their narrative contents and the processes of organisational learning and socialisation. The paper suggests that the development of a learning culture within such an organisation may benefit from the provision of appropriate learning opportunities among the guides and facilitators who coordinate guide development

Developing Absorptive Capacity Theory for Public Service Organizations:Emerging UK Empirical Evidence

A strong public policy focus on high performance means that utilizing management knowledge effectively is at a premium for UK public service organizations. This study empirically examined two English public agencies to explore the inter-sectoral transfer of a strategic management model originally developed in the private sector – absorptive capacity – which is one way of conceptualizing an organizational competence in such knowledge mobilization. Two theoretical contributions are made. First, a new absorptive capacity framework for public service organizations is developed which recognizes the participation of public agency project teams during an innovation process proceeding over time with phases of co-creation, testing, metamorphosis and diffusion. Second, our novel framework modifies an early influential model of absorptive capacity. Counter to this model, we argue that realized absorptive capacity requires agency from skilled and embedded actors to turn ‘curbing routines’ into ‘enabling routines’ in all four stages. Project (middle) managers have flexibility in their roles to seize episodic moments of opportunity to innovate and achieve service delivery goals, and to build absorptive capacity capability. Absorptive capacity capability develops organically over time. Future research directions are discussed

A contingency analysis of precarious organizational temporariness

This paper extends our current understanding of organizational temporariness. The life of a temporary British trade union branch established to recruit Eastern European migrant workers reveals ‘precarious temporariness’, which is less predictable than the ‘planned temporariness’ typically portrayed in the literature. This different type of temporariness was associated with four key contingencies affecting the branch: dispersed governance, bottom-up initiatives, uncertain resourcing, and an effectuation logic. Analysis of the case extends our existing understanding of organizational temporariness and points to an extension of existing theorizing by highlighting the contingent nature of temporariness. The broader managerial implication of the findings is that for projects facing contingencies of the kind studied, the conventional linear approach of target setting and performance management will be less effective than an ongoing process of communication and consultation

Discretionary power of project managers in knowledge intensive firms and gender issues

The scarcity of women among the highly qualified professionals in business-to-business information and communication technologies (ICT), either in Europe andor in North America, has been noted as recently as the late 1990’s (Panteli, Stack, Atkinson, & Ramsay, 1999). The organization and management of work in such organizations firms is typically project-based. This has many consequences, including: long working hours with fierce resistance to shorter hoursany reduction, unpaid overtime, high management expectations of employee flexibility to meet unanticipated client demands, and the need for employees to negotiate flexible work arrangements on a case-by-cases basis with a project manager who often has much discretion on whether to accommodate such requests. We found that women are particularly disadvantaged in such a system, which could partly explain their under-representation in such jobs

An Examination of Celtic Craft and the Creative Consciousness as a Contribution to Marketing Creativity

Examination of the Celtic craft sector identifies a creative form of marketing which has its foundations in imagination, intuition and innovation, rather than the linear prescriptions of formal marketing frameworks and language which still dominate contemporary marketing management texts. The creative marketing competencies identified in the sector are also grounded within a wider creative marketing paradigm where experimental forms of marketing are encouraged, postmodern ideals are embraced and artistic philosophy and practice encouraged. The controlled Saxon influenced Marketing Establishment is challenged by the freer, more creative fringe of Celtic marketing as the avant garde

Making knowledge visible: Using expert yellow pages to map capabilities in professional services firms

Accepted versio

Making career decisions in a changing graduate labour market: A Hospitality perspective

The study seeks to understand how prospective hospitality graduates tackle the career decision-making task. In-depth interviews were conducted with 28 undergraduate hospitality students in the UK. The findings highlight the challenging nature of career decisions within the context of a changing graduate labour market. The adoption of a qualitative method, coupled with career decision-making theory has resulted in a study that gives a voice to the key participants in the education-to-work transition, the students themselves. These insights will enable higher education, policy makers and employers to assist students in their quest for employment

Careers of highly educated self-initiated expatriates : observations from studies among Finnish business professionals

This chapter reviews existing literature about the careers of self-initiated expatriates and analyzes the different studies carried out among university level educated Finnish business professionals. A series of studies carried out among members of the Finnish Association of Business School Graduates during the last 15 years was cross-analyzed. The studies are based on three surveys and further interviews among their expatriate members (1999, 2004 and a follow-up study in 2012) also involving SIEs. Therefore, this chapter provide an overview of what we know about the careers of Finnish SIEs and show evidence of (1) their career motives, (2) the role of family considerations in the career decision making of SIEs, (3) the development of career capital and social capital during SIE-experiences, and also (4) longer-term career impacts of SIE-experiences. Based on the literature review and analysis of above mentioned studies we highlight the gaps in in the knowledge about SIEs and suggest areas where further research is needed.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A competence-based and multidimensional operationalization and measurement of employability

Employability is a critical requirement for enabling both sustained competitive advantage at the firm level and career success at the individual level. We propose a competence-based approach to employability derived from an expansion of the resource-based view of the firm. In this contribution, we present a reliable and valid instrument for measuring employability. This measure is based on a five-dimensional conceptualization of employability, in which occupational expertise is complemented with generic competences. Two sources of raters (employees and their immediate supervisors) are involved in developing and testing the measure. Since the five dimensions of employability explain a significant amount of variance in both objective and subjective career success, the predictive validity of the tool is promising. This instrument facilitates further scientific HRM research and is of practical value in light of job and career assessments, recruitment, staffing, career mobility, and development practice