On Friday, April 8, 2005 in Philadelphia, PA at the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry (SC'MOI), a panel of female sports experts was gathered to answer some interesting and difficult questions regarding females in sports. The panel consisted of the following: Ms. Lynn Tighe, Associate AD/SWA, Villanova University; Ms. Kim Keenan-Kirkpatrick, SWA, Lafayette College; Ms. Dei Lynam, Sports Anchor Reporter, Comcast Sportsnet; Ms. Karen Kopecky, Sports Marketing Manager; Ms. Ryan Heiden, Premium Services Event Manager, Philadelphia Eagles; Ms. Jamie Braunwarth, Compliance Assistant, Atlantic 10 Conference; and Ms. Connie Hurlbut, former Sr. Director of WNBA for Basketball Operations and Patriot League Executive Director. The historical perspective and attitudes of these women varied as did their years of experience and stages of their respective careers. For the purpose of this article the panelists were broken into two groups which were the experienced group (15 or more years in the sport industry) and the up-starts group (5 or less years in the sport industry). Both Ms. Heiden and Ms. Braunwarth were considered up-starts while the remaining panelists were experienced.

The ideas in this paper were initially explored at the Organisational Theatre summit, co- ordinated by learning Lab., Denmark at Lisegaarden near Copenhagen in March 2005. Working in collaboration with a group of actors and theatre practitioners; approaches to the phenomenon of rehearsal were discussed and a short play was devised and performed to communicate our findings to the rest of the conference. This paper arose from further reflection on those discussions and includes a transcript of the short play devised: The paper offers some reflections on the phenomenon of 'rehearsing' as practiced in theatre. It also represents our view on the usefulness of rehearsal as a model for the development of new products especially services and the possible value of this concept in the context of organizations, especially the management of professional service firms.

The aim of this paper is to point to the potential value of an approach to management based on the idea of the common good, as opposed to classical capitalism based on private ownership. Such an approach makes it possible to resist a pursuit of short term oriented gains and a maximization of narrowly defined profits, and, instead, to focus on humanistic values, as to adopt a long term perspective. The much cited notion of the “tragedy of the commons” was based on deficient material and argumentation, but, most of all, it completely disregards of the issue of management. Using a case study developed through a longitudinal action research project in a big service enterprise we call “Soplicex”, we present the strategic process grounded in learning, as well as the building of a strong structure centred on teams. The engagement of the employees was, originally, strongly oriented towards the idea of the common good. The consultants and researchers adopted this principle as the guiding rule in their work with the organization. Even though the process was interrupted by the takeover by a foreign investor, we show how the findings of the study remain relevant for alternative organizing and managing today and in the future. The conclusions of this paper reach further than just being reflections on a historical case study: a model of management is presented, concerned with the care and protection of the common good.

Trends in organisation and in organisational activity, which have resulted in increasing dependence on the discretionary efforts, initiatives and judgements of employees, have left management with the problem of how to ensure that such discretion is exercised appropriately in the service of the organisation. The Human Resource Management approach, relying as it does on strategic integration and underpinned by a value-driven approach seemed to be an ideal mechanism, particularly when designed as encouragement to commitment via social identification and a shared sense of meaning.

If culture is the enacted manifestation of organisational identity, management aspiration is that the 'good' employee is one who will learn the cultural reality and enact it appropriately. Expectations of 'good' employees are that they will exhibit not only the appropriate competence, but will also possess the necessary commitment, via identification and emotional engagement, so that they can be trusted to regulate themselves, take decisions that are in the best interests of the organisation and even go that extra mile for the company and the customer. This paper gives attention to such expectations and explores their implications.

This paper describes how two professors struggled with traditional and non-traditional approaches to scholarship in order to understand how they could best serve students in a new secondary school (grades 6-12) while fulfilling expectations for tenure and promotion. Using methods related to reflexive autoethnography, the authors explore the rewards and challenges of building a partnership between a college and school that enabled the development of a comprehensive and systemic college and career readiness program called the Career Institute (CI). The professors explore the tensions that arose when they tried to both build and study this program. Over time, the professors realized that in order for the program to be important and meaningful for students, they themselves needed to develop a non-traditional approach to scholarship that was engaged, responsive, and service-oriented. Accordingly, they developed a model from which to theorize about the goals and aims of community-engaged scholarship: “Community-engaged scholarship” creates, explores and extends research as it is valued by, valued for, and valued with.

This paper examines how employees respond to managements’ conflicting use of technocratic forms of control to ensure efficiency and socio-ideological control to produce an ‘on brand’ employee identity. The paper proposes a portrait-based form of ethnography as a way to illustrate both commonalities and differences in employees’ identity work and responses to managerial control within the call centre setting. The findings show that cynical distancing – and subtle enactment of the service brand – grows out of simultaneous embracing of and distancing from the contested work role. The study extends the concept of cynical distance as well as advances our understanding of how the tandem of socio ideological and technocratic control may work through employees’ cynical distancing. Finally, the paper argues for more nuanced insights into the identity work of call centre employees to fully understand negative but also positive consequences of managerial control in this specific setting.

This paper uses business model perspective to understand how different organisations can through their corporate sustainability policies contribute to the social innovation/entrepreneurship processes. Since the current literature on social innovation concentrates on an individual level and the topic of social entrepreneurs, we propose a wider view of the scene. We analyse how social innovation can be a part of a business model (design) on one hand; and how the social innovation can be sustainable as a result of the integration with the business models on the other hand.

In our analysis, we identify four levels of business involvement in which organisations can both contribute and benefit from innovative social goods or support social innovation. An organisation may address social needs as a part of its marketing strategy, offsets, R&D model, or as a core-business idea. We argue that in any of these situations a company can benefit from supporting social innovation, for instance by good brand recognition, positive associations, innovative products and services, new markets, etc. Fulfilling social needs may be either a by-product of business-oriented activities, such as investigation of existing demand, addressing specific groups of potential customers, inventing a new market segments; or because of the external pressures such as legal regulations or public protests.