Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the papers in this special issue and some issues surrounding choosing management as a career. A jointly developed questionnaire is also presented. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is descriptive in nature. Findings: It is crucial for researchers and practitioners to expand their perspectives…

It is well documented that the achievement gap between affluent students and economically disadvantaged students and between White students and students of color continues to widen. In addition to these achievement gaps, marginalizing practices are often imbedded in the structures of schooling. These challenges require educational leadership…

The link among the quality of principals, caliber of teaching, and levels of student achievement is a tight one. School leadership is a key factor in the recruitment and retention of quality teachers; teaching quality, in turn, profoundly influences improvements in student learning and achievement. Yet despite their central role in this equation,…

This paper explores the role that action learning might play in micro and small enterprise development. It is divided into two parts. The first part focuses upon the distinctive characteristics of smallness and ownership and their implication for management development processes in the owner managed firm. In particular the impact of personal…

Background: Children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and mild to borderline intellectual disability (ID) have less adaptive behaviour and more behaviour problems than children with mild to borderline ID. Social information processing appears to be an important mechanism in the explanation of the socially inadequate behaviour of children…

It is no surprise that the issue of leadership is a compelling topic for students of management and the American public at large. According to the second annual National Leadership Index taken by the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, more than 7 in 10 Americans (70.8%) agree or agree strongly that…

The primary purpose of management development programs is performance improvement at an individual and organizational level. Performance improvement results from knowledge, skill, or ability enhancement. An important intervention in management development is the use of 360-degree or multisource feedback (MSF), which leads to more effective career…

We examined the possibility that teams composed primarily of individuals with personality characteristics conducive to team creativity (e.g., high extraversion, high openness to experience, low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, low agreeableness) would show synergistic increases in creativity when they experienced high levels of "team creative…

This paper examines the underlying assumptions that competency-based frameworks are based upon in relation to leadership development. It examines the impetus for this framework becoming the prevailing theoretical base for developing leaders and tracks the historical path to this phenomenon. Research suggests that a competency-based framework may…

Objective: This article discusses the pedagogy of teaching family therapy in the new millennium. It draws on the strengths of "family systems therapy" but goes beyond it--suggesting a new paradigm, new terminology, and a new teaching perspective. It discusses the historical background of family therapy training, a scientific foundation for what…

This commentary asks some critical questions concerning the article "Management Education and the Base of the Pyramid" included in this special issue. Are "bottom of the pyramid" (BOP) multidisciplinary action project (MAP) students prepared to critically assess the impact of their interventions beyond a narrow definition of profit in complex and…

In the South, as in the North, the need to confront and escape poverty forces people to seek out administrative knowledge as a way of participating in economic activities. The current study considers one such group of individuals and provides a case study of a cooperative of single mothers in El Salvador (the Madres) that produces fairly traded…

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the question of how long a behavioral skills training program should be in order to result in measurable behavioral change. Design/methodology/approach: An empirical field study was conducted to compare two different lengths of time for a managerial skills training program aimed at achieving behavioral change.…