Millions of customer services representatives are assessed each year by subject matter experts (e.g., recruiters, team leaders) in Asian contact centres to ensure good spoken communication skills when serving customers on the phones. In other workplace contexts, language experts are employed to do this work but in Asian contact centres, a…

This study offers a microhistory by exploring the impact regular smallpox outbreaks had on the lives of gentry families in seventeenth-century England. It particularly focuses on the question as in what way smallpox influenced upbringing and educational decisions and draws on a collection of personal letters of the Clarke family (1667-1710),…

There has been to date a long tradition of research in workplace discourse. The bulk of the research has focused on professional white-collar workplaces, but a handful of studies have examined working-class settings such as factories and building sites. This area of research has, however, been concerned with interactions involving co-workers.…

The urgency of the analyzed issue is due to lack of attention of heads of service companies to the theory and methodology of strategic management, methods and models of management decision-making in times of economic instability. The purpose of the article is to develop theoretical positions and methodical recommendations on the formation of the…

Purpose: The present descriptive-analytical study aimed to rank the barriers of the application of the value chain in the context of rural entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach: The statistical population was composed of 125 entrepreneurs from the provinces of Tehran, Hamedan, and Golestan, Iran. Data were analyzed by the TOPSIS technique.…

Technical efficiency is the ability of a firm to produce its maximum output using a set of inputs or to minimise the use of its inputs to produce a certain level of output. When a firm is operating at its most efficient, operating costs can be minimised, profits maximised and competitiveness improved. This study investigates the role of a firm's…

The study of entrepreneurial learning in schools has been widely reviewed, however, is limited to aspects of the theory. This study aims to find out how to teach entrepreneurship education in culinary schools. This study used a qualitative approach with case studies design. The result revealed that: (1) entrepreneurship education is considered…

Effective undergraduate instruction requires accurate knowledge of professional communication practices and employer expectations, but ongoing contradictions between academic and professional expectations reflect historical, rhetorical, and pedagogical causes for inaccurate presumptions. Taking a customer service perspective, one business faculty…

This study examined learner perspectives of the benefits of communication strategy training by analysing strategy diaries written by low English proficiency learners enrolled in an English for Occupational Purposes programme. The communication strategy instruction involved 23 students who were taught 13 lexical, negotiation, and discourse-based…

In the study reported on here we sought to identify teaching and general stressors, and how they contributed to work-family conflict among female teachers in urban public schools in Kenya. A total of 375 female teachers with at least their youngest child not yet in primary school completed a survey of closed and open-ended questions. Role theory,…

This paper explores how left behind children (LBCs) of emigrant women experience and make use of familial and educational investment on 'getting ahead' in thinking about their futures. On the one hand, these efforts of Filipino families figure in the imaginary of transnational migration as the ticket to better life. On the other hand, it surfaces…

Despite repeated calls to temper the bureaucratic ethos and its associated process-oriented pathologies with more of a democratic ethos grounded in normative values and the public interest, the practice, research, and teaching of public administration continues to largely perpetuate the former. In this paper we build upon the work of Camila…

This dissertation examined the relationship between employee engagement and the factors that may influence the three psychological conditions of engagement: meaningfulness, safety, and availability for the sector of employees classified as maintenance, grounds, and custodial employees in a community college setting. The factors for each of the…

This paper explores the learning experiences and literacy practices of a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal, reporting on ethnographic data collected between 2008 and 2013. Drawing on the conceptualisation of literacy as a social practice, as well as the notion of translocational positionality, it examines the way in which the…

Developing the next generation of leaders in government is seen as a strategic challenge of national importance in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This article examines the wicked nature of the UAE's leadership development challenge, identifying patterns of complexity, uncertainty, and divergence in the strategic intentions underlying current…