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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an essential part of business, and companies should genuinely incorporate social responsibilities toward internal and external stakeholders in their operations. The most important stakeholder group is the personnel, which is why employers should pay attention to strengthening the employer–employee relationship. The purpose of this text is to demonstrate the connections between employer branding and CSR.

Theory on employer branding and CSR indicates that there are both strategic and operational connections. Strategically, employer branding can be considered the outcome of the co-operation among branding, CSR, and human resource management (HRM). At an operational level, there are several CSR activities that can be of use when developing and implementing economic, functional, and psychological employer-branding elements.

In order to establish how CSR is used in employer branding in practice, a qualitative content analysis of the website communication of three multinational IT companies was made. All of the companies have been acknowledged for their strong internal employer brands, and the analysis focused on what types of CSR activities they communicate externally as part of their employer branding efforts.

The study concludes that CSR can be relevant to employer branding and presents a categorization model for facilitating a concrete integration of CSR and employer-branding elements.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how the Swedish Association of Biology Teachers (ABT) and some other subject associations helped form pre-service biology teacher education in two major Swedish reforms from ca. 1960 to 1990.

The activities of subject associations can be understood as boundary-work since they defend their subject boundaries in terms of content, space in the timetable, and legitimacy. A hermeneutic method of text interpretation is employed in analyzing historical archival and parliamentary material.

The work of the ABT to demarcate their subject in the 1968 and 1988 Teacher Education Reforms may seem like merely defending certain biological items instead of others, in the name of science. However, it was also a professional struggle to assert the importance of the teachers, their jobs, education, knowledge of biology subject matter, and thereby their professional authority and autonomy. The ABT were also caught in a political struggle for their subject throughout the period of investigation. Depending on the political winds of the time they therefore had to ally themselves with or distance themselves from various actors.

In comparison with the few other studies of subject associations, this paper is unique in outlining how the ABT acted in relation to teacher education. However, the ways of doing boundary-work were still very similar to those used by subject associations in schools in other countries, especially in acting for increased study time in their respective science subjects as well as their resistance to subject integration. An obvious conclusion regarding teacher education is that subject associations such as the ABT did not contribute to bridging the gap between subject matter and pedagogy but rather the opposite. Biology teacher education was seen as an academic pursuit carried out at universities rather than at the practically oriented teacher training colleges.

The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative way of using focus groups in research – a role‐play‐enhanced focus group method – in which participants are presented with the challenge of dealing with a specific task while playing a familiar but nevertheless fictive role.

The research is performed through an experimental approach in which a focus group of small business owner‐managers are assembled and presented with a prepared case exercise. The design is a role‐play‐like setting in which the participants are to act as the board of a company.

Carefully designed, well‐prepared role‐play‐like activities can add substantially to focus‐groups.

Adding an experimental dimension to focus groups offers the possibility of addressing topics indirectly and thus increases their usefulness.