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The purpose of this paper is to examine the key issues involved in situations within the workplace when an employee goes through gender reassignment, in order to consider how such situations might be managed more effectively.

It analyses a case study from a national public sector organisation in the UK where a transsexual person went through male to female gender reassignment. The case was compiled via participant observation and one to one interviews with the key players in the process (managers, human resource staff and colleagues as well as the individual).

Key issues discussed include the effects on trust and relationships at work, harassment, the role of trade unions, training, and other support. It explores the difficulty of gaining acceptance for a transsexual, and links this to literature on managing diversity and change management.

The case study is in the public sector in the UK, but implications are valid for other organisations.

Makes suggestions for managing transsexual issues for management and for trade unions, whilst being cautious about the extent of acceptance that can be achieved.

Existing literature tends to focus on the transsexual individual's own viewpoint, and guidelines from transgender support groups. This study includes the roles and reactions of all the key people involved within a real organisational case, and offers insights into the issues involved when managing transsexual cases in the workplace.

This paper aims to explore how teacher leaders help teachers improve mathematics and science teaching.

Research focused on a purposive sample of seven teacher leaders selected to vary in their time allocated to teacher leader work and their content knowledge. Each teacher leader was interviewed, as were two teachers and at least one administrator working with that teacher leader. Each interview was first subjected to a mix of deductive and inductive coding before a case study was written for each teacher leader. Ultimately, a cross‐case analysis was written.

Teacher leaders conducted two sets of leadership tasks. The paper finds that support tasks helped teachers do their work but did not contribute to teacher learning. Developmental tasks did facilitate learning. All teacher leaders engaged in support tasks, but only four did developmental tasks as well. Teacher leaders who engaged in developmental tasks had access to one material resource and three social resources not available to other teacher leaders: time to work with teachers, administrative support, more positive relations with teachers, and opportunities to work with teachers on professional development

When teacher leadership is intended to facilitate teacher learning, the payoff comes from engaging in developmental tasks. A key to teacher leader success is administrative support. Schools and districts should not invest in teacher leaders unless they intend to support teacher leaders adequately through time, administrative follow through, and training to help teachers develop the positive social relations on which their work depends.

These findings have implications for how to integrate teacher leaders into larger school improvement efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to show how actor-network theory (ANT) can be useful in exploring tweens consumption of the Disney franchises of High School Musical (HSM) and Hannah Montana (HM). Through the lens of the ANT and the concept of situated consumption, the aim of the paper is to elucidate how both tween girls and the Disney merchandise and media content are mutually enacted through practice.

The paper draws on material from in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine girls, seven who were followed during a two-year period in an after-school program at two different schools in a midsize town in Norway and who were visited twice in their home. Two of the girls were recruited from a Disney HSM fan site online. The interviews explored the use of HM and HSM as part of their everyday practices.

A main finding was how tween girls and their relation to the Disney HSM and HM came to be and mean different things in different settings. Media texts and tied in merchandise functioned as social tools and sign vehicles to manage part of belonging to a peer group and also to distinguish themselves from others. Also, focus is on the social norms surrounding how one can display and not one’s devotion to Disney tween franchises in a socially accept form.

The paper draws on ANT to expand on studies of consumption building on Bajde’s (2013) proposal to include ANT within consumer studies. By drawing on the ANT with a socio-material perspective, this study contributes to gain insight into how popular cultural items take part in the co-construction and performance of both consumers and commodities attempting to move beyond an ontological divide between human and non-human entities. Thus, this paper explores how Disney media texts and merchandise and the girls were enacted in different assemblages.

Since the late 1990s, teacher professional development models have shifted from a focus on individual improvement to collaboration as a means to foster support, information, and resource exchange between teachers. Following this shift, researchers began to use social network research methodology in the early 2000s to reveal the ways in which informal relationships affect teachers’ practices. This chapter reviews current literature on teachers’ social networks and teacher quality to describe the ways in which social networks mediate teachers’ practices. It provides detailed examples from two studies on teachers’ social networks and suggests ways that scholars can incorporate the constructs of social capital and social networks into large-scale research on teacher quality.

The radical center is a space of convergence among overlapping circles, a space in which various ecosystems come into contact. In this chapter, we discuss curricular approaches that take their home in this radical center, leveraging documentary mediamaking practices to connect students, disciplinary approaches, community members, and organizing efforts in relationships of transparency, accountability, and mutuality. In such contexts, students can be equipped to create responsible documentaries through engaged pedagogies that focus on critical documentary theory and understanding of individual location (Coles, 1997). This chapter presents two case studies that facilitated documentary-as-praxis in different communities in the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsylvania.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Canadian lesbians and gay men manage their non‐hegemonic identities in organizations, given the relative paucity of qualitative data in the area, the importance of work as a site for identity projects in the contemporary west and growing pressure on employers to attend to sexual orientation as part of diversity management initiatives.

Data were gathered through 16 semi‐structured interviews with lesbian and gay workers from three Canadian cities.

The data emphasize the importance of organizational environments in which queer people feel able to integrate their identity at work with their identity in the rest of their lives. Role models were identified as especially important in this regard, particularly for women who talked of the organizational “double jeopardy” of being female and a lesbian.

Although the data reported here are not generalizable, it is worrying that they echo many earlier studies on the negative aspects of lesbian and gay workplace experience. One key implication is that those employees who conform most closely to what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix are less likely to experience problems related to their sexual orientation.

This paper indicates several themes which are not extensively travelled in the existing literature, including the suggestion that coming out to colleagues is easier if one is in a long‐term relationship, as well as a sense that having to negotiate such disclosure simultaneously enhances work‐related interpersonal skills.

Developing self-awareness as a management instructor and modelling this process for students’ similar awareness has benefits in classroom learning environments. In this chapter, the authors reframe faculty and student traditional roles and responsibilities, providing an iterative, holistic process of embedded interdependent self-awareness development where students experience a sense of empowerment and control over their learning, integral to mutual success. The authors’ experiences draw on aspects of experiential learning, Gestalt psychology, and self-determination theory (SDT). To create an intrinsically motivating, student-centred learning environment in an undergraduate leadership course, the authors reframed teaching to include course design, opportunities for student autonomy, co-creation of psychological safety, and the instructor’s use of self. This evidence-based reflection for self-awareness included examining behavioural patterns, feelings, and thinking. Finally, the authors discuss lessons learned and practical applications, identifying reflexivity, psychological safety, iterative feedback, student autonomy, and modelling as key to the process.

For generations retailing has had to fight against its image as a second‐class occupation. Successive governments have tended to regard it as less important than manufacturing industry, and this view has been reinforced by careers officers who, in the palmy days when school‐leavers were in the privileged position of having an element of choice in their jobs, adopted a condescending if not dismissive attitude to “working in a shop”. If anything this attitude has been even more marked at graduate level; as our contributor writes, retailing has been generally neglected by universities, and even by many management centres and business schools. There are, of course, some exceptions. One of the most notable of these is the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology; UMIST was one of the first in the UK to develop courses in retailing, and these are described here in some detail. The author is only too well aware that there are a number of universities and polytechnics whose retail courses have not been mentioned in this feature; equally that there are personnel officers who will justifiably feel that they are not guilty of the charges levelled against them in the section entitled “Graduate Retailers”. We welcome correspondence from educational organisations or individuals who desire to put the record straight.

Examines the perceptions and expectations of Chinese graduates in Hong Kong towards their careers and initial job needs immediately prior to their graduation. The findings, which comprised quantitative data from 492 responses and qualitative data from seven interviews and two focus group meetings, show that both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are important in career and job aspects. Discusses various issues in light of the results, such as the relationship between jobs and career, organizational commitment, occupational choice of allocations, work attitudes and environment. The analysis has implications for undergraduates, employers and career advisers.