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Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This formal academic teaching or initial professional development in EM is supported and enhanced by training and continuing professional development from the major EM Institutes in the UK orientated to a set of technical and transferable skills or competencies expected of professional practitioners. In both cases there can be a tendency to focus on the more tractable, technical aspects of EM which are important, but may prove insufficient for EM in practice. What is also necessary, although often excluded, is an appreciation of, and capacity to deal with, the messiness and unpredictability of real world EM situations involving many different actors and stakeholders with multiple perspectives and operating to various agendas. Building on the work of Reeves, Herrington, and Oliver (2002), we argue that EM modules need to include the opportunity to work towards the practice of authentic activities with group collaboration as a key pursuit. This paper reports on a qualitative study of our experiences with a selected sample taken from two on-line undergraduate EM modules for second and third year students (referred to respectively as Modules A and B) at the Open University, UK where online collaboration was a key component. Our tentative findings indicate that on-line collaboration is difficult to ensure as a uniform experience and that lack of uniformity reduces its value as an authentic experience. Whilst it can provide useful additional skills for EM practitioners the experience is uneven in the student body and often requires more time and support to engage with than originally planned.

The authors draw on emerging research in organization theory to suggest how different firm-level identity orientations (individualistic, relational, or collectivistic) impact governance choice. They develop a conceptual framework that focuses on the relationship between a focal firm's own identity orientation and that of a value chain partner. The framework identifies a series of match and mismatch scenarios, where the latter represent unique governance problems that are not accounted for by existing theory. Some of the mismatch scenarios involve pseudo-matches that resemble convergent orientations between parties but actually represent governance problems. Theoretically, this framework advances the governance literature by providing a comprehensive and nuanced account of (1) the orientations that parties bring to bear on a relationship, and (2) how their effects vary depending on the interdependence structure between the parties. The authors also advance the general literature on identity orientation by connecting it to concrete governance practices, by showing how multiple internal identity orientations create unique internal governance challenges, and by delineating two possible solutions to these challenges. They rely on the framework to develop managerial guidelines for governance choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marketing scholars have long acknowledged that buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs) evolve over time. Nevertheless, truly dynamic considerations tend to be confined to the 'future research' sections of papers. Performing dynamic BSR research is difficult, not only because of the requirements of data collection and analysis, but also due to the somewhat fragmented understanding of the available studies on BSR dynamics and how an overarching understanding of their findings can refine static relationship models. We conduct a systematic literature review to organize the available research on BSR dynamics. The review process reveals four overarching themes: (1) relationship continuity, (2) relationship learning, (3) relationship stages and trajectories, and (4) relationship fluctuations. We discuss each theme, describe how the themes can be applied as a dynamic lens to research questions involving BSRs, and outline research directions that might stimulate further work on relationship dynamics., Author(s): Ali Shamsollahi [sup.1] , Danielle A. Chmielewski-Raimondo [sup.2] , Simon J. Bell [sup.2] , Reza Kachouie [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.432649.e, 0000 0001 0666 5255, ESSEC Business School, , [...]

This paper adopts an ecological approach to describe the opportunities offered by school landscape for children's curricular learning. The approach is based on Gibson's concept of affordances which refers to the opportunities offered by an environment to its users. The research conducted in school grounds in two different contexts – Scotland and Bangladesh drew on this theory to examine the relationship between the school landscape and children's learning. Case study research included application of observation and behaviour mapping in school grounds, and interviews with participants in both contexts. Opportunities for teaching and learning offered by the school landscape in both cases were later defined as 'cognitive affordances' by the authors. 'The concept of 'cognitive' affordances' had limited attention in the field of landscape research. This paper thus introduces and defines the term to understand and study the potential of outdoor environments for development of children's learning and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]