The Grand Seaside Hotel is a large five-star hotel in an Australian Coastal town. It is a place that not only aspires to provide excellent service but that also seeks to reconcile two apparently divergent demands: the need for customized service and the efficient management of business operations. To commit staff to the provision of service excellence, management has introduced a customer service programme that relies on various forms of training and rewards, as well as a guest response system. The customer service programme, particularly the use of guest questionnaires, appear as disciplinary strategies that aim to produce service encounters in which both staff and guests are ‘normalized’. The main loci of ethnographic data collection for this paper are regular Management Briefings. Through data collected from these, the paper investigates the use of the ‘imaginary’ in constituting service encounters and guest expectations. It interprets these in terms of Foucault's Panoptic analysis to identify the immanent mechanisms of discipline in these customer service programmes.

This paper is based on a study of a large U.S. multinational corporation, examining the importance of career plateauism, the condition whereby more employees find that opportunities for promotions are limited or non-existent. This phenomenon has gained special attention with corporate downsizing and the emergence of “flatter” organizations. This exploratory study suggests that plateauism is a multi-faceted construct. Plateauism can have adverse effects upon certain employees in the organization; however, a segment of plateaued employees commonly referred to as “solid citizens” can manage to function effectively. Instead of viewing plateauism solely by its traditional definition of hierarchical movement, the assessment of plateauism needs to be expanded to include factors such as the content of the job, change in work responsibilities, and the learning of new skills. “Content” plateauism is contrasted as being distinctly different from the conventional measure referred to as “structural” plateauism. This difference in the assessment of plateauism may explain why one type of plateauism has detrimental effects while the negative repercussions attributable to the other type of plateauism can be moderated; consequently, the different types of plateauism may require different interventions. The implications for managers, organizations, and plateaued employees are discussed.

Leaders are widely exhorted to employ visions, yet surprisingly little research has been conducted on what constitutes an “effective” vision. A research model is proposed for investigating relationships between vision components, and business unit performance as measured by employee and customer satisfaction. The model, expressed both graphically and as three propositions, proposes that vision attributes of brevity, clarity, abstractness, challenge, future orientation, stability, and desirability, plus vision content relating to employee and customer satisfaction, can directly affect performance. However, the model also predicts indirect effects on performance mediated by six realization factors and two intervening variables.

The paper presents findings of a study evaluating the impact of performance appraisal training on rating accuracy and perceived rating ability. 41 supervisors from a telecommunications firm took part in the training evaluated video vignettes and completed a questionnaire measuring self-efficacy beliefs about rating, goal intentions, and feelings about future rating behaviour. Supervisors in a control group (n = 12) also rated the video and completed the questionnaire. Trained supervisors showed increased accuracy on video ratings of work behaviour over the course of the training and an increase in self-efficacy measures. Control group supervisors by comparison decreased their accuracy of rating over the same time period while self-efficacy ratings remained constant. Impact of training on satisfaction and goals of participants is also presented.

Given the need to provide increased opportunities for busy managers to learn, but their reduced availability to attend formal on-campus classes, management students and corporate employers have turned to Distance Education (DE) provision as an alternative to face-to-face (FtF) programmes.

Providing flexible delivery, however, does not guarantee that the learning requirements of management students will be met, and needs to be considered in terms of the limits and enhancements to learning that different flexible methodologies support. DE comes in many forms and pedagogics, uses a variety of media, and tends to be designed with the individual learner in mind, whereas the demand for work-relevant management skills requires Management Education (ME) programmes to include collaborative as well as individual modes of learning.

Managers require integrative knowledge, emotional intelligence, and complex social and perceptual skills and attitudes that increasingly reflect ethical and values-oriented behaviour. At issue in the shift from FtF to DE is the need to provide opportunities for the ongoing social and interpersonal skills development that would normally occur within the classroom. For DE to add value to management learners it needs to offer flexibility that supports quality work-relevant education.

In this paper the author explores whether print-based DE combined with Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies provides a solution. CMC is a networked electronic medium; used in conjunction with print-based DE it can provide opportunities for group interactivity and collaborative learning. Since the skills required for effective CMC participation are also synergistic with the socio-cultural and technical skills required of today's ‘networked manager’, the author suggests that there are further advantages to including CMC as part of the ME curriculum. From a review of the literature, the author concludes that there is much benefit in combining the two methodologies provided that:

• appropriate pedagogy is designed into the combined media

• the flexibility and educational needs of management learners are met

• educators and learners learn how to learn by the new media.