If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractService organizations are encouraged to consider the manner in which employees perform at the customer/front-line employee interface, as a means to gain competitive advantage. The employee's behaviour requires "emotional labour" where the front-line employee (academic), has to either conceal or manage actual feelings for the benefit of a successful service delivery. The implication is not necessarily of equality or mutual benefit, but of satisfaction for the customer (student) and profit for the management. The paper discusses whether the academic is being exploited in this three-way relationship. To illustrate this argument, data gathered from in-depth interviews at a higher education institution are used. The research is of value as an aid for the management and support of academic staff in an age of managerialism and to the notion of the student as customer.

This literature review considers the use of action research in higher education. It specifically looks at two areas of higher education activity. The first concerns academic teaching practice and includes a discussion of research and pedagogy practice, and staff development. The second considers student engagement. In both these core features of higher education, action research has proved to be a central approach to the investigation, reflection and improvement of practice. Each of these main foci includes a discussion of the limitations of the literature. The review illustrates the extent and range of uses to have benefited from an action research approach.Keywords: higher education; action research, literature review; reflective practice 2 Literature Review on the Use of Action Research in Higher EducationThe centrality of students as fee paying customerts, besides based on the value of their fees, has focused UK Government policy in the higher education sector on the importance of the quality of teaching and rates of retention. On 1 July 2015, Jo Johnson, UK Minster for Higher Education, confirmed the second of his party's election pledges concerning teaching in higher education: secondly, delivering a teaching excellence framework that creates incentives for universities to devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers have a right to expect. (Johnson 2015) The justification for such a scheme is as follows:to meet students' high expectations of their university years and to deliver the skills our economy needs, we need a renewed focus on teaching. (ibid.)A process was put in motion that seeks to enact changes to put teaching at the heart of higher education policy. The extrinsic value of teaching, or its value for money, is thus established as a metric of the level of skill, inferred from its calculative value: as a professional activity -as a vocation -higher education is undermined. Whether this exposes the essence of higher education provision is contentious, but the rebalance of emphasis from research to teaching in our mass participation higher education system clearly has intrinsic merit, and certainly possesses political leverage. Amid the development of lecturers' capability to teach and facilitate learning is the enhancement of pedagogical practice through reflection and research into practice (Gibbs, Angelides and Michaelides 2004). In this context, the importance of action research (AR) as a method of revelation, instruction and improvement, and as the realisation of technical skill and facilitation of learning, is hard to overemphasise. Informed practice removes the consumeristic notion of lecturers as emotional labourers, intent on satisfying students' consumerist desires, and balances the edifying mission of higher education institutions. This literature review is undertaken to contribute to this aim. It attempts to reflect AR from a number of perspectives and to consider its implications and limitations in regard to generating the...

Purpose -Although the notion of wisdom confronts the economic rationale of business organizations, this paper aims to argue that organizations are coming under increasing pressure not only to learn, change and adapt, but also to take actions that are ethically acceptable and respond to the expectations of multiple stakeholders, or in other words to act wisely. Accordingly this article seeks to progress the debate on the relationship between organizational learning, learning organizations and wisdom, in pursuit of a new version of the model of the learning organization, the practically wise organization. Design/methodology/approach -First, the literature on the learning organization and organizational learning is reviewed with a view to the identification of useful models and concepts. The paucity of reference to wisdom in that literature is noted. The following sections develop the theme of practical wisdom and, the essence of the practically wise organization, respectively. Finally a model for the practically wise organization that is both a virtuous and a learning organization is proposed. Findings -The paper finds that a practically wise organization is a learning organization whose learning architecture is based on the principles of practical wisdom. Such an organization manages the processes associated with the seven pillars of wisdom: understanding dynamic complexity; developing personal wisdom competency; deliberating towards ethical models; refreshing shared sustainable vision; group wisdom dynamics; deliberated praxis; and embodied learning. Originality/value -The article is a first step towards extending the theory and practice associated with the learning organization and organizational learning to embrace the multi-stakeholder, ethically and morally informed perspectives embedded in the notion of practical wisdom.

This article considers the situation in the UK higher education system and investigates specifically the leadership practice in a cluster of UK institutions as they changed their status. The research goes further to advocate a form of contextualized leadership that is relevant to higher institutions under change.

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