᭹At the core of strategic planning has been the use of strategic tools and frameworks such as the ubiquitous SWOT analysis and a variety of frameworks bearing Michael Porter's moniker. There has been a tendency for generic tools to be developed and disseminated to industry, with a one-type-fits-all approach. ᭹ Planning and the use of tools have largely been dismissed in much contemporary, particularly European practice-based, strategic literature. This paper argues that the use of strategic tools has a place in contemporary strategic management. However, the traditional prescriptive rationale for strategic frameworks is replaced with a practice-based set of reasons advocating the use of strategic tools. ᭹ The paper advocates the use of strategic tools in a variety of strategic contexts including planning. However, it is shown that groupings of strategic tool usage can be identified which might indicate that business and business schools should reconsider how they apply, learn and disseminate strategic framework.

This paper reports the research fi ndings of the experiences of public sector workers of bullying at work across 13 organizations in South Wales. The study explored the experiences of White and Ethnic minority respondents and found that there are signifi cant differences in the type and frequency of bullying behaviours being experienced by the two groups. Ethnic minority respondents are more likely to label themselves as suffering from bullying behaviours than their White counterparts. The evidence presented in this paper demonstrates how line managers use different tactics when bullying Ethnic respondents compared to White respondents. Furthermore, when colleagues bully fellow colleagues, there are subtly different patterns of bullying behaviour towards White and Ethnic victims. Given the specifi c requirement to comply with the public duty for promotion of racial equality expected under the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000), it is important that these fi ndings are recognized by UK public sector organizations.

The World Wide Web doubles in size roughly every 2-3 months and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of Web-based commercial efforts. The centrality of non-price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of factors such as form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm of aesthetics. This paper reports on an interactionist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis of 60 maleand female-produced websites. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences between the male-and female-produced websites on 13 out of the 23 factors analysed. These differences span issues of navigation as well as linguistic and visual content. The paper argues that the appeal of websites can be maximised if they mirror the needs and interests of their target populations and that websites targeted at male or female dominated markets need to reflect the aesthetic diversity found in the male-and femaleproduced websites analysed here. It also presents information on the demographics of the IT profession, showing that there is a potential imbalance between the percentage of women involved online and those involved in the IT profession. This suggests that the male domination of the IT profession could be a barrier to the effective mirroring of female Website preferences.

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The research discusses the impact of national culture on the processes of knowledge management (KM) in Higher Education. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which teamwork approaches to IC development are favoured in individualistic and collectivist cultures. The study was carried out in two phases. The first, aimed at generating emerging theory, involved interviews in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in an individualistic culture (UK). The second, aimed at testing emerging theory, utilised questionnaire responses from researchers in an individualistic (Australia) and collectivist society (Slovenia). The results revealed that, in the first phase, the absence of teamwork resulted in feelings of isolation and reduced research output. In the second, there was a statistically significant correlation between engagement in teamwork and membership of a collectivist society on the one hand, and engagement in teamwork and increased research output. This article shows the value of teamwork in facilitating KM, and the extent to which it is facilitated in a collectivist culture.