Editorial
Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 26, Issue 7.
Welcome to the final issue of 2012 which I hope you enjoy. The contributors are International as befits the IJEM with authors from Malaysia,Sweden, Sweden/Holland, USA/Korea and USA/Hong Kong and Australia.
The Malaysian contribution is via Ismail Amzat of the University of Malaysia(management) namely, “Structural equation models of management and decision-making styles with job satisfaction of academic staff in Malaysia research University”. The paper discusses the effects of management and decision-making styles on the job satisfaction of academic staff in a Malaysian research university using 218 respondents. The findings showed that the research university had adopted an analytical decision making. The paper comments on a number of international factors and uses Herzberg's descriptors(motivators/hygiene). The research revealed that decision-making styles of the university management have direct and indirect effects on the academic staff's job satisfaction.
Dianne Bevelander has twin affiliations with Lulea University of Technology,Sweden and the Rotterdam school of Management at Erasmus University. Her paper is “Who is engaging with whom? Internationalizing opportunities for business schools in emerging economies”. The author refers to the long debate about the nature and purpose of universities and suggests that universities need to direct more of their efforts into fuelling the economy and particularly the labour market. The paper begins with discussion on the global imperatives and the literature on the business school strategy is reviewed. The exchanges between MBA students in and out of the top-100 ranked schools is analysed. The paper studies the internationalization of some business schools often within a context of limited resources.
Stefan Lagrosen and Yvonne Lagrosen of University West, Trollhattan, Sweden contribute a piece on organisational learning for school quality and health, the purpose of which is to shed light on the connections between quality management,employee health and organisational learning in a school setting. The study is based on a quantitative survey of 20 schools. The reliability of indices measured was seen as sufficient and correlations were found between all the indices of quality management values and the health index, which indicates that the health status of the school employee is related to the level of adoption o the quality management values. The authors show a framework depicting the findings from an organizational learning perspective.
Geoffrey Soutar of the University of Western Australia is the next author and he covers “Word of mouth antecedents in an Educational context – a Singaporean study”. Word of mouth is the informal person-to-person communication on a particular topic or service and some feel that this process has a greater input on people's choices than other forms of communication. The study was based in Singapore where the Educational scene has changed dramatically in the last few years where there has been an expansion of higher education institutions both public and private. The constructs of functional service quality and technical service quality are examined in relation to the institutes and within the “zone of tolerance”.
A joint paper by Eyong Kim, Kijoo Kim and Michael Bzullak of the University of Hartford USA and Konyang University, Korea, has been written on management internship programmes within accredited institutions. The purpose of the paper is to survey the current status of internship programmes for management undergraduate students and to introduce a well-established internship programme using a web page analysis of 473 institutions. In their conclusion the authors found that most universities offer internship programmes to improve their students’ job opportunities, although the ways of managing these programmes varies widely. A surprisingly small number of schools strongly encourage schools to participate. The authors recommend that to make an internship experience more valuable to students it is suggested that an internship course should be a required course or required elective course supervised by a dedicated faculty member.
In the final paper the authors look at the first phase of curriculum reform on student learning in Hong Kong. The authors are Timothy Yuen, Alan Cheung, and Ping Man Wong of the Hong Kong Institute of Education and John Hopkins University USA. The Hong Kong Government implemented a major curriculum reform scheme to help students face a rapidly changing world. The impacts of change in Hong Kong have been well reported in this journal. This paper aims at examining the impact of the reform from the perspective of the major stakeholders –principals, teachers and students. The findings show better progress in primary schools than secondary. Overall moderate progress had been made in students’overall performance in generic skills, positive values and attitudes, language proficiency and the key learning areas. However, there were gaps in other aspects, e.g. critical thinking and self-learning abilities were less favourable compared to IT, reading habits and healthy lifestyle.
Brian Roberts
