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The contemporary human resource management (HRM) sector is faced with continual leadership development challenges. Unethical behavior in leaders is not the norm, but it is also not the exception. Human resource training and development focus significantly on better leadership but have largely failed to create more effective leaders. The result? Employee and follower wellbeing have not seen their best days. In this chapter, authentic relationships comprising authentic leaders and authentic followers are posited as a solution. The call is for more rigor in the theory underpinning leadership development programs, assurance of such programs, and embedding ethics into the core of what leadership developers do.

Distributional issues have re‐emerged as an important issue in economics, social science, and philosophy in the last few decades. In the same period, the relevance of derivative Judeo‐Christian socio‐economic principles to the contemporary world has been (re)asserted, developing an incipient Judeo‐Christian economics. Methodologically, this undertaking is comparable to that underlying the evolution of Islamic and other forms of religious economics. The methodology employed in the Judeo‐Christian undertaking is described via a worked example. The example shows how normative principles can be derived from Judeo‐Christian thought allegedly relevant to shaping the contemporary distribution of wealth and income. The principles are deduced from a particular sub‐set of Judeo‐Christian source material, and have the effect of generating greater equity in economic distribution. The deductions are compared with selected ideas canvassed in recent economics' discussion about inequitable distribution concerning appropriate criteria for guiding redistributional policy, ideas of “equal opportunity” vs “equal outcomes”, and the relation between distribution and economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a Biblical basis for localization as against globalization. This paper argues that the normative direction of Biblical thought is toward the localization of socio‐economic activity. A case study is made for the developing world today relevant to localization.

An evaluation is made of normative Biblical teaching that might have bearing on the localization of socio‐economic activity. How this teaching could apply to the contemporary developing world is assessed.

Normative Biblical teaching is oriented toward localization. This emphasis is capable of being applied in the developing world.

The case that normative Biblical teaching is in favour of localization rather then dispersal (and thereby globalization) has not been made previously. For those who believe that normative Biblical teaching has relevance today, the localization bias challenges the widespread acceptance of globalization.

This study aims to compare linear programming and stable marriage approaches to the personnel assignment problem under conditions of uncertainty. Robust solutions should exhibit reduced variability of solutions in the presence of one or more additional constraints or problem perturbations added to some baseline problems.

Several variations of each approach are compared with respect to solution speed, solution quality as measured by officer-to-assignment preferences and solution robustness as measured by the number of assignment changes required after inducing a set of representative perturbations or constraints to an assignment instance. These side constraints represent the realistic assignment categorical priorities and limitations encountered by army assignment managers who solve this problem semiannually, and thus the synthetic instances considered herein emulate typical problem instances.

The results provide insight regarding the trade-offs between traditional optimization and heuristic-based solution approaches.

The results indicate the viability of using the stable marriage algorithm for talent management via the talent marketplace currently used by both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force for personnel assignments.

This paper aims to argue that resilience – and its underlying socio-ecological perspective – is a critical concept that could serve to integrate different views on, and approaches to, social marketing. The aim is to inspire social marketers to move away from narrow, issue-based interventions targeting individual behaviours and to consider the impact of social ecologies, particularly the contribution resilience research can make to behaviour change.

This is a conceptual paper; socio-ecological models and the resilience concept are discussed and applied to a current “wicked problem” – obesity.

From a socio-ecological perspective, research findings highlight the impact macro, meso and micro forces have on behaviour and the importance of a child’s micro-system and the influence it has on development and life outcomes. Building resilience requires a relationship-building, person-centred, holistic and long-term developmental approach to behaviour change.

This is a conceptual paper that introduces new concepts to the social marketing field. Future research should focus on understanding how to implement a resilience-building approach in practice – including the interrelationships and interactions between individual, family and community resilience – and how resilience can be integrated within systematic, socio-ecological thinking when addressing “wicked problems”.

Rather than blaming and targeting individuals, the goal should be to create an environment that supports parents, families and communities to build resilience at the micro, meso and macro levels. The findings support the argument that social marketers should adopt an upstream approach to develop interventions that make the environment the primary focus. Social marketers should collaborate with, and learn from, social workers, psychologists and educationalist to further their understanding of resilience. This would have a positive, sustainable impact on a whole range of social and health issues, ultimately helping to address the overarching issue of social inequality.

Building resilience amongst individuals, families and communities offer a means to achieve fundamental positive social change and to reduce social, economic and health inequality.

The paper offers a unique perspective on how and why resilience – and its underlying socio-ecological framework – should be applied within the social marketing field.

In his apocalyptic book on the environment and public policy, Timothy C. Weiskel warned of the consequences of humanity's intrusion into the biological and geo‐chemical processes of the natural world. He said that our intrusions have been massive and thorough; that they now threaten to transform ecosystemic parameters; and that unless responsible public policy directs itself toward moderating our current destructive impact on the environment, we will face ecosystemic collapse and human catastrophe “on a vastly greater scale than has ever been recorded in human history.”

In this chapter, we review empirical research evidence on the relationship between stressors and catecholamines (i.e., adrenaline and noradrenaline) and cortisol. With respect to acute stressors, both laboratory and field research have shown that the exposure to stressors leads to an increase in catecholamine and cortisol levels. With respect to more chronic stressors, research evidence is less consistent. Chronic mental workload was found to be related to elevated adrenaline levels. With respect to cortisol responses the interaction between workload and other variables seems to play a role. Empirical studies suggest that chronic stressors affect the responsivity to acute stressors. Research showed that after the exposure to stressors catecholamine and cortisol recovery is delayed.