Recent accelerated decay of discontinuous permafrost at the Stordalen Mire in northern Sweden has been attributed to increased temperature and snow depth, and has caused expansion of wet minerotrophic areas leading to significant changes in carbon cycling in the mire. In order to track these changes through time and evaluate potential forcing mechanisms, this paper analyses a peat succession and a lake sediment sequence from within the mire, providing a record for the last 100 years, and compares these with monitored climate and active layer thickness data. The peat core was analysed for testate amoebae to reconstruct changes in peatland surface moisture conditions and water table fluctuations. The lake sediment core was analysed by near infrared spectroscopy to infer changes in the total organic carbon (TOC) concentration of the lake-water, and changes in d 13 C and C, N and d 15 N to track changes in the dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) pool and the influence of diagenetic effects on sediment organic matter, respectively. Results showed that major shifts towards increased peat surface moisture and TOC concentration of the lake-water occurred around 1980, one to two decades earlier than a temperature driven increase in active layer thickness. Comparison with monitored temperature and precipitation from a nearby climate station indicates that this change in peat surface moisture is related to June-September (JJAS) precipitation and that the increase in lakewater TOC concentration reflects an increase in total annual precipitation. A significant depletion in 13 C of sediment organic matter in the early 1980s probably reflects the effect of a single or a few consecutive years with anomalously high summer precipitation, resulting in elevated DIC content of the lake water, predominantly originating from increased export and subsequent respiration of organic carbon from the mire. Based on these results, it was not possible to link proxy data obtained on peat and lake-sediment records directly to permafrost decay. Instead our data indicate that increased precipitation and anomalously high rainfall during summers had a significant impact on the mire and the adjacent lake ecosystem. We therefore propose that effects of increased precipitation should be considered when evaluating potential forcing mechanisms of recent changes in carbon cycling in the subarctic.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework of severe expatriate crises focusing on the occurrence of “fit-dependent” crisis events, which is when the crisis is “man made” and triggered by expatriates’ maladjustment or acculturation stress in the host country. The authors focus on the causes, prevention and management of fit-dependent expatriate crises. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a conceptual framework of fit-dependent expatriate crises that involves different levels of analysis. Findings The conceptual framework shows that crises can be triggered at micro, meso and macro levels ranging from the personal and family domains (micro), to the network and organisational domains (meso) as well as the host country domain (macro). The authors conceptualise these “domains of causes” as triggering maladjustment and acculturation stress that ultimately leads to a severe crisis event with correspondingly serious and potentially life-changing consequences. Furthermore, using a process perspective, the authors outline strategies for preventing and managing crises before, during and after the crisis occurs, discussing the support roles of various internal (organisational) and external (specialist) stakeholders. Originality/value Studying the link between expatriation and crises is a highly relevant research endeavour because severe crisis events will impact on HRM policies, processes and procedures for dealing with employees living abroad, and will create additional challenges for HRM beyond what could normally be expected. Using attribution theory to explain why organisational support and intervention to assist expatriates during a crisis is not always forthcoming, and theories of social networks to elucidate the “first responder” roles of various support actors, the authors contribute to the expatriate literature by opening up the field to a better understanding of the dark side of expatriation that includes crisis definition, prevention, management and solutions.

An institution is often considered to be a stable, taken-for-granted 'being'. The consequence is that agency is primarily associated with the rather exceptional creation or disruption of a relatively stable structure. In this article, we suggest an alternative ontology for understanding an institution as something unstable and always 'becoming'. This opens a range of new and distinct opportunities for theorizing and researching institutional work involved in the everyday practice of managing institutional complexity. It allows us, in this study, to contribute with a new form of agency in terms of the continuous, active work of managing novel contradictions. Further, it induces us to take a more fine-grained look at the accompanying dynamics of work, in addition to work itself, whereby we provide a novel way of accounting for whether work effort is amplifying or subsiding, and whether it is likely to result in greater or lesser volatility within -on the surface -an otherwise seemingly stable institution. The argumentation is supported by an ethnographic field study of the work of managing novel contradictions within a single South Korean credit card company in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis in 1997.

This paper advances knowledge on how the forms of institutional logics that emerge and become venerated among members of a singular organization in a heterogeneous field are influenced by struggles between contending interest groups. It examines the moderating effect of group dynamics that occur when an organization attempts to balance novel institutional complexity within organizational bounds through its hiring and promotion systems. The authors argue that, while the specific institutional oppositions of heterogeneous fields compel organizational changes, the institutional forms that emerge and become legitimate among members of an organization in such fields are the effects of indeterminate social processes of regularization and breaking of coexisting logics. The paper provides insights into how the negotiations among groups of organizational actorsover the process and outcome of institutional change are influenced by asymmetric power relationships yet significantly mediated by their social strategies. The findings reported are from an ethnography of the enactment of institutional changes at a South Korean credit card company following the economic crisis in 1997 and the International Monetary Fund bailout programme.

School-based vocational training has been organised to support students' boundary crossing between school and work. Such training has the potential to engage students in relevant work-oriented schooling. Drawing on theories of boundary connections and symbolic resources, it is argued that school participants define and attribute quality to schoolbased vocational training based on their experiences and expectations of past, present, and future boundaries between school and work contexts. Empirical findings from an ethnographic study conducted at a Danish vocational school illustrate that students and teachers in some cases attribute negative qualities to school-based vocational training, whilst, in other cases, they find it difficult to define the boundaries between school and work, thus questioning the relevance and organisation of schoolbased vocational training in supporting students' boundary crossing between school and work. It is therefore argued that boundaries between school and work practices do not exist per se. Instead, more attention needs to be directed to the negotiations in which particular boundary connections between school and work practices are developed. This may have important consequences for the preparing of students for apprenticeship.