1 football program on a university campus: an application of collaborative action research in higher education" by Greene, O'Neill and Lhotksy. This work focusses on collaborative action-based research, centred on a university-based football programme, and showcases the positive impact that the collaboration had on its various stakeholders: the university's sport management faculty, the athletic department and the sport management students. During the action research process, these stakeholders

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... moved through a cyclical process of reflection, planning, action and evaluation. Through the action-based process that was utilised, all stakeholders were able to learn, adapt, participate and make positive changes. The athletic department made positive changes within their marketing strategy, their game-day operations, the opportunities available for sport management students to participate and learn and the development of their relationship with the sports management faculty. The study initially aimed to capture fan information surrounding a new football programme, however, the stakeholders quickly realised that the action-based research study had more to offer than simply producing marketing reports for the university athletic department. Inclusion of the students as equal stakeholders in the project has proved vital to student learning and involvement. The students play an important role within each cycle of the project and the consequence of this is that additional networking outside the classroom with potential employers occurs, as well as in-depth discussions and involvement in the classroom when synthesising and disseminating the gathered marketing information. The collaboration between two separate departments within a higher education institution proved vital to the overall success of this research project and this paper aims to provide a practical approach to collaboration among individuals working in different departments of an organisation, as the findings from this research reveal that the overall success of the project was only possible through collaborating and joining up resources, abilities, areas of expertise and capabilities. The issue's second paper, "Organizational commitment: an empirical analysis of personality traits" by Farrukh, Ying and Mansori, investigates the impact of the five-factor model of personality on the organisational commitment of higher educational institutions in Pakistan and adopts quantitative methodologies to measure this impact. The tools used include a structured questionnaire, e-mailed to the faculty members of the social science department of higher education institutes, with software used to interrogate the resultant data. The findings include indications that extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness are positively linked to affective commitment. The research results have implications for the personality and commitment literature, for example, they provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the dispositional basis of organisational commitment, notably, that the "Big Five" personality traits, as a whole, are significantly associated with organisational commitment.