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Recent studies of bureaucracy and decision making in education using differing methodologies and populations are, the writer claims, pointing to generalizations which are largely supportive of each other. An important question only partly answered is whether the relationships identified as between the bureaucratic variables and situational and personal variables examined are causal. Caution should therefore be exercised in drawing implications for practice. Nevertheless, on the basis of overall consistency in the findings, the writer proposes that moves toward participative management approaches and away from rigid hierarchical organization of schools should lead to positive consequences such as improved supervisor effectiveness, greater teacher satisfaction, a decrease in student alienation, and improved student achievement.

The federal budget process is a compilation of many rules and procedures, enacted primarily over the past century. Initially neutral as to budget outcome, that process, by the mid-1980s, had evolved to emphasize reducing the deficit. And the budget enforcement procedures put in place to control deficits, combined with robust economic growth, helped to produce historic budget surpluses by the end of 1990s. But in 2001, the economy slowed significantly. The budgetary effects of that slowdown, of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and other factors, brought a return of the deficit in 2002--- ironically, just as the budget enforcement framework put in place to control deficits expired. Now, lawmakers face the question of what new framework should take its place. This article discusses the evolution of federal budgeting, emphasizing the major characteristics of each period and what factors drove reform efforts at each stage.

The number of years a person has lived is a poor indicator of their self‐perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. For these reasons, gerontologists have looked to alternative measures of age, including self‐perceived or subjective age. While American researchers have built up a body of knowledge pertaining to self‐perceived age for more than half a century, little is known about the concept in the UK. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the self‐perceived age of a group of UK citizens (n = 356) aged 50‐79 (mean age 60.2 years). Using the cognitive age scale, respondents were asked how old they perceived themselves to be on the dimensions of feel, look, act and interests. Overall, respondents indicated a self‐perceived age of more than 10 years younger than their chronological age. These results suggest that the phenomenon is at least as extensive as in the US, where it is frequently argued that youth is valued over age. Policy and practice implications are discussed.

The internal auditor has an opportunity to play a significant role in the detection and prevention of internal fraud and external fraudulent reporting. This paper examines various methods, including a written company policy, increased audit effectiveness, and active participation with the audit committee, that can be used by the internal auditor to help prevent and detect fraudulent activity.

This article will provide an overview of the national child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) workforce planning programme 2006‐7, which used early implementer sites in each of the eight English regions to produce a specialist CAMHS workforce plan and explores the potential transferable learning from the CAMHS experience to workforce planning across a range of other settings.

This paper focuses on the policy context that led to the development of the New Ways of Working in child and adolescent mental health services (NWW CAMHS) project and the future direction of change that is its legacy. NWW CAMHS represents a merging of policy and practice across what is sometimes a divide between adult and child services. In some aspects, CAMHS had already adopted what became known as a NWW in adult mental health with multidisciplinary teams characterised by dispersed patterns of responsibility and leadership. In other areas, particularly the involvement of service users and carers, CAMHS has been less forward‐thinking. There continues to be a significant workforce challenge for children's services and a risk that innovation and development will not be fully inclusive of the full range of service users' needs. It is important that the lessons learned from the national workforce programme are kept while the usual boundaries to development across services are broken down.

This chapter compares two protected natural parks as specific experiential contexts providing two different experiences for visitors: extraordinary and memorable versus ordinary and mundane (Carù & Cova, 2006, 2007). Each experiential context enables the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) inside each park. A qualitative study collected information to differentiate each protected natural park based on three dimensions: the geophysical environment, the recreational practices, and product and service offer management. A quantitative study analyzed the effect of a specific experiential context through a comparison of actual visitors’ experiences on four dimensions (esthetics, escapism, education, and entertainment) in both countries (500 in each country). Results of the qualitative study show that the Taiwanese park provides an experiential context with more extraordinary and memorable experiences while the French park provides an experiential context with more ordinary and mundane experiences. The results of the quantitative study show the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences inside each park: more immersion through esthetics and escapism in Taiwan and more absorption through education and entertainment in France. Each park manager has to build one’s own positioning and should offer a unique experiential context based on the three dimensions to provide more extraordinary and memorable or more ordinary and mundane experiences. this study highlights the interest of an analysis framework of experiences adapted from Carù and Cova (2006, 2007) and Pine and Gilmore (1999) underlining the link between experiential context and actual experiences.