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As month succeeds month some sort of optimism seems to replace the stoical determination of our people, no less determined indeed in its purpose, but having a brightness somewhat rare until this Spring. There still remains the real War to be fought; it may even have begun for us before these words appear, but somehow our people feel that there is some end discernible to the world outrage. However that may be, since our last issue went to press others of our cities have felt the malevolence of Nazidom. Exeter is indeed more than a cathedral city, the gateway of the West, but York and Bath and Norwich are not conspicuously in the same category. All have been visited with varying devastation, but Exeter from our point of view, suffered as Plymouth did, in that its beautiful central library has completely gone, only a few MSS. having been recovered from its ruins. Thus the two largest libraries of the south‐west have been destroyed.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb017570. When citing the article, please cite: Barry Sutton, (1989), “Procurement and its Role in Corporate Strategy: An Overview of the Wine and Spirit Industry”, International Journal of Wine Marketing, Vol. 1 Iss: 1, pp. 49 - 59.

Procurement can be seen as a key element in any organisational corporate strategy. The development of a procurement strategy is examined, discussing insights gained in the application of such a policy within an international drinks and leisure organisation.

We are negotiating all the time: with customers, suppliers, trade unions, our family ‐ indeed, all with whom we come into contact. In business, in particular, negotiation needs management. There are said to be eight stages in negotiation: prepare, argue, signal, propose, present the package, bargain, close and agree. At the proposal stage one must be clear about what one must achieve, what one intends to achieve, and what one would like to achieve. The approach to constructive and competitive negotiation, the role of consultation, how to cope with deadlock and conflict, cross‐cultural negotiation, and the art of compromise are reviewed. The development and use of teams in negotiation is also an important factor, needing careful assessment. Negotiation will nearly always involve conflict, but steps must be taken to ensure that the participants remain on friendly terms.

FULL CIRCLE? The Danish public library service is one of the most developed systems in the world. From unlimited borrowings of books, loans of records and artworks, to concerts, filmshows and public meetings, the average Danish public library is genuinely a community centre. Danish authors receive a lending right payment for the use of their books in public libraries.

Most readers of this chapter are very familiar with OSSP. The book's basic proposition is that successful companies need to develop consistency among their strategy, the business model they adopt, including the choice of technology, and their organizational capability including human resource practices. The basic framing of the problem in OSSP is not a static analysis of fit but rather the dynamic problem of adaptation. How do organizations adapt to changing environments? Why do adaptive failures occur? These were the starting questions for M&S.

Children’s health and life chances are affected by many factors, with parents and schools holding influential roles. Yet relatively little is known about parental engagement in school-based health education and specifically, from the perspectives of health and education professionals. The purpose of this paper is to examine professionals’ perspectives on parental engagement in school-based health education.

An exploratory qualitative study was conducted with ten health, education and local authority professionals from a socio-economically deprived area in England. Semi-structured interviews explored the role of professionals within the school health curricula, roles that parents played in school health, and barriers and enablers to parental engagement in school health education.

Reported barriers to engagement related to assumptions about parents’ own health behaviours, impacts of funding and inspection regimes, and protected time for health within the school curriculum. Enablers included designated parental support workers based in the school, positive role modelling by other parents, consultation and engagement with parents and a whole school approach to embedding health within the wider curriculum.

Findings from this study suggest the importance of building meaningful partnerships with parents to complement school health education and improve child health outcomes.

This paper addresses an important gap in the research on parental engagement in school-based health education from the perspectives of health and education professionals. Effective partnerships with parents are crucial to the success of school health education.

In the fall of 1989, SilverPlatter and Human Relations Area Files, Inc. began releasing their new series Cross‐Cultural CD, based on a subset of the Human Relations Area Files. The first disk in the anticipated five‐disk series covers the subjects Human Sexuality and Marriage, and represents two of ten proposed topical databases that are scheduled to be released over the next five years. The other eight databases in the series, to be produced on a total of four additional disks, are to be on the following topics: Family, Crime and Social Problems, Old Age, Death and Dying, Childhood and Adolescence, Socialization and Education, Religious Beliefs, and Religious Practices. An annual “volume” of two databases is currently $1,495, and each volume may be purchased separately. The databases will be issued one time only, one every six months, and are not updated. The second disk in each volume replaces the first disk of that volume, and becomes the property of the purchaser.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate institutions of accountability in Zambia in order to understand how social networks may influence such institutions not to discharge their mandates as expected from time to time. The study equally seeks to explore how social networks may perpetuate corrupt activities and compromise the functioning of institutions of accountability.

The conceptual framework adopted in this study draws on insights from social network theory (SNT) and Bourdieu’s ideas of capital to devise a critical lens for investigating network activity and its influence on the functioning of institutions of accountability. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with respondents drawn from different institutions of accountability. Social network analysis was conducted through content analysis.

Research findings highlight the presence of networks of a corrupt nature operating within government structures and some institutions of accountability. Manifested in the form of systemic and familial archetypes, these networks appear to be championed and propelled by senior government officials like controlling officers and other actors of a political nature including ministers and presidents. Most of these corrupt activities are organised through brokerage mechanisms that interface internal and external networks.

Due to the clandestine nature of corruption activities, however, the study was unable to determine measures of centrality and density since these details were not forthcoming during interviews. Such information could only become available if willing individuals involved in corruption could be identified so that they explain who they conduct their corruption with together with the number of connections involved and the most influential individuals in those networks.

This study helps us to understand that activities of a corrupt nature are often undertaken through well-connected groups and networks that make it difficult for institutions of accountability to detect and untangle such activity. The study also suggests that accountants and other accountability actors may have forgotten that accounting is not just a technical discourse for enhancing one’s economic status but is an ethical profession as well. There is a great need to put institutions in place which should hold everyone, including the president and ministers, accountable to the Zambian people in the light of wrongdoing. Dismantling the corrupt network activities inferred from the data entails a complete top-down change in systems of politics, governance, wealth distribution and social values.

This study contributes towards filling the gap of undertaking accounting research of a critical nature focussed on African contexts (Rahaman, 2010). The paper is equally an attempt at providing empirical flesh to Laughlin’s (1991) framework on organisational transformations through complementing that framework with SNT. The study is also among the first to draw on the experiences and insights of actors working within institutions of accountability to highlight accountability challenges within an African context.

This paper examines the effectiveness of the reliance on a leader’s reputation as an informal control tool to mitigate subordinates’ budgetary slack. In addition, it seeks to explain whether this relationship is mediated by subordinates’ truthfulness in revealing their private information.

A laboratory experiment was conducted involving 60 undergraduate business students who participated in the experiment. A 1 × 2 between-subjects design was employed for the experimental study. Each subject assumed the role of a production manager responsible for setting a budget target. The experimental task employed involved a simple decoding task adapted from Chow (1983).

The results of this study indicate that budgetary slack is lower when a leader’s reputation is favourable than when it is unfavourable. In addition, it is found that subordinates’ truthfulness in revealing private information fully mediates the relationship between a leader’s reputation and budgetary slack.

This paper extends the limited literature on the reliance of informal controls in mitigating budgetary slack by examining a leader’s reputation as an informal control. The findings of this study provide important implications for the design of effective management control systems.