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In this chapter, I suggest three conceptual tools developed by William R. Freudenburg and colleagues that characterize the failure of institutions to carry out their duties – recreancy, atrophy of vigilance, and bureaucratic slippage – are of use beyond environmental sociology in the framing of the September 11, 2001 disaster. Using testimony and findings from primary materials such as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Joint Inquiry hearings and report (2002, 2004a, 2004b) and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004) alongside insider accounts, I discuss how Freudenburg’s tools have the potential to theorize institutional failures that occur in national security decision making. I also suggest these tools may be of particular interest to the U.S. intelligence community in its own investigation of various types of risk and failures.

Reviews the small firm training field, focusing specifically on exporting. Reports on an action learning programme devised by the University of Ulster which sought to prepare small business owners for a United States trade mission under the Young Exporters Trade Mission Scheme (YETM). Discusses mission gains and evaluates the initiative.

The purpose of this paper is to report on how the University sector in the UK has undertaken a massive transformation over recent years, resulting in a current mass market. Institutions (and their managers) are facing enormous challenges to establish competitive advantages whilst attending to customer need and focus. A smarter, cost‐effective, lean teaching and learning environment needs to evolve in order for UK universities to compete in a flatter global educational market place.

Adopting an action research methodology the paper seeks to analyze how much‐hyped Web 2.0, which moves away from static “read only” web sites to those which are “read‐write” and interactive and are clearly here to stay. An eclectic mix of multi‐media technology and social networking, blogs, Wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, social software, broadband and megalithic search engines are changing the way people live – and learn.

This paper considers and highlights opportunities for increasing operational efficiency, from a personal perspective, based on a blended approach to technology enhanced learning by creating a 24/7 learning environment for the Google‐eyed YouTube generation. The challenges of teaching large groups of students from a very diverse range of backgrounds and abilities are also discussed.

This article balances interests in the immense potential of Web 2.0 in teaching and learning, with concern for the limitations of the technology.

Whitehead's notion that if you say something for long enough, it will be believed, aptly describes the development of the latest corporate governance regimes. Curbing managerial opportunism is the current focus, but the regimes contain only more of what has failed in the past. Inexplicably, at a time when reformers are declaring their allegiance to principles over rules, long-standing principles are being by-passed and more rules imposed. Whereas much of what the rules address is contestable, the frequency with which it is proclaimed has been seductive – it is being accepted as if it were true, not by virtue of either convincing evidence or argument, but through the power of repetition. Stock options in executives remuneration packages are to be expensed, not because they satisfy expensing criteria, but because of the penetration of the mantra that they are expenses; independence is being accepted as the consequence of not being in particular relationships, not because that will change one's state of mind, so much as it will appear likely to have done so; and impairment calculations are being declared superior to conventional amortization techniques, not because of any demonstration that they better indicate the decrease in the market price of a physical asset, but because of the repetition of the impairment litany. Corporate governance is being perceived as a set of processes, rules to be complied with, rather than the desired outcome of them – that is, the authority exercised with probity and unquestionable integrity over corporations’ affairs, for the public good. There is a less than clear explanation of whether or how the separate governance processes mesh with one another. The governance miasma confuses rather than clarifies corporate activity. Underpinnings of the mechanisms in the governance regimes have achieved a false status of concreteness. Contrary to the universal indoctrination, the case is stronger for fewer, rather than more, governance rules.

This article focuses on the need for universities, as teaching and research organisations, to recognise and act upon a more culturally inclusive interpretation of “sustainable development” and “sustainability”. It argues for the valuing of indigenous worldviews as a means of achieving a more holistic and interdisciplinary way of thinking about the Earth as the home of all people and as a complement to the beliefs of Western science and rational objective thinking. At a more personal level, it challenges readers, especially academics, to re‐examine their own ways of thinking and knowing for the sake of creating sustainable futures that are inclusive in its processes, contexts and outcomes.

As biomedicine becomes increasingly enmeshed in modern life, biomedicalization processes have implications for reproductive policy, including abortion policy. Informed consent provisions have been a prominent trend in state-level abortion lawmaking in the United States in recent years. Modeled on the practice of securing informed consent for medical procedures, informed consent provisions stipulate the information a person must receive before they can consent to an abortion. Informed consent provisions purportedly require that this information be objective, scientifically accurate, and non-judgmental. Through an analysis of informed consent provisions in Texas abortion legislation from 1993 to 2015, this chapter explores how such provisions employ medical and biomedical tropes to frame regulations that restrict access to abortion care as ostensibly protecting women’s health and safety. I find that informed consent legislation in Texas selectively borrows from medical and biomedical lexicons, cites strategic empirical evidence, and co-opts medical techniques and experts in ways that encumber abortion access.

The government published its long awaited Wages Bill on 31st January 1986. Amongst its more important aims it proposes to make fundamental changes to the wages council system the long term effect of which will result in the eventual abolition of wages councils. At this stage however the proposal has fallen short of total abolition of wages councils; it proposes to simplify the law relating to payment of wages and to repeal a significant amount of connected but archaic legislation; it aims at de‐regulating the field of wage payment by repealing some thirteen Acts, twenty Orders and parts of legislation; and finally the proposals aim at abolishing payment of redundancy rebates to all employers with ten or more employees. The raison d'etre of this proposed legislation is, in the words of Kenneth Clarke, when introducing the Bill “….to creat new job opportunities, particularly for young people …. remove out of date restrictions that restrain the ability of businesses to develop and to offer new jobs. The law on wages that we are replacing goes back to Victorian and Edwardian times and reflects historical social conditions. This Bill will make it easier to employ people under modern conditions and will remove the over‐regulation and rigidity of the present system.”

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.