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This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the comparative strengths and weaknesses of leading third‐party logistics providers (3PLs) in the USA with respect to their financial efficiencies during the period of 2005‐2007. It also intends to identify various factors that significantly affect the financial efficiency of the 3PLs over time and propose ways to improve the competitiveness of 3PLs.

This paper proposes data envelopment analysis to measure the financial efficiency of 12 leading 3PLs in the USA, relative to their key competitors. In particular, this paper develops the Charnes, Cooper, and Rhodes (CCR) model that is designed to derive weights without being fixed in advance. It also employes the Banker, Charnes, and Cooper (BCC) model to mitigate the impact of 3PL sizes on the 3PLs' financial efficiency.

The rapid expansion of the business scope can undermine the financial efficiency of 3PLs due to huge start‐up investments. In particular, business expansion through mergers and acquisitions can hurt the financial efficiency of 3PLs due to restructuring and re‐branding costs. The non‐asset based 3PLs have the less financial burden than their asset‐based counterparts due to their limited investment in assets. But, the asset‐based 3PLs such as J.B. Hunt can still overcome such a burden by streamlining their logistics services and focusing on their niche areas.

This paper primarily uses financial measures as the major output. Thus, it can be extended to include some non‐financial measures. Owing to the difficulty in finding some secondary data sources about the 3PL industry, only 12 leading 3PLs are compared to each other with respect to their relative financial efficiency.

This paper provides several practical guidelines as to how 3PLs can cope with increasing competition, cost pressures, and changing business environments and what the future holds for the maturing 3PL industry.

This paper reveals the current weaknesses of the leading 3PLs and identifies challenges and opportunities for the 3PL market in the USA. In addition, it helps 3PLs formulate the future survival and growth strategies by providing the detailed picture of where they stand in terms of competitiveness. In so doing, this paper identifies important sources of 3PLs' financial inefficiencies, while uncovering the secret behind the improvement of their financial efficiencies.

We present a comprehensive literature review and critique of union decertification research, and develop a theoretical framework that should prove useful for future research. The framework incorporates three theoretical viewpoints from several research traditions: the expected utility, social‐political, and workplace voice perspectives. We provide suggestions for how each viewpoint can be modeled in future research. Additionally, although some previous decertification research was theoretically rich, the empirical findings across prior studies were ambiguous and inconsistent. We analyze the reasons for the ambiguous and inconsistent prior findings, and note how future research can avoid or minimize the empirical problems of the past.

Meat consumption is higher than health recommendations, but little is known about potential moderating factors in rural areas. Informed by the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), this paper explored potential moderators amongst rural residents.

The authors summarized meat-related attitudes (importance, taste preference, healthfulness perceptions), social norms, controls (availability, affordability, self-efficacy) and frequency of consumption (overall, lean meat, wild game) in a cross-sectional survey of rural, adult, US volunteers (n = 572). The authors examined correlations and differences by gender, connection to hunting and to livestock raising.

These rural residents had positive attitudes toward meat, high family expectations to consume meat and daily consumption. Half of the meat consumed was lean but was infrequently wild game. Respondents with connections to hunting or raising livestock reported more positive meat-related attitudes, norms and self-efficacy, and more frequent meat consumption. Those with a connection to hunting also had higher perceived availability, affordability and consumption of wild game.

Strong meat preferences and expectations may hamper moderation amongst rural residents, particularly in households connected to hunting or raising livestock. Dietary advice can be tailored to respect meat consumption, emphasize the identification and selection of lean meats and highlight wild game as a lean meat that is moderately available and affordable. Future research should disentangle hunting and livestock raising as potential factors in food choice and examine wild game consumption in jurisdictions where it can be sold legally.

This study was novel in examining meat-related practices amongst rural residents, separately examining lean meats and wild game, and identifying hunting and livestock raising as important predictors.

EVERY now and again, one of the solemn monthly or quarterly magazines, by way of enlivening its pages, inserts a terrific onslaught on municipal libraries, in which the judgment of heaven is called down upon the fiction reader, and the library authorities are condemned as a set of ignorant and inefficient office‐holders, who pander to a depraved public taste. The last assailant of this sort whom we had the pleasure of setting right was Mr. J. Churton Collins, who used the Nineteenth Century and After, as the medium for conveying his accusations. Now comes Mr. W. H. Harwood, who fills six‐and‐a‐half pages of the Westminster Review for February, 1906, with a quantum of twaddle about libraries, which differs from most recent articles of the same sort only in its dulness. In his use of this journalistic cliché, Mr. Harwood displays the customary ignorance of the Public Libraries Acts, by styling his paper “Free Libraries and Fiction,” and by his failure to prove even one of his statements by reference to a single concrete fact. Briefly, Mr. Harwood's position is this:—

Events, conventions and other meetings are one of the fastest growing sectors within the tourism industry. For many destinations events provide a large number of tourists and a high public exposure through an extensive media coverage. This paper draws its focus on the image of an event and its influence on the image of a destination. The results show that an event has an influence on a traveller's image of the destination, most notably for travellers living close to the destination. It is also shown that the image of those travellers who have a prior experience with the destination are less affected by the event. The results can be used by destination managers to improve the image benefit of events through a better selection of events and to improve the competitive position of the destination by a selective communication of the positive aspects of the event to particular target groups.

This empirical study examined links between entrepreneurial personality traits and perception of new venture opportunity in a sample of 207 respondents. Four entrepreneurial personality traits were included to predict respondents℉ perception of new venture opportunity. They are (1) achievement motivation, (2) locus of control, (3) risk propensity, and (4) proactivity.The results of multiple regression analysis show that three of the four entrepreneurial personality traits‐locus of control, risk propensity, and proactivity‐related significantly to perception of new venture opportunity in expected directions. Among the three personality traits, proactivity was found to have the strongest influence over entrepreneurial perception. No significant relationship was found between achievement motivation and perception of new venture opportunity. Among six control variables, only work experience was found to influence perception of new venture opportunity. This study explored links between entrepreneurial personalities and cognition and its results suggest that a combination of trait and cognition approaches contributes to a better understanding of entrepreneurial decision-making process. Both theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Factors influential in directing Turkish manufacturers to exporting are discussed. The research shows that the majority of these companies started exports due to unexpected orders and entered this field as a result of domestic economic factors. For most of these companies, the domestic market preserves its significance. Therefore, a different marketing strategy is not implemented for exports. However, as size and export volume increase, a change in attitudes is observed, supporting the findings of previous empirical studies that involvement in export marketing is a sequential and gradual process.

Turbomachinery, including pumps, are mainly designed to extract/produce energy from/to the flow. A major challenge in the numerical simulation of turbomachinery is the inlet flow rate, which is routinely treated as a known boundary condition for simulation purposes but is properly a dependent output of the solution. As a consequence, the results from numerical simulations may be erroneous due to the incorrect specification of the discharge flow rate. Moreover, the transient behavior of the pumps in their initial states of startup and final states of shutoff phases has not been studied numerically. This paper aims to develop a coupled procedure for calculating the transient inlet flow rate as a part of the solution via application of the control volume method for linear momentum. Large eddy simulation of a four-blade axial hydraulic pump is carried out to calculate the forces at every time step. The sharp interface immersed boundary method is used to resolve the flow around the complex geometry of the propeller, stator and the pipe casing. The effect of the spurious pressure fluctuations, inherent in the sharp interface immersed boundary method, is damped by local time-averaging of the forces. The developed code is validated by comparing the steady-state volumetric flow rate with the experimental data provided by the pump manufacturer. The instantaneous and time-averaged flow fields are also studied to reveal the flow pattern and turbulence characteristics in the pump flow field.

The authors use control volume analysis for linear momentum to simulate the discharge rate as part of the solution in a large eddy simulation of an axial hydraulic pump. The linear momentum balance equation is used to update the inlet flow rate. The sharp interface immersed boundary method with dynamic Smagorinsky sub-grid stress model and a proper wall model is used.

The steady-state volumetric flow rate has been computed and validated by comparing to the flow rate specified by the manufacturer at the simulation conditions, which shows a promising result. The instantaneous and time averaged flow fields are also studied to reveal the flow pattern and turbulence characteristics in the pump flow field.

An approach is proposed for computing the volumetric flow rate as a coupled part of the flow solution, enabling the simulation of turbomachinery at all phases, including the startup/shutdown phase. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first large eddy simulation of a hydraulic pump to calculate the transient inlet flow rate as a part of the solution rather than specifying it as a fixed boundary condition. The method serves as a numerical framework for simulating problems incorporating complex shapes with moving/stationary parts at all regimes including the transient start-up and shut-down phases.

This paper aims to improve performance prediction and to acquire more detailed flow structures so as to analyze the turbulence in complex rotor-stator flow.

Hydraulic retarder as typical fluid machinery was numerically investigated by using hybrid Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS)/large eddy simulation (LES) models CIDDES Algebraic Wall-Modeled Large Eddy Simulation (LES) (WMLES) S-Ω and dynamic hybrid RANS/LES (DHRL). The prediction results were compared and analyzed with a RANS model shear stress transport (SST) k-omega which was a recommended choice in engineering.

The numerical results were verified by experiment and indicated that the predicted values for three hybrid turbulence models were more accurate. Then, the transient flow field was further analyzed visually in terms of turbulence statistics, Reynolds number, pressure-streamline, vortex structure and eddy viscosity ratio. The results indicated that HRL approaches could capture unsteady flow phenomena.

This study achieves both in performance prediction improvement and better flow mechanism understanding. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) could be used instead of flow visualization to a certain extent. The improved CFD method, the fine computational grid and the reasonable simulation settings jointly enhance the application of CFD in the rotor-stator flow.

The improvement was quite encouraging compared with the reported literatures, contributing to the CFD playing a more important role in the flow machinery. DHRL provided the detailed explanation of flow transport between rotor and stator, which was not reported before. Through it, the flow mechanism can be better understood.