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The paper aims to show how professional identity is constructed at a very early stage of initial management education. In so doing, it questions the notion of le métier in management.

The paper is based on a study of the experiences of six French management apprentices (or apprentis) who participated in a management apprentice programme in 2005. The research methodology is qualitative and illuminates the process of professional identity building. The central question of the study concerns the manager as an individual, an actor, and the link between the individual and his or her métier.

The findings suggest that from their very first immersion into the real world of corporate employment at junior management level, students construct different types of professional identity which can be shown as a 2×2 matrix whose independent axes are the type of acting displayed by the apprentis; and the degree to which the apprentis enacted their roles. This can be interpreted using the coupling system metaphor. Some of these types of professional identity are born of cynicism and disillusion engendered by their experiences.

The research is based on a small number of students drawn from one business school and concentrated in one job function – marketing.

The paper draws attention to the implications of the findings for those in business schools and organisations concerned with the formation of professional identity in young graduates.

The article proposes a new model for the formation of professional identity; and is the first study that deals with the French Apprenti manager programme.

Increasingly, reports of consumers are witnessed expressing their concerns regarding corporate practices through behaviours of boycotting, buycotting and voice. The theory of consumer votes suggests that such consumers may view their purchases as “votes” in the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer voting within competing theories of community.

The study adopts an exploratory approach through semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with a purposive sample of ten ethical consumers.

Findings reveal that consumers adopted a voting metaphor in their approaches to ethical consumption. While choices were mainly individual in nature they were characterised as part of a wider, largely imagined community of like‐minded consumers.

This research is limited to a single country and location and focused on a specific consumer group. Expansion of the research to a wider group would be valuable.

Findings reveal consumers active in registering their discontent towards companies considered to be unethical, while rewarding those considered ethical. This has important implications for marketers interested in appealing to this group. Findings also reveal consumers taking responsibility through marketplace actions for ethical/political issues. This view of consumer votes as being more effective than political votes is pertinent, given reports of a decline in engagement with traditional political participation.

Limited empirical attention has been given to consumption as voting explored within the context of community. However, with reports of a rise in consumer ethical concerns and reports of a search for community in society this suggests that further exploration of this area is worthwhile.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

The mammoth proportions of Public Expenditure, its accountability, its control, must be one of the biggest problems any government has had to meet. Despite all its counselling to the public spenders, its massive efforts to scale down the spending, there is extremely little to show for it. The Departments and State Services have become so large, they have outgrown government control; they are in fact forms of government in themselves. When a body established with a definite role becomes so big and powerful, as many of the authorities in the country have become, they tend to resent any form of control over them. History has many such examples in one form or another. Where an ocean divides them, the subordinate power may seek a separate nationhood for itself, as the American colonies did a couple of centuries or more ago. They chose the right moment to rebel when the home government sought to pass on extra levy on the importation of tea, which the Colonists turned into a slogan “no taxation without representation”. The truth, however, was they had outgrown the mother country and saw themselves as a new nation in a new land immensely rich in natural resources, riches all theirs for the taking. Much of the old country understood their aspirations and in the final settlement, the British were more than generous to them.

This paper aims to understand and document evaluation criteria used in the new product development (NPD) process of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to support the management and control of their NPD projects.

This study combines exploratory and explanatory methodology (case studies) involving five Canadian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are successful in NPD. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with nine selected managers and project managers to explore the process and evaluation criteria used to manage and control NPD projects.

The results highlight that cost, time and quality are key evaluation criteria used by SMEs to make decisions relative to the NPD project's success. Profitability, return on investment, expected sales and customer satisfaction are additional criteria used to evaluate NPD project's success. It has been also found that the SMEs did not consider sustainability issues in the criteria used as their focus are on the needs of stakeholders, mainly customers.

Limitations: The evaluation criteria are extracted from a limited number of SMEs that have successfully carried out NPD projects and may therefore be influenced by some contextual factors. The results cannot be generalized to all SMEs or to all projects, as their characteristics may differ. Implications: This study offers a novel outlook on NPD process in SMEs, by documenting criteria related to constraints in project management. The integration of theory of constraints contributes to increasing theoretical knowledge about the management and control of NPD projects in SMEs. It provides insight into how project managers (and other decision makers) can increase the chances of project success by managing project constraints and criteria.

The evaluation criteria identified in this study can therefore be of use to SMEs managers and project leaders seeking to improve the management and control of their NPD projects. These criteria can help them better manage their limited resources and skills and allocate them to the most promising projects. They can also help them conduct their NPD process more efficiently to achieve the intended objectives, including the desired project profitability targets.

This paper offers new insight and practical implications about evaluation criteria within the stages and activities of the NPD process that needed to be considered by SMEs' managers involved in NPD projects.

This paper gives an account of important aspects of Smith’s methods in An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN). I reinterpret Smith’s distinction between natural and market prices, by focusing on Smith’s account of the causes of the discrepancies of market prices from natural prices. I argue that Smith postulates a “natural course” of events in order to stimulate research into institutions that cause actual events to deviate from it. Smith’s employment of the fiction of a natural price should, thus, not be seen merely as an instance of general or partial equilibrium analysis, but, instead, as part of a theoretical framework that will enable observed deviations from expected regularities to improve his theory. For Smith theory is a research tool that allows for a potentially open-ended process of successive approximation. These are the Newtonian elements in Smith. I provide evidence from Smith’s posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS, 1795), especially “The History of Astronomy” (“Astronomy”), that this accords with Smith’s views on methodology.¹ By way of illumination, Smith’s explanation of the introduction of commerce in Europe is contrasted with that of Hume as presented in “Of Commerce.” I argue that Smith’s treatment is methodologically superior.

This study aims to investigate the heat transfer mechanism of the uniforms used by people working in hot, humid and windy environments. Furthermore, the effectiveness of an opening structure added to the armpit of the uniforms in improving thermal comfort was comparatively examined.

A set of uniforms was tested with the opening at the armpit alternatively zipped or unzipped. Thermal manikin and human tests were performed in a climatic chamber simulating the specific environmental conditions, including wind speeds at four levels (0.15, 0.5, 2, 4 m/s) and relative humidities at two levels (50 and 85%). Static and dynamic thermal insulations of clothing (I_T) were examined by the thermal manikin tests. The human bodies' thermal responses, including heart rates (HR), eardrum temperatures (T_e), skin temperatures (T_sk) and subjective perceptions, were given by the human tests.

Special mechanisms of heat transfer in the specific uniforms used in tropical monsoon climates were revealed. Reductions on I_T were caused by the movement of the human body and the environmental wind, and the empirical equations would underestimate this reduction. The opening at the armpit was able to prompt more heat transfer under dynamic condition, with reducing the I_T by 11.8%, lowering the mean T_sk by 0.92°C, and significantly improving the subjective perceptions (p < 0.05). The heat exhaustion was alleviated with lowering the T_e by 0.32°C.

This study managed to improve the thermal performance of uniforms for workers under unforgiving conditions. The evaluation and design methods introduced by this study provided practical guidance for similar products with strict dress codes and cost control requirements based on the findings from thorough product tests and analysis.