Search results

We have recently seen a growing concern for business ethics and the central role key individuals play in the formative years of a business. Research has shwon that the embedding of personal values are one of the more critical and lasting contributions that a founder can make in an organisation. Research also indicates that in the modern business context, there are few accepted guidelines for moral evaluations in practical business settings. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to explore some of the moral and social elements inherent in entrepreneurship, using the basic tenets expoused by Aristotle. By revisiting the theory of virtue, we find a powerful framework for establishing organisational purpose, habitual excellence, the optimal balance for sustaining these ventures, and the people on whom they depend. For creative business practices, such as entrepreneurship and marketing, a virtue perspective offers a particularly appropriate lens.

Over the last few years, governments, the public and private sectors, and international trading partners, have and are enforcing “ISO certification” and other similar quality standards as a requirement for doing business and often demand ISO 9000 accreditation as a prerequisite in their requests for tenders. There have been related criticisms that businesses are thus sometimes seen to be opportunistic in pursuing certification merely to retain and hopefully increase sales rather than improve quality. This research aims to explore whether certification itself provides some guarantee of performance outcomes, or whether such outcomes are dependent on the way in which the accreditation process is introduced into organizations. The results indicate that certification itself seems to provide little guarantee of effective performance outcomes. Rather, performance outcomes are highly dependent on the strategy for implementation, with high performance outcomes being associated with changes to both transformational and transactional organizational variables.

This chapter provides “viewpoints” on the education of learners with extensive and pervasive support needs. That is, students who require the most support to learn, often categorized as having intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, or related disabilities. The lenses through which we provide these viewpoints are historical and future-oriented; we begin with historic perspectives on the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs, and then provide 21st century viewpoints for these learners. We interpret the notion of viewpoints in two ways: first, consistent with a viewpoint as indicating an examination of objects (in this case, practices and interventions) from a distance so as to be able to compare and judge; and, second, viewpoint as indicating our perspective on said interventions and practice.

People with disabilities have always existed in our communities and societies; however, how we treat them has always been an issue. For example, for a long time, people with physical disabilities received more attention than those with disabilities that we could hardly see (e.g., learning disabilities). Very early research focused on students with sensory impairments and then the focus shifted to students with cognitive impairments. Finally, the focus was on students with learning disabilities and emotional behavioral disorders. Early research with this last group of students focused on comparing students with and without disabilities to document deficits and characteristics of these individuals. Over time, when the characteristics were established, researchers moved their attention to interventions or ways to improve deficits in specific content areas such as reading and mathematics. This chapter is an introduction to the rest of this volume that addresses different viewpoints on interventions for students with different types of disabilities.

Special education in the USA is, in most respects, a 20th century phenomenon and is now governed primarily by federal legislation first enacted in 1975. The federal law in its most recent reauthorization (2004) continues to require a free appropriate public education (FAPE) for all students with disabilities, a full continuum of alternative placements (CAP) ranging from residential or hospital care to inclusion in general education, an individual education plan or program (IEP) for each student identified as needing special education, and placement in the least restrictive environment (LRE) that is thought best for implementing the IEP. Parents must be involved in the special education process. Approximately 14 percent of public school students were identified for special education in 2004–2005, but the number and percentage of students identified in most high-incidence categories as needing special education have declined in recent years (the total for all categories was about 8.5 percent of public school students in 2010). A variety of evidence-based interventions can be used to address the wide range of instructional and behavioral needs of students with disabilities and their families, including transition to further education or work, family services, and teacher education. Special education in the USA may find new sources of support and thrive or may become less common or be abandoned entirely due to criticism and withdrawal of support for social welfare programs of government.

MANY and sundry are the worries which fall to the lot of the librarian, and the matter of book‐repair is not the least among them. The very limited book‐fund at the disposal of most public library authorities makes it imperative on the part of the librarian to keep the books in his charge in circulation as long as possible, and to do this at a comparatively small cost, in spite of poor paper, poor binding, careless repairing, and unqualified assistants. This presents a problem which to some extent can be solved by the establishment of a small bindery or repairing department, under the control of an assistant who understands the technique of bookbinding.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine what it means for students with extensive support needs (ESN) to have opportunities to learn (OTL), why OTL is inexplicably tied to inclusive practices, and the in-school and post-school outcomes when students have OTL. Research will be provided that supports positive in-school and post-school outcomes, when students are provided equitable learning opportunities in inclusive contexts. Given the difference in possible outcomes for students with ESN when they do and do not have OTL, excluding them from general education contexts, where they have the best access to the intended and enacted curricula, is both unethical and limiting to society as a whole.

This paper aims to examine how socially responsible supply management activities, a term labeled purchasing social responsibility (PSR) in the extant literature, affect a firm's costs. There has been much debate, and mixed empirical findings, regarding whether socially responsible behavior on the part of companies improves or reduces firm performance.

A survey methodology and structural equation modeling are used to assess the relationship between PSR and supplier performance, including the mediating role of organizational learning. The theoretical scope is developed through an integration of literature from logistics, corporate social responsibility, the resource‐based view of the firm, and organizational learning.

No direct relationship is found between PSR and costs; however, organizational learning and supplier performance act as key, mediating variables between PSR and costs, with PSR leading to organizational learning, improved supplier performance, and ultimately reduced costs.

The significant mediating roles of organizational learning and supplier performance provide one possible explanation for the past, conflicting findings of studies that have investigated the direct relationship between corporate social responsibility and firm performance.

The findings suggest that PSR not only is the “right thing to do”, but also can lead to significant improvements in supplier performance and costs.

This is the first study to suggest and test the possibility of mediation between social responsibility and firm performance. The research also extends the integration of organizational learning and supply chain management.

It is argued on the basis of ideas from personal construct psychology that people feel attached, or desire strongly to become attached, to particular consumption pathways because they judge that to do otherwise would carry “implications” of a predominantly negative kind with respect to their abilities to make sense of the complex and uncertain world around them. It is noted that information‐processing problems may make it impossible for consumers to compute the overall implications of alternative strategies when market conditions change. Hence they may use simplifying decision procedures which may conflict with the principle of substitution.

This research examines the relative influences of different forms of government on local governments' financial management. Specifically, it seeks to determine whether or not the impact of financial and environmental factors on the unreserved fund balance differs between an administrative form of government, such as the Unit system, and a political form of government, such as the Beat system of county governments in Mississippi. The purpose of this study is to explain further why governments maintain far more savings than are the recommended benchmarks. The findings suggest that savings behave differently under different financial environments. During times of resource abundance, Beat systems increase savings as per capita income, property tax, and other revenues increase. Beat systems decrease savings as the population, debt per capita, and intergovernmental revenues increase. Unit systems, however, increase savings as property tax, intergovernmental and other revenues increase, but decrease savings as per capita income, population, and debt per capita increase. During times of resource scarcity, majority-non-white counties spent savings at a much slower rate than did the majority-white counties.