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Tesco's distribution operation exceeds 2 million sq feet of warehousing and employs over 1,500 people. It has a vehicle fleet consisting of 250 commercial vehicles and 600 trailers. The direct cost of this operation exceeds £30m a year and moves a total of 125m cases each year. In this paper David Kirkwood looks at the radical changes in the retail sector which have taken place in the past ten years, and hazards some guesses as to what will happen in the next decade. Against this background he outlines “the Tesco review” — the changes which Tesco found it necessary to make to its distribution operation. David Kirkwood was speaking at a conference entitled “Towards excellence in distribution management”, jointly presented by the Institute of Physical Distribution Management and the Centre for Physical Distribution Management. This is a slightly abridged version of his paper.

This paper asks the question, “What is the appropriate management value system for commerce in the increasingly complex global marketplace?” We argue that the current management orthodoxy is deficient in dealing with the challenges brought about by the growing number and increased cultural diversity of economic transactions in this new environment. As the justification for the current system is so frequently based on Adam Smith’s writing in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, we compare the current ideology of organizational life with that proposed in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In so doing, we argue that a form of international commerce based on Smith’s concept of “sympathy”, the innate need for each individual to care for others, is better suited to building the conditions necessary for human flourishing than is the existing value base. We propose an important initial step toward achieving a more sympathetic capitalism, the “No‐Harm Proviso”, and briefly speculate on its implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how Kirkwood Community College uses a learning outcomes information system (eLumen Achievement) in any wireless or even nonwireless setting to directly improve student learning by evaluating student performance and providing feedback in real time.

The paper describes how, unlike more conventional users of eLumen Achievement, Kirkwood Community College chose both to engage students in outcomes assessment and to take advantage of the latest technologies.

The paper finds that both instructors and students are pleased with the new practice.

The authors believe that Kirkwood Community College is the first college in the country to combine the use of a generic learning outcomes information system with wireless tablet PCs to capture and communicate data on student performance evaluation in real time.

This paper delineates workplace and work based learning before going on to discuss in detail the application of workplace learning, based on experience gained from a number of case studies. The rationale, operational aspects and quality assurance requirements are described, before attention is turned to delivery methods, project management and financial considerations. The paper identifies the problems and opportunities associated with adopting this form of academic delivery for an existing university programme, and provides suggestions for likely future development.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Implementation is a key process in the effective development of Advanced Manufacturing Systems. Specifically, implementation should not be confused with installation of the technology for it involves change in companies on a much wider front than mere technological change. Change has to be pursued, not only in terms of technology, but also in terms of the associated organisational and business dimensions. Failure to do this can severely limit the impact and success of the application to the business in question. These three dimensions constitute conceptually different aspects of the technological innovation process, and in developing a normative implementation methodology for Advanced Manufacturing Systems drawn partly from extensive empirical work in manufacturing companies, it is useful to represent these as three orthogonal dimensions from which at least eight logical positions can be explored. An argument is presented therefore for the development of a strategy containing all three dimensions considered in the order: business first, technology and organisation afterwards, which aims to bring about radical change on a wide variety of fronts to support the effective implementation of Advanced Manufacturing Systems.

Increased longevity is the success story of 20th‐century biomedicine, together with improvements in general living conditions, but it brings great challenges. Although many individuals do undergo what might be termed ‘successful ageing’, this is not a universal experience, for with older age comes a range of age‐related diseases and degenerations that can diminish, if not destroy, quality of life for some older individuals. Biogerontology is the study of the biology of ageing, a normal process but one that has the potential to contribute to age‐related disease. Its goal is to extend the proportion of a life that is healthy, an outcome that is desirable both at an individual and a societal level. One of the great insights from the last decade or more of biogerontology is the realisation that the ageing process is not a fixed, unchangeable process. Rather, it is controlled by genes and is open to experimental interventions that extend healthy lifespan, in species from microbes to mice. These findings have produced a sea change in the way the biogerontological community views ageing: not as a fixed, ‘inevitable’ process, but one where rates of ageing vary enormously according to genotype, and can be readily changed by interventions. This makes the biological process of ageing an attractive target both to understand, and target, age‐related conditions.

Climate change is a global issue with far-reaching environmental, social and economic consequences. As more people become aware of these consequences, pressure is mounting on governments and businesses to implement ambitious and required climate mitigation and adaptation plans to reduce and finally stop making the climate crisis worse. One of these strategies is just transition, which is defined as the call for climate transformation that prioritises the social and environmental needs of workers and vulnerable groups, especially in the context of transitioning away from fossil fuels, while leaving no one behind. This chapter first provides an overview of just transition through a review of the literature and bibliometric analysis. Then, it discusses just transition in policymaking, comprising reactive, proactive and transformational just transition approaches. This is followed by a discussion on barriers to just transition. Finally, the chapter offers a practical example of transformational just transition approach by reporting some preliminary findings from a case study in the coal mining town of Collie on Wilman Boodja, Western Australia.

In many countries concerns have been expressed about the merits of educational research. This paper reports on the outcomes of a review of reviews of such research in Australia and the UK. Taken at face value, the latest round of reviews are largely critical in the UK (where they have generated much debate) and mainly favourable in Australia (where they have not). In accounting for this difference the paper suggests that it might be explained in part as a function of how the reviews were conducted. In the UK reviews have tended to begin with the research and work forward to practice whereas in Australia they have been inclined to begin with practice and work back to the research. It is suggested that policy makers, practitioners and researchers in Australia and the UK have much to learn from each other's experience, as have those in other countries planning similar reviews.