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AFTER 17 years continuous service as a LA Council member it seemed strange to me to attend the first council meeting of 1979 as NLW'S reporter.

Examines the history of branded characters in children’s marketing; these go back to the Michelin Man in 1898, and include the Robinson Golly and the Jolly Green Giant. Shows how reliance on these characters diminished with television advertising, which allowed animated stories to carry the brand, rather than mere static poster and press characters; some of the characters have now been pensioned off. Outlines three stages of child development related to brand characters, followed by the different form of commercial character usage: licensed product (the character is the brand), brand spokespeople like Tony the Tiger, characters associated with the brand over time (like the Dulux dog), borrowed equity using entertainment characters, and pack design with character visuals. Warns that increased sophistication of children with respect to brands and advertising means that character brands can alienate older children if they are perceived as too childlike.

Focuses on the approach to interpreting earnings equality found in the writings of a variety of economists and in particular, technological change and its effects on the demand skill resulting in earning inequality. Argues that the evidence in favour of the technological effect is weak and presents some alternatives for further consideration.

This chapter examines the involvement of finance companies in the purchasing and leasing of Australian farmlands. This is a new global phenomenon as, in past decades, finance companies have lent money to farmers, but have rarely sought to purchase land themselves. We investigate and discuss the activities of the Hancock company – an asset management firm that invested in farmland in northern NSW. Material on the activities of Hancock and other investment firms were obtained from documents on the public record, including newspaper reports. Semi-structured interviews with community members were conducted in the region of NSW where Hancock operated. Australian agriculture is being targeted for investment by companies in the finance industry – as part of a growing ‘financialization’ of farming. While it is financially beneficial for companies to invest, they do not do so in ‘empty spaces’ but in locations where people desire to live in a healthy environment. The Hancock company was criticized by community residents for failing to recognize the concerns of local people in pursuing its farming activities. To date, there have been few studies on the financialization of farming in Australia. By investigating the operations of the Hancock company we identify a number of concerns emerging, at the community level, about an overseas company running Australian-based farms.

The purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of the “HRM process” as defined by Bowen and Ostroff (2004). The authors clarify the construct of “HRM philosophy” and suggest it is communicated to employees through “HRM messages”. Interrelationships between these concepts and other elements of the HRM-performance relationship are explored. The study identifies commonalities in the HRM philosophy and messages underscoring high-performing HRM systems, and highlights the function of a “messenger” in delivering messages to staff.

Case study of eight Australian hospitals with top performing HRM systems. Combines primary interview data with independent healthcare accreditor reports.

All cases share an HRM philosophy of achieving high-performance outcomes through the HRM system and employees are provided with messages about continuous improvement, best practice and innovation. The philosophy was instilled primarily by executive-level managers, whereby distinctiveness, consensus and consistency of communications were important characteristics.

The research is limited by: omission of low or average performers; a single industry and country design; and exclusion of employee perspectives.

The findings reinforce the importance of identifying the HRM philosophy and its key communicators within the organisation, and ensuring it is aligned with strategy, climate and the HRM system, particularly during periods of organisational change.

The authors expand Bowen and Ostroff’s seminal work and develop the concepts of HRM philosophy and messages, offering the model to clarify key relationships. The findings underscore problems associated with a best practice approach that disregards HRM process elements essential for optimising performance.

This paper studies the profit efficiency of a sample of large U.S. commercial banks and explores how this performance varies with selected measures of bank risk reflecting aspects of credit risk, liquidity risk, and insolvency risk. We use a standard profit function and the stochastic frontier approach, and compare two standard functional forms – Cobb‐Douglas and translog – to assess the tradeoff between precision and parsimony. We find that profit efficiency is sensitive to credit risk and insolvency risk but not to liquidity risk or to the mix of loan products.

For many years within Organization Studies, broadly conceived, there was general agreement concerning the pitfalls of assuming a ‘one best way of organizing’. Organizations, it was argued, must balance different criteria of (e)valuation against one another – for example ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’ – depending on the situation at hand. However, in recent years a pre-commitment to values of a certain sort – expressed in a preference for innovation, improvisation and entrepreneurship over other criteria – has emerged within the field, thus shifting the terms of debate concerning organizational survival and flourishing firmly onto the terrain of ‘exploration’. This shift has been accompanied by the return of what we describe as a ‘metaphysical stance’ within Organization Studies. In this article we highlight some of the problems attendant upon the return of metaphysics to the field of organizational analysis, and the peculiar re-emergence of a ‘one best way of organizing’ that it engenders. In so doing, we re-visit two classic examples of what we describe as ‘the empirical stance’ within organization theory – the work of Wilfred Brown on bureaucratic hierarchy, on the one hand, and that of Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on integration and differentiation, on the other – in order to highlight the continuing importance of March's argument that any organization is a balancing act between different and non-reducible criteria of (e)valuation. We conclude that the proper balance is not something that can be theoretically deduced or metaphysically framed, but should be based on a concrete description of the situation at hand.

The chapter considers the change of position of the Home Office on the value of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in England and Wales which took place around 2003 after the end of the Crime Reduction Programme (CRP). Before the CRP Home Office researchers had shown little interest in RCTs; after it, they came close to arguing that no other kinds of evaluation research were worth doing. This represented a reversal of a position that had dominated Home Office thinking on the issue for almost 30 years – that RCTs were in general impractical and unlikely to produce clear-cut results. This view was based in part on the experience of RCTs in the 1970s, which led influential researchers to conclude that the method could not be transferred from medicine to criminal justice. But, disappointed with the lack of definite results from the CRP, the Home Office turned back to RCTs as a potential source of certainty about what works. The chapter considers two recent scholarly exchanges on the question, in relation to an evaluation of a community crime reduction programme, for which an experimental design was attempted but not achieved, and to Lawrence Sherman's recent advocacy of RCTs and his use of research on restorative justice as an example of the successful use of the method. The chapter argues that the restorative justice research, while of very high quality, does not provide as clear an example of the use of an RCT as Sherman claims, and concludes with some reflections on the inherent difficulties of criminal justice evaluation, and on the lack of a predictable, rational relationship between research quality and policy influence.

The object of all teachers of nutrition is to help students to bridge the gap which produces the dichotomy between what they should eat and what they do eat. Nutrition can be an unrealistic subject to learn. Evidence of the result of bad eating habits is slow to show and therefore remote and the subversive influences of temptation, laziness, boredom, poverty and the like, are on the other hand totally realistic. If students can become conscious of the fact that what they put into their mouths is their responsibility and if possible gain an interest in the interaction between different nutrients and the effect upon the body, then reason might win over instinct in helping them towards better eating habits.