Search results

Changes in legislation, congestion problems and the continuing drive to improve supply chain profitability are being addressed by new technologies. The part of the logistics cycle that is now the focus of attention is supply chain traceability, particularly the tracking and traceability of transport, personnel and goods. The new technologies that are being brought to bear on supply chain traceability include, Mobile Data, Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVL), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), consignment tracking, etc. These technologies have now reached maturity in their technical development and are being effectively incorporated into business processes. Provides an overview of the technical status and future prospects of these technological developments and argues the business case for and against traceability. Also assesses the key market sectors in which these technologies will have an impact and suggests that a “building bricks” approach is taken to incorporating the technologies into re‐engineered business processes.

One of the leading indicators of the quality of human life is health and access to medical care. Increasing social concern over the problems of health has resulted in various nationwide proposals like medicare and medicaid. At present, many bills are pending before the United States Congress for the creation of a comprehensive national health insurance scheme. One result of this public awareness is the demand in many libraries for information on the various aspects of the health care industry in general and in particular, on health legislation, resources and facilities, prices and costs and insurance. The following survey aims to examine certain leading publications which provide statistical and other types of information in this area. Excluded from this survey are sources dealing specifically with clinical aspects of drugs and medicine. Moreover, additional and uptodate information on the specific topics discussed below can be obtained by consulting subject indexes like the Hospital Literature Index and the Insurance Periodicals Index.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes, knowledge and beliefs regarding female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) of six groups of immigrant men from countries where FGM/C is practiced and to identify their role in the decision-making process of circumcising their daughters.

The study took the form of qualitative action research with seven focus groups of 50 men coming from Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Benin, Egypt and Nigeria, living in Florence, Italy.

Different conceptions, cultures and attitudes about FGM/C exist among men coming from different countries, but also within the same community. The participants expressed positions both in favor and against the maintenance of the practice. There were opposite beliefs about the religious motivations invoked.

The study is qualitative and the non-probability sample and the small number of participants are important limitations.

The study improves current knowledge on men’s role and attitude in FGM/C and gives important information for the prevention of future activities that could include both men and women of the community.

The need to involve men in preventive actions against FGM/C has been underlined by the World Health Organization. The involvement of men and leaders of the communities could facilitate cultural changes toward the abandoning of these practices. FGM/C is often considered as a phenomenon concerning only women, who are frequently left alone to face the decision of whether to abandon the ritual.

The great advantage of conducting such a study in a country of migration is the presence of different communities, with different cultural views, in the same area.

Conventional wisdom holds that the art of dance is strictly and in all its aspects a phenomenon of the moment, something adequately captured by pictorial means only, and not by the written word. Reading and writing are thought to have little or nothing to do with the ephemeral magic of the art of dance. This attitude has its roots in a time before film and video technologies made more possible the vivid preservation of choreography; it also has its roots in a time before the importance of preserving our unique modern dance heritage became fully evident.

The authors' research was carried out with the aim of analyzing perception of luxury and luxury brands among an international sample of young people.

This article was based on an empirical study among 233 respondents. First, a qualitative analysis of content using the respondents' own words was conducted. Then, to show whether there are differences between countries and significant groups of countries, an analysis of variance (one‐way ANOVA) was performed and analyzed with Fisher F‐test and post‐hoc Duncan tests.

Beyond the belief in the existence of two stable groups of developed and developing countries with regard to luxury, this study shows a situation that requires further analysis. The main results show some strong cross‐cultural differences in the perception of luxury, which is multi‐faceted as demonstrated by previous studies in this field.

Results of this exploratory study confirm that the concept of luxury presents multiple facets, and the authors' analysis provides an in‐depth survey of the main categories and attributes that can be used to describe this concept. Although this study was only exploratory in nature, a number of comments can be made to highlight the congruence between the concept of luxury for young people and recent academic literature.

To maintain their brand equity, companies in the luxury sector seek to improve their image within younger targets. Managerial implications of the authors' research indicate that international luxury companies should take into consideration the multi‐faceted concept of luxury in general, but also the main differences between countries in the continuum between the “status” and “emotional” dimensions of luxury. According to the authors' research, luxury companies cannot adopt a global strategy when addressing the six countries analyzed. Some managerial recommendations are developed in this perspective.

The additional value of this article stems from its reliance on a cross‐cultural in‐depth study between six countries (Italy, France, Germany, China, Japan, and USA). The balance between qualitative and quantitative techniques makes this article particularly relevant when drawing both conceptual and managerial conclusions.

An analysis of community health, its history, successes and failures, depends on an understanding of its scope, but there is little consensus as to precisely what the discipline entails. Some view it as a strict scientific discipline, others see it as a social movement, and still others conceive of it as a conglomerate of various disciplines. It is useful initially to identify the medical components of community health, and then to approach its interdisciplinary aspects. Community health, strictly defined, includes such fields as disease control, environmental sanitation, maternal and child care, dental health, nutrition, school health, geriatrics, occupational health, and the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse. This limited definition, though accurate, does not differentiate the field from the much older area of public health. Within community health, the disease focus of traditional public health epidemiology, the total health focus of community medicine, and the outcome focus of health services research are interconnected. Community health combines the public health concern for health issues of defined populations with the preventive therapeutic approach of clinical medicine. An emphasis on personal health care is the result of this combination. Robert Kane describes the field accurately and succinctly: “We envision community medicine as a general organizational framework which draws upon a number of disciplines for its tools. In this sense, it is an applied discipline which adopts the knowledge and skills of other areas in its effort to solve community health problems. The tools described here include community diagnosis (which draws upon such diverse fields as sociology, political science, economics, biostatistics, and epidemiology), epidemiology itself, and health services research (the application of epidemiologic techniques on analyzing the effects of medical care on health).”

The purpose of this study is to examine the acute toxicity and antidiabetic activity of Asystacia gangetica leaf ethanol extract.

The study was designed as completely randomized in vivo experimental model. Where acute toxicity study was carried out using 30 albino mice, randomly assigned into six groups of five mice each. Toxicity signs and mortality were observed in the rats within a period of 24 h. The acute and sub-acute antidiabetic study was carried out using 50 rats, randomly assigned into five groups of 10 rats each. The rats’ blood glucose levels were determined and used to assess the acute and sub-acute antidiabetic activity of the extract.

Results obtained from the acute toxicity study indicated no death in any of the study groups, even at 5,000 mg/kg body weight and showed no signs of toxicity. The acute antidiabetic study showed that treatment with 400 mg/kg of the extract significantly (p = 0.01) lowered glucose level in the diabetic rats from 430.6 to 177.4 mg/dl while 800 mg/kg brought down glucose level from 370 to 144.2 mg/dl by the end of 6 h following administration when compared with the diabetic control group. It was observed that the effect of the extract mostly at 800 mg/kg also compared favorably with that of the standard drug (glibenclamide), which lowered glucose level in diabetic rats from 374.2 to 176.4 mg/dl. Furthermore, the significant reduction was evident from 4, 2 and 2 h for 400 mg/kg extract, 800 mg/kg extract and 5 mg/kg glibenclamide, respectively. At sub-acute level the blood glucose was lowered from 155.6 to 127.2 mg/dl, 137 to 124.4 mg/dl and 151.8 to 121.8 mg/dl for diabetic rats treated with 400 mg/kg, 800 mg/kg and 5 mg/kg glibenclamide, respectively, when compared to the diabetic untreated rats, which ranged from 417.6 to 358.6 mg/dl. The biochemical profile, lipid profile and hematological examination were all positively restored near to normal with the herbal treatment at the different doses. At histopathology level, the liver of the rats treated with 400 mg/kg had moderate portal inflammation without interface or lobular hepatitis while that of 800 mg/kg showed severe portal inflammation with the interface and lobular hepatitis with extensive confluents necrosis. The pancreatic cells of the treated rat showed no significant difference in the β-cells of the islets of Langerhans with hyperplasia of the acinar cell when compared to the diabetic untreated.

The record of no death and signs of toxicity implies that the extract is safe for consumption even at a high dosage of 5,000 mg/kg body weight. The significant (p = 0.01) reduction in the plasma glucose level of the treated rats as compared to the control is an indication of blood glucose-lowering potential of the extract at two different doses. The significant reduction evident of the extract at different hours and days for the two doses implies that the extract rate of lowering potentials is dose-dependent. The evidence of moderate-severe portal inflammation with the interface and lobular hepatitis at 800 mg/kg treatment is an indication that the intake of this herb at high dosage for long period is not safe for the liver tissue.

The outcome of this study suggested that the Asystacia gangetica should also be used as a vegetable in-home food preparation and food processing to use its antidiabetic effect. The herbal extract could also be incorporated into a food product and processed into herbal tea bag for convenient. The subjection of this herbal plant to heat treatment during processing could be a possible avenue to make it safe.

The economic burden and complications of diabetes mellitus management will be reduced if the practical implication of this research finding is implemented in foods as vegetable and in functional food production.

This study revealed that Asystacia gangetica leaf extract may be safe and effective for use at a low dose for acute management of diabetes mellitus. This research may be of value to those living with diabetes mellitus.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of the tax agent as a preparer of tax returns and provider of professional tax advice under a system based on self‐assessment principles. It recognises the competing pressures under which tax agents attempt to discharge their professional responsibilities, and examines the implications for potentially unethical behaviour.

The paper uses a mail survey of tax professionals in Western Australia. Respondents are presented with realistic tax return scenarios, in which the demands of the client are varied according to the risk of audit, the severity of tax law and the materiality of dollar amounts involved.

The findings suggest that the severity of tax law violation is an important factor in ethical decision‐making, but that audit risk and the amounts involved are not.

The lack of support for audit risk as an influential variable is an important outcome, because policy makers have traditionally proceeded on the basis that increases in audit probabilities will reduce the likelihood of taxpayers adopting aggressive tax reporting positions. However, since the findings are based on an Australian sample, care must be taken in generalizing these findings elsewhere.

The implications are important in that alternative enforcement and compliance strategies must be considered by tax administrators.

The paper extends empirical research into taxpayer attitudes to those of the preparers of tax returns. The findings will be of relevance both to tax agents and to tax administrators.

The paper addresses the following research question: how do decision-makers use heuristics in their international business (IB) environment? Whereas, the literature has focused on entrepreneurial companies, here contrasting approaches to learning and using heuristics in international marketing (IM) decisions are examined and discussed.

The paper aims to address a gap in the study of micro-foundations of internationalization, exploiting research from other disciplinary fields. It combines a multidisciplinary literature review and longitudinal case studies to illustrate different approaches in learning and using heuristics by international marketers.

International marketers can adopt “closed” heuristics that are consolidated and consistently followed, or “open” heuristics, which are constantly being adapted and learned. Established multinationals learn heuristics in international marketing decision-making, following both “closed” and “open” models.

This paper offers an original contribution by presenting different approaches not yet examined in the literature, focusing on how international marketers make decisions through learning and using heuristic rules. The focus is on established exporters, in contrast to the literature that has largely paid attention to the effectiveness of heuristics in new entrepreneurial firms.

The authors evaluate the evolution of the intellectual structure of strategic management (SM) by employing a document co-citation analysis through a network analysis for academic citations in articles published in the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ).

The authors employed the co-citation analysis through the social network analysis.

The authors outlined the evolution of the academic foundations of the structure and emphasized several domains. The economic foundation of SM research with macro and micro perspectives has generated a solid knowledge stock in the literature. Industrial organization (IO) psychology has also been another dominant foundation. Its robust development and extension in the literature have focused on cognitive issues in actors' behaviors as a behavioral foundation of SM. Methodological issues in SM research have become dominant between 2004 and 2011, but their influence has been inconsistent. The authors concluded by recommending future directions to increase maturity in the SM research domain.

This is the first paper to elucidate the intellectual structure of SM by adopting the co-citation analysis through the social network analysis.