Search results

The revolution in the world economy, especially in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, has accelerated academic and practitioner interest in the process of global change. Of special relevance to the topic are the disciplines of strategic management, human resource management, and public policy. Specifically, global changes force a rethinking of existing managerial and governmental practices with respect to economic growth and development. This rethinking is critical to the successful transformation from planned to market economies and to assist in this large systems change the West has offered a myriad suggestions in all areas of management and public policy. The paper first explains the basic tenets of institutional economics and convergence theory, second, it presents the new rights by contrasting them with past practices in former Communist countries, and it concludes with a discussion of their implications for policy makers.

This paper raises the debate about integration of services, drawing on the experience of the occupational therapy profession. This is followed by a review of the roles and responsibilities of all staff within the integration agenda.

This editorial brings to an end a branded series of articles on the outputs of research concerned with improving the quality of life of older and disabled people. The growing significance of the subject matter addressed throughout this series is illustrated and discussed. As a consequence of the series, it has been realised that papers on topics that previously would have been considered peripheral to the interests of the readership of JIC are now recognised as significant for good health and well‐being.

The purpose of this qualitative, interpretive, study is to help us better understand how a small group of Hmong immigrant adolescents conceptualize their political and civic citizenship in the United States. Three focus groups including a total of 18 Hmong middle/junior high school adolescents were carried out in order to garner data. Upon data analysis and interpretation, it was determined that study participants consider rights and responsibilities important to citizenship in a democracy and participate in various social, political, academic, and environmental activities. Study participants emphasize the community good over personal self-interests. As Hmong culture tends to be more collectivist in nature, this value orientation may be incompatible with the curriculum, instruction, and philosophy that students experience in public schools: Hmong youth may experience educational disadvantage. Adolescents in this study are developing their conceptions of citizenship within a racialized, hierarchical society and they explained their experiences with racialization and how they understand white privilege.

The purpose of this original research is to gauge the level of academic libraries' strategic credibility by analyzing whether strategic planning goals align with annual reports.

A modified replication of a study by Jarvenpaa and Ives was used. A random sample of 28 ARL libraries was taken from ARL membership. Library directors were contacted for a copy of both a strategic plan and an annual report. A two‐way comparison was conducted between three groups using content analysis.

Analysis of strategic plans and annual reports revealed that the majority of the libraries in the study produced strategic plans. However, most libraries no longer produce annual reports. Canadian strategic plans were user‐centered, whereas US plans focused on “hot topics”. Themes emerged from the analysis of strategic plans including space planning, offsite storage, assessment, development, and personnel.

Determining the level to which ARL libraries have strategic credibility is difficult to surmise, since the anticipated number of annual reports did not materialize. Further research is needed to compare what impact strategic plans and marketing strategies have on fundraising.

Several tactical methods libraries can implement in order to get the attention of potential donors and funding agencies to support projects and programs include the hiring of a library development officer, contracting with a marketing firm, and greatly improving the quality of communication to clientele.

The paper presents original research and is of value to academic library leaders who want to know about current trends in communicating strategic goals and objectives to their clientele.

Physicians can significantly impact both the quality and the cost of health care. Thus, it is not surprising that there is great interest in modifying physician behavior. There have been three main methods used to alter physician behavior: education, motivation, and facilitation. This article reviews the success of these methods.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

In the report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Meat Inspection of 1950, it was recommended that suitable candidates from the butchery trade should be enabled to qualify as meat inspectors and now the Authorised Officers (Meat Inspection) Regulations, 1960, give effect to this recommendation. The training and examination of candidates for these new posts will be under the auspices of the Royal Society of Health and a syllabus has been drafted comparable to that of the Meat and Other Foods Inspector's examination, but in meat only. Holders of the certificate will qualify for appointments as “authorised officers” under the Food & Drugs Act, 1955, with powers of inspection and seizure, but, again, in meat only. Appointments will be made by local authorities and the new inspectors will be integrated with the existing local authority meat inspection service and work under appropriate direction, although the circular of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food accompanying the regulations carries the suggestion that local authorities might permit individuals appointed to discharge the full duties of a meat inspector without “continuous supervision.”

The practice of pricing with numbers ending in nine (“nine‐ending”) has been little studied. It now seems well established that, under certain conditions, the practice of such pricing strategies has a particular effect on sales, especially inciting the customer to buy products that are more expensive. The research design for explaining such an effect would depend on the price encoding mechanisms, namely, the emphasis of focusing attention, which decreases when reading from left to right, leading to only partial memorization of the price. This would favour the leftmost digits, thus leading to errors of evaluation or estimation of the starting price. A new experiment was carried out to test this possibility. Subjects had to estimate the discount rate of products in a sale, according to whether the starting price was a “rounded” figure or “odd‐ending”. Assuming the first digit of the price is memorized, we might expect that a round starting price leads to an overestimation of the amount of the offered discount. The results provide evidence in support of this hypothesis, enabling us to gain a more accurate knowledge of the processes used for estimating the starting price.