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As academic libraries face growing challenges from the declining economy, deteriorating administrative support, increasing patron demands and fiscal accountability, as well as the expanding competition from both technology and retail industries, there is an opportunity to be more responsive to academic library customers and more strategic in the services provided to them. A boutique service model, generally, employed in high-end retail industries, may be adapted for academic libraries to provide a proactive, specialized approach to serving faculty and students. In the context of libraries, this model is focused on service that is personalized, user-driven, and technology-enhanced. It can be employed with the efforts of subject librarians and library personnel with minimal additional cost and would have a profound impact on the customer service experience. This chapter describes how the Policy Sciences & Economics Library at Texas A&M University (TAMU) has successfully implemented a boutique services model. It discusses the emphasis on a customer-intimacy strategy, focusing on relationship building of the Library and liaison librarians with its customers, the faculty, and students of the Departments of Political Science and Economics and the Bush School of Government and Public Service. A number of collaborative projects and services have been borne out of this effort and the result has been a measure of embeddedness that permeates the curriculum and research activities of those serves and increases the effectiveness and impact of the services provided by the library. The various efforts and innovations are easily transferable and scalable to other types of libraries.

This paper discusses the American debate over price controls and economic stabilization after World War II, when the transition from a war economy to a peace economy was characterized by bottlenecks in the productive system and shortages of food and other basic consumer goods, directly affecting the living standard of the population, the public opinion, and political discourse. Specifically, we will focus on the economist Franco Modigliani and his proposal for a “Plan to meet the problem of rising meat and other food prices without bureaucratic controls.” The plan prepared by Modigliani in October 1947 was based on a system of taxes and subsidies to foster a proper distribution of disposable income and warrant a minimum meat consumption for each individual without encroaching market mechanisms and consumers’ freedom. We will discuss the contents of the plan and its further refinements, and the reactions it prompted from fellow economists, the public opinion, and the political world. Although the Plan was not eventually implemented, it was an important initiative for several reasons: first, it showed the increasing importance of fiscal policy among postwar government tools of intervention in the economic sphere; second, it showed a third way between direct government intervention and full-fledged laissez faire, in tune with the postwar political climate; third, it proposed a Keynesian macroeconomic approach to price and income stabilization, strongly based on econometric and microeconomic foundations. The Meat Plan was thus a fundamental step in Modigliani’s effort to build the “neoclassical synthesis” between Keynesian and Neoclassical economics, which would deeply influence his own career and the evolution of academic studies and government practices in the United States.

The authors review the German voluntary turnover literature and examine how it reflects and extends the overall knowledge of employee turnover. First, the authors describe legal, institutional, and cultural influences specific to Germany that may affect voluntary turnover and its relationships with antecedents and outcomes. The authors then explain how research paradigms, which in German turnover research are primarily embedded in sociology and labor economics and to a lesser degree psychology and management, affect the lens by which voluntary turnover is examined. For instance, the variety of research perspectives leads to a variety of research questions, theories, data, and methodological approaches. Using these diverse perspectives, the authors explain how measurement and data quality concerns may hamper the understanding of turnover in cross-country/cross-cultural comparisons. This review further reveals many similarities with US-based turnover research, regarding the theories, methods, and results. The authors also find that turnover levels are, on average, considerably lower in Germany than in Anglo-Saxon labor markets. The authors suggest that the industry structure in Germany, coined by its strong and traditionally organized “Mittelstand” companies, may partly drive these findings. The authors close by identifying several research opportunities, available through advances in technology to improve the matching process, nonstandard work arrangements (such as in the gig economy), and a broader perspective on institutional peculiarities.

Entrepreneurship education has had a remarkable evolution over time and the number of entrepreneurship textbooks has multiplied given the increased interest in entrepreneurship programs in higher education. Yet, studies that review the coverage of textbooks focusing on entrepreneurship are scarce. This study provides an inventory of entrepreneurship textbooks and the topics they cover as well as specific emerging topics they do not cover by analyzing the content of 57 textbooks. Our results suggest that most textbooks provide significant coverage of such topics as the nature of entrepreneurship, business plans, financing, marketing, and cases. Among emerging concepts, social media has been relatively well covered with increasing coverage in more recent textbooks, while business canvas, as an example of alternatives to conventional business plans, is rarely covered. Most textbooks have provided little coverage of such topics as sales, family business, women and minorities, as well as ethics and sustainability. This study not only reveals areas that are covered by existing textbooks but also themes that future textbooks and research could cover to address the challenges of future entrepreneurship education.