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The purpose of this paper is to use data from the 2008 and 2012 US Senate elections to examine the relationship between candidate size (obese, overweight, normal weight) and candidate selection and election outcomes.

Using pictures captured from candidate web sites, participants rated the size of candidates in the primary and general US Senate elections. χ2 analyses, t-tests and hierarchical multiple regressions were used to test for evidence of bias against overweight and obese candidates and whether gender and election information moderate that relationship.

Obese candidates were largely absent from the pool of candidates in both the primary and general elections. Overweight women, but not overweight men, were also underrepresented. Supporting our hypothesis that there is bias against overweight candidates, heavier candidates tended to receive lower vote share than their thinner counterparts, and the larger the size difference between the candidates, the larger the vote share discrepancy. The paper did not find a moderating effect for gender or high-information high vs low-information elections on the relationship between candidate size and vote share.

Further research is needed to understand the process by which obese candidates are culled from the candidate pool and the cognitions underlying the biases against overweight candidates.

Because of the bias against obese political candidates, as much as one-third of the adult US population are likely to be excluded or being elected to a major political office.

This study is the first to use election data to examine whether bias based on size extends to the electoral process.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

THIS number will appear at the beginning of the Leeds Conference. Although there is no evidence that the attendance will surpass the record attendance registered at the Birmingham Conference, there is every reason to believe that the attendance at Leeds will be very large. The year is one of importance in the history of the city, for it has marked the 300th anniversary of its charter. We hope that some of the festival spirit will survive into the week of the Conference. As a contributor has suggested on another page, we hope that all librarians who attend will do so with the determination to make the Conference one of the friendliest possible character. It has occasionally been pointed out that as the Association grows older it is liable to become more stilted and formal; that institutions and people become standardized and less dynamic. This, if it were true, would be a great pity.

One of the consequences of the democratization of higher education in the United States is the explosion of institutions that have arisen to meet mass demand, and the stratification of those institutions based on the populations they serve. The Ivy League, the “public ivy” flagship state universities, and a cadre of elite small private liberal arts colleges are the basis for the institutionalized myths that inform public perception of what colleges or universities are, even though these schools account for an ever-shrinking fraction of American higher education experiences. The growth in schools serving primarily “nontraditional” students – that is, anything except in-person residential undergraduate liberal arts for at-least-middle-class white eighteen-year-olds with certain test scores coming directly from a college-preparatory high school program – has created a legitimacy paradox within the higher education sector. Democratization has created a need for different types of institutions, but the quest for legitimacy within the higher education sector drives isomorphic change and fuels mission creep, pulling schools away from their original nontraditional constituencies. In order to effectively serve nontraditional students, schools must explore other sectors outside of higher education where there is potential for creating programmatic and/or institutional legitimacy, including the business sector, specific professional sectors, and social/cultural milieu. The intentional development of multiliminality, where institutions draw legitimacy from multiple overlapping environmental sectors simultaneously, offers one response which helps anchor colleges and universities in their missions and helps maintain the access promised by the democratization of higher education.

We issue a double Souvenir number of The Library World in connection with the Library Association Conference at Birmingham, in which we have pleasure in including a special article, “Libraries in Birmingham,” by Mr. Walter Powell, Chief Librarian of Birmingham Public Libraries. He has endeavoured to combine in it the subject of Special Library collections, and libraries other than the Municipal Libraries in the City. Another article entitled “Some Memories of Birmingham” is by Mr. Richard W. Mould, Chief Librarian and Curator of Southwark Public Libraries and Cuming Museum. We understand that a very full programme has been arranged for the Conference, and we have already published such details as are now available in our July number.

Since the end of the war, most countries — if not all — have realised the importance of the powerful stimulus created by tourist spending. The high rate of tourist spending and turnover of expenditure in tourist trades introduce large sums of extra money into the local community. It is, therefore, quite obvious that the tourist industry can bring prosperity to areas lacking in natural resources and can sustain a range of public utility services far above that which the local region can afford without this help. These utility services can become the foundation on which secondary industries may be based. They can help to bring life to less frequented areas and to check the drift towards cosmopolitan cities which has affected these areas so seriously.

After briefly covering Bill Freudenburg’s early years, this essay reviews his major scholarly contributions and professional accomplishments while a faculty member at Washington State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Bill’s unique strengths – especially his keen sociological imagination – and crucial conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions are highlighted, as well as his commitment to providing valuable mentoring for students and colleagues. The enduring importance of his work is ensured by the continuing application and extension of his ideas by other scholars.

DAMAGE to libraries has assumed dimensions which make it unlikely that any private beneficence alone will be able to effect restoration. Nor is it probable that we have reached anything like the end of the destruction. Libraries are in the nature of things in great centres of population which are main targets of the enemy and they suffer accordingly. There is every hope that after the war the most determined effort will be made to repair every form of loss, and the libraries must be kept well to the fore by those who have charge of them; but the effort, in which we certainly hope such benevolent institutions as the Carnegie and similar trusts will assist, must be a universal one. It will also be considered a state obligation, we hope, based partly upon the State Insurance Scheme. In connexion with this, some librarians have had difficulty in persuading their authorities to insure books for anything like the money it would cost to replace them; it is curious that public men appear to think that books cost little or nothing! A reflection of this from the other side was the remark of a District Valuer on a claim for damage which certainly could not replace the lost books, that it was “excessive.” Cover should certainly be adequate.

Higher education (HE) marketing the world over is in a state of crisis that manifests itself on three fronts. First, there continues to be sizeable resistance towards the marketing idea in the academy of many universities across the world. Second, HE itself has failed to identify its core business without which the sector can not have a firm marketing foundation. Third, HE marketing has not adequately domesticated itself and continues to rely on imported wisdom from the business sector. The purpose of this paper is to explore these problems using evidence from international research and propose a curriculum focused marketing model which should help refocus HE marketing, domesticate it appropriately and reduce the internal resistance with which it is frequently associated.

The paper begins by examining the imperatives for marketisation in HE. It then reviews the extent of the three obstacles using evidence from research in different parts of the world. It concludes by offering a curriculum focused marketing model (CORD) which could serve the basis for future HE marketisation.

Based on wide ranging data from the developed and less developed countries, obtained through national and regional surveys and a review of secondary findings, the paper suggests that a way out of this crisis is for universities to identify their core business as the development of their curricula and to base their marketing on a proposed curriculum centred marketing model.

The CORD model represents an attempt at addressing the crisis that HE marketing faces today.

The question of what it is fitting for children to read would seem to be one which is always being debated. “Cinderella,” wrote a woman in 1802, “is perhaps one of the most exceptionable books ever written for children. It paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast— envy, jealousy, vanity, a love of dress.” The same writer disapproved of Robinson Crusoe, which, she feared, might lead “to an early taste for a rambling life and a love of adventure.” On August 12th, 1955, the leading article of The Times Literary Supplement, dealing with the quality of present day writing for children, speaks of “a kind of struggle that is now taking place in the battlefields of our children's souls between the child's active appetite for the particularity of experience and its passive vulnerability to the stereotype.” The Literary Supplement goes on to say: “Almost any child has at once more sensibility, and less discrimination, than almost any adult. And one of the most worrying things about some levels, at least, of our contemporary culture is the tendency to damp and dim that intrinsic sensibility and to exploit that innocence, that inability to discriminate.” This, be it noted, is not directed at the “Comics”, English or American, but at children's books, the books which fill the shelves of the libraries which the teacher is perpetually urging the child to join.