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Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

Most countries around the world base their old‐age pension programs largely on the pay‐as‐you‐go defined benefit (PAYGO DB) model. However, due to a number of factors including population aging, the maturing of these schemes, rapidly increasing old‐age pension costs, and the perceived need to become more competitive in international markets, many nations have become increasingly concerned about the present (or projected future) economic burden of paying for the pension benefits promised by these schemes. This concern has led policy makers to look for alternative models. One of the most innovative alternatives to emerge during the past ten years is the notional defined contribution (NDC) model. In this article we describe this model and discuss some of the implications of a shift to this model for women and low‐wage workers. We conclude that in the industrial nations women and low‐wage workers are likely to do less well with schemes based all or in part on the NDC model because such schemes are typically designed to be less redistributive (from higher to lower income groups) than the PAYGO DB schemes they will be replacing. However, in developing countries the reverse will often be true as the NDC schemes are likely to be replacing PAYGO DB schemes that tend to redistribute from low‐income groups to higher income groups. Relative to funded DC schemes a major advantage of the NDC model is that it does not subject individual pension benefits to the volatility of financial markets. This issue is relevant to workers in both developed and developing nations, but it is a particularly important consideration in developing nations.

I was fairly certain that I had explored most aspects of Whitehaven history. However this town of endless surprises had yet one more to spring on me. On his return my plumber friend unwrapped a parcel: it contained a ship's log — not the official one, but one kept by an apprentice on a voyage to the far east in the early nineteenth century — and the minute book of the Whitehaven Literary Society, 1820–1822. Of all the material things written about White‐haven very little has been said about its cultural activities. For the development of an interest in art it should be said by the way that the town owes a debt to William Gilpin of Scaleby Castle, the agent for Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven. Directly through his patronage of Matthias Read, and indirectly through his son and grandsons Gilpin contributed not a little to the promotion of painting in Cumberland and elsewhere.

The purpose of this viewpoint article is to acquaint those engaged in health care quality improvement and patient safety programs with an effective, well‐documented but overlooked method. As described in a 1978 article, “Achievable Benefit Not Achieved” (ABNA) is a formal, efficient, transdisciplinary, evidence‐based method to identify and prioritize quality improvement project topics.

Narrative review of personal experience and pertinent literature.

While the ABNA method succeeds in serving its purpose when applied, and no evidence could be found to discredit it, ABNA appears to have been abandoned and forgotten for reasons of political expediency.

A strength and weakness of this research is its reliance upon personal narratives from the limited number of individuals still available who have first‐hand knowledge of past events. Convergence of those narratives along common themes, and their consistency with published records, is reassuring; however, age, memory, and some reluctance to broach political barriers limit one's ability to examine key events of past decades. A structured interview format conducted by a trained and experienced interviewer who had no vested interests in the topic, plus independent analysis of transcripts by researchers who have experience in qualitative methods, protects internal validity of the work.

Today's emphasis on continuously improving the quality and safety of health care requires appropriately focused, effective programs. ABNA arose and was suppressed in an era when health service deficiencies characteristically remained hidden as potential embarrassments rather than sought out as opportunities for improvement. ABNA, that era's under‐appreciated tool, should be reconsidered for its unique merits to guide today's programs.

This work, one of the first efforts to trace the entire history of ABNA, confirms that the method remains practical, effective and has not been discredited.

A report is provided of an evaluation of two “Senior Colleges” designed to offer viable alternatives to traditional secondary education for students above the age of compulsory schooling. The evaluation involved several researchers working independently and information collected using a variety of both quantitative and qualitative methods (including student and staff interviews and questionnaire surveys, nominal group procedures with staff and administration of instruments assessing student perceptions of classroom‐level and teacher perceptions of school‐level environment). The most striking finding emerging from almost every aspect of the evaluation was the success of the Colleges in creating a positive ethos for both students and staff. Some of the areas of concern which were identified included a relatively low level of student cohesiveness, confusion about the purpose of the Colleges, the distracting behaviour of some younger students and staff's conditions of service.

This chapter explicates inter-firm governance mechanisms and suggests employing similar approaches for managing corporate governance issues in an Islamic business setting. A number of theoretical approaches outline the motivation of business firms to choose between contractual versus non-contractual governance mechanisms in inter-firm business transactions. In addition, a number of socioeconomic and transactional factors also affect inter-firm governance choices. Obviously, a number of country-specific transactional elements affect corporate governance. Therefore, the chapter suggests that preferences for governance mechanisms may provide guidelines for corporate governance, particularly in an Islamic business context.

Located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, Eastern Truss Company produced trusses used in construction of both large warehouses and custom homes. This case presents the student with the opportunity to analyze the critical factors associated with the decision of whether Eastern should adopt a new production technology and whether cash flows from reduction of temporary workers will cover adoption coasts. The student must evaluate the decision to adopt the production technology through the lens of operations management tools. This case is appropriate for undergraduate business studies in the field of operations management.

Case study.

Undergraduate operations management.

This research provides a new perspective in explaining cardholders' willingness to use debit cards instead of cash by applying the transaction costs economic theory. This study also expands the adaptation of transaction cost economics theory in explaining consumer behaviour by investigating the moderating effects of income and education level on the relationship between perceived transaction costs and willingness to use debit cards.

The conceptual framework was developed primarily from the transaction cost economics theory. An in-depth interview method was employed to further support hypothesis development and the development of measurement scales. A structural equation model linking asset specificity, behavioural uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, frequency of payment, perceived monitoring costs, perceived adaptation costs and willingness to use debit cards was tested using data from a sample of 384 Vietnamese debit card holders.

This study's results support the transaction cost economics theory that asset specificity, uncertainty and frequency of payment all positively contribute to the perceived transaction costs associated with debit card usage. However, only environmental uncertainty and perceived adaptation costs have significant negative impact on willingness to use debit cards, with the relationship between environmental uncertainty and willingness to use debit cards being totally mediated by perceived adaptation costs. Moreover, the relationship between perceived adaptation costs and willingness to use debit cards becomes less negative among richer and better-educated cardholders.

The research provides insights into the hidden obstacles for developing cashless economies, thereby supporting policy makers in designing more effective and comprehensive strategies to make debit cards more widely used as a true substitute for cash.

This study provides a new lens in explaining customer willingness to use debit cards, while expanding the transaction costs economics theory by incorporating demographic factors as moderators in the relationship between transaction costs and the card-or-cash choice.

In a by now classic article, R.A. Mundell demonstrated that an open economy could maintain internal and external balance without using the exchange rate as a policy tool. This, he showed, could be done by using fiscal policy to produce internal balance, and interest rate policy to produce an imbalance on the capital account to offset whatever imbalance there might be on the current account. There have been two criticisms of this analysis. The first, fairly common in the literature, is that it presumes international capital movements are flows. If, as is often maintained, they are stock adjustments, a certain amount of funds will move in response to an interest rate rise, and then to produce a further reallocation of portfolios a further rise in interest rates will be required. It is thus concluded that Mundellian policy in the presence of a current account deficit would have to be not merely interest rates above those elsewhere, but interest rates rising higher and higher above those elsewhere. The second criticism was first suggested by H.G. Johnson, and later developed in detail by John Williamson. They attacked not the feasibility of the policy, but its desirability. They argued that the policy would produce resource misallocation, both because it compels the choice between home and overseas investment to be made exclusively on short‐term balance of payments grounds, and because it distorts the consumption/investment mix at home.

The linkage between diversification and performance has puzzled scholars for decades. A vast amount of empirical studies, together with the help of meta-analyses condensing diverse results, established a widely shared understanding that related diversification leads to superior firm performance. The main rationale for this finding is that relatedness within a company’s portfolio of businesses allows the company to achieve synergies by sharing or transferring resources. Although the predominant importance of related diversification seems generally accepted, scholars raise severe concerns about our ability to precisely define and measure relatedness. In most studies, traditional measures of diversification such as the Berry index are used, which assess relatedness from a product/market perspective. However, these measures face strong criticisms for their low degree of content validity. So if we doubt our understanding of relatedness, how can we agree on the performance effect of related diversification? To reassure our understanding of the diversification-performance linkage, this study critically reflects upon the underlying phenomenon of relatedness. By compiling and evaluating the different perspectives of relatedness with their heterogeneous conceptualizations and measures, this study supports the view that the multi-facetted nature of relatedness can only be captured inadequately so far. Moreover, most prior work mainly focuses on synergy potential rather than on the realization of synergies, thereby neglecting a mechanism that may have an important bearing on the performance effects of diversification.