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THE STUDENT OF PUBLIC LIBRARY HISTORY soon accepts without surprise accounts of opposition to the public library. It is perhaps remarkable that a forerunner or pioneer of the public library idea should have encountered it when what he did was of his own volition and to some degree at his own expense, and when he laid no claim to public finance for his idea.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

The mass exodus of the professional healthcare workforce has become a cankerworm for a developing nation like Nigeria, and this worsens the already depleted healthcare systems in underdeveloped nation. This study investigated the rationale behind medical workers' brain-drain syndrome and the quality healthcare delivery in the Nigerian public healthcare sector.

To stimulate an understanding of the effect of the phenomenon called brain drain, the study adopted a diagnostic research design to survey the public healthcare personnel in government hospitals. The study administered a battery of adapted research scales of different measures to confirm the variables of interest of this study on a probability sampling strategy. The study surveyed 450 public healthcare sector employees from four government hospitals to gather pertinent data. The study used a structural equation model (SEM) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to analyse the collected data from the medical personnel of government hospitals.

The findings of this study are significant as postulated. The study discovered that poor quality worklife experienced by Nigerian medical personnel was attributed to the brain-drain effect and poor healthcare delivery. The study further demonstrated that job dissatisfaction suffered among the public healthcare workforce forced the workforce to migrate to the international labour market, and this same factor is a reason for poor healthcare delivery. Lastly, the study discovered that inadequate remuneration and pay discouraged Nigerian professionals and allied healthcare workers from being productive and ultimately pushed them to the global market.

Practically, this study has shown three major elements that caused the mass movement of Nigerian healthcare personnel to other countries of the world and that seems novel given the peculiarity of the Nigerian labour market. The study is original and novel as much study has not been put forward in the public healthcare sector in Nigeria concerning this phenomenon.

Job satisfaction is indispensable in the daily life of the workforce, and the mechanism that drives job satisfaction requires the attention of the management of corporate organisations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the predictors of work environment on job satisfaction among nurses in both federal and state tertiary hospitals in Lagos State.

The study used the longitudinal research design to elicit information from the respondents. The research instrument used is a nursing work index scale by Aiken and Patrician which has been established to have a high internal reliability coefficient. The simple random sampling strategy was used to administer the research instrument to 364 nurses. The study used hierarchical multiple regression to analyse the data obtained.

This study discovered that all the variables collectively determined nurses job satisfaction; however, the salary was the most fundamental essential predictor that drive nurses’ job satisfaction followed by advancement and promotion. All seven predictors, namely, socio-political climate; administrative and managerial support, autonomy and responsibility, salary, supervision and working condition, recognition and achievement, advancement and promotion, collectively exert positive relationship with nurses’ job satisfaction. The study concluded that to retain and prevent turnover intention among nurses, and other health-care workers, the management of hospitals must pay due attention to issues relating to job satisfaction, as this is likely to increase health-care system effectiveness, boost mental and social health of the nurses.

This study shows that job satisfaction in the workplace comes from diverse techniques, as other factors have been proven effective other than salary in international cultures and regions, but in Nigeria, salary and career promotion take pre-eminence above other factors. This is because of Nigerian socio-cultural realities and that is another paradigm shift.

Our study explores friction costs in terms of competition and market structure, considering factors such as market share, industry leverage levels, industry hedging levels, number of peers, and the geographic concentration that influences reinsurance purchase in the Property and Casualty insurance industry in China. Financial factors that influence the hedging level are also included. The data are hand collected from 2008 to 2015 from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook. Using panel data analysis techniques, the results are interesting. The capital structure shows a significant negative relationship with the hedging level. Group has a negative relationship with reinsurance purchases. Assets exhibit a negative relationship with hedging levels. The hedging level has a negative relation with the individual hedging level. Insurers have less incentive to hedge because it provides less resource than leverage. The study also robustly investigates the strategic risk management separately by the financial crises.

Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a vital role in work and non-work outcomes. Gaps exist in the role of contextual factor (i.e. perceived organisational support, POS) and personal resource (i.e. psychological capital, PsyCap) in investigating employees’ EI. This current research draws on the cognitive–motivational–reactional theory of emotions and conservation of resources theory in examining the serial explanatory pathways between EI and work engagement.

Data were collected at three points of measurement from the public sector in Nigeria. The authors tested their serial mediation model with a sample of 528 public sector employees using PROCESS macro with a bias-corrected bootstrapping method.

The findings show that EI was positively related to work engagement. EI exerted an indirect effect on PsyCap via POS. The indirect effect of EI on work engagement was serially mediated by POS and PsyCap.

Organisations need to pay attention to the level of support they provide to employees, given that employees differ in their emotional appraisal and regulations. The way employees perceive organisational support is vital to helping them stimulate their personal resources towards work goals. This study further accentuates the fact that emotionally intelligent employees tend to understand how to manage their emotions and that of others in a way that leads to a higher level of work engagement.

This paper addresses gaps in the literature on EI and regulations in the changing and challenging world of work. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature by deepening our understanding of the complex relationship between EI, POS, PsyCap and work engagement. Theoretical and practical implications for employees’ emotional appraisal and regulations are discussed.

This chapter examines the practical and conceptual limitations and possibilities of using ethnographic methods in the college writing classroom for the purpose of instructors’ professional development. The study is based on ethnographic research with a second-year course in Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. The study’s dual foci included the teacher–researcher’s pedagogical practices and students’ learning, and entailed participant-observation and the recording of ethnographic fieldnotes. It builds on the anthropology of literacy, a tradition of action research among educational ethnographers, and scholarship on composition pedagogy. Participant-observation could be helpful to other college instructors interested in improving their teaching. However, combining participant-observation with direct student feedback through interviews or surveys will be most effective in shaping educators’ professional development. Using participant-observation for professional development in the college writing classroom did not only situate me, the ethnographer, as both subject and object of research. Unexpectedly, my research also placed ethnographic methods as objects of research. By examining student learning and teaching practices ethnographically, researchers create opportunities to illuminate assumptions related to research as well as broader lessons about the study of teaching and learning.

This case invites students to evaluate, based on given materials, the causes, consequences, and potential resolutions of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. The premise of a business professor preparing a slide presentation dramatizes an analysis of the financial crisis. Reviewing his data, much of it in graph form, the professor ponders the central role of banks and the impact of risk management, leverage, and incentives. His main thesis is that the fundamental issue surrounding this crisis was the misjudgment of the risks taken, with the result that risk management failed to do its job of curtailing and managing risk as expected.

Henry George came to maturity at a time when the simplicity and democratic values that had governed the United States were under assault. Slow and placid rhythms of life prevailed, but their future would be brief. Factories were flinging mass-produced goods into an economy accustomed to expecting a hat or a pair of shoes to come to an individual consumer from a local craftsman, or perhaps from a merchant drawing craft products from small shops at some distance. Canals and then rail tracks had begun slicing into the backcountry. Cities were taking on a character Americans might more quickly have expected of ancient times: overcrowded housing, uncollected sewage, the ravages of cholera, and the spread of street crime.

A pæan of joy and triumph which speaks for itself, and which is a very true indication of how the question of poisonous adulteration is viewed by certain sections of “the trade,” and by certain of the smaller and irresponsible trade organs, has appeared in print. It would seem that the thanks of “the trade” are due to the defendants in the case heard at the Liverpool Police Court for having obtained an official acknowledgment that the use of salicylic acid and of other preservatives, even in large amounts, in wines and suchlike articles, is not only allowable, but is really necessary for the proper keeping of the product. It must have been a charming change in the general proceedings at the Liverpool Court to listen to a “preservatives” case conducted before a magistrate who evidently realises that manufacturers, in these days, in order to make a “decent” profit, have to use the cheapest materials they can buy, and cannot afford to pick and choose; and that they have therefore “been compelled” to put preservatives into their articles so as to prevent their going bad. He was evidently not to be misled by the usual statement that such substances should not be used because they are injurious to health— as though that could be thought to have anything to do with the much more important fact that the public “really want” to have an article supplied to them which is cheap, and yet keeps well. Besides, many doctors and professors were brought forward to prove that they had never known a case of fatal poisoning due to the use of salicylic acid as a preservative. Unfortunately, it is only the big firms that can manage to bring forward such admirable and learned witnesses, and the smaller firms have to suffer persecution by faddists and others who attempt to obtain the public notice by pretending to be solicitous about the public health. Altogether the prosecution did not have a pleasant time, for the magistrate showed his appreciation of the evidence of one of the witnesses by humorously rallying him about his experiments with kittens, as though any‐one could presume to judge from experiments on brute beasts what would be the effect on human beings—the “lords of creation.” Everyone reading the evidence will be struck by the fact that the defendant stated that he had once tried to brew without preservatives, but with the only result that the entire lot “went bad.” All manufacturers of his own type will sympathise with him, since, of course, there is no practicable way of getting over this trouble except by the use of preservatives; although the above‐mentioned faddists are so unkind as to state that if everything is clean the article will keep. But this must surely be sheer theory, for it cannot be supposed that there can be any manufacturer of this class of article who would be foolish enough to think he could run his business at a profit, and yet go to all the expense of having the returned empties washed out before refilling, and of paying the heavy price asked for the best crude materials, when he has to compete with rival firms, who can use practically anything, and yet turn out an article equal in every way from a selling point of view, and one that will keep sufficiently, by the simple (and cheap) expedient of throwing theory on one side, and by pinning their faith to a preservative which has now received the approval of a magistrate. Manufacturers who use preservatives, whether they are makers of wines or are dairymen, and all similar tradesmen, should join together to protect their interests, for, as they must all admit, “the welfare of the trade” is the chief thing they have to consider, and any other interest must come second, if it is to come in at all. Now is the time for action, for the Commission appointed to inquire into the use of preservatives in foods has not yet given its decision, and there is still time for a properly‐conducted campaign, backed up by those “influential members of the trade” of whom we hear so much, and aided by such far‐reaching and brilliant magisterial decisions, to force these opinions prominently forward, in spite of the prejudice of the public; and to insure to the trades interested the unfettered use of preservatives,—which save “the trade” hundreds of thousands of pounds every year, by enabling the manufacturers to dispense with heavily‐priced apparatus, with extra workmen and with the use of expensive materials,—and which are urgently asked for by the public,—since we all prefer to have our foods drugged than to have them pure.