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The third-party logistics (3PL) provider has faced significant change since containerisation with the broadening scope of supply chains and technological developments. With these changes, the required supply chain skills discussions have covered mostly graduate skills or employees' skills with a limited discussion to what extent and whether senior management skills were changing. Hence, 3PL senior management skill requirements will be compiled based on existing studies and assessed to check whether these are still relevant and if so to what extent for today's 3PL senior managers.

A questionnaire has been devised based on 3PL senior management skills identified in the academic literature and sent out to senior managers via professional social networks of 3PL. Based on the previous literature, the senior managers selected had to fulfil the selection criteria of a minimum five years' managerial experience in a 3PL, and a minimum of ten years' experience in general, which limited the sample size to twenty-seven senior managers in the 3PL sector.

The findings indicated that 3PL senior managers’ skills highlighted an increasing dependence on and importance of relational and behavioural skills, particularly when compared with the more traditional functional and managerial skills. The study indicated that the 3PL senior managers highlighted an increasing dependence and importance upon relational and behavioural skills, particularly when compared with the more traditional functional skills.

The study has explored the senior management skills in 3PL in the UK, albeit the respondents possessing diverse backgrounds. Therefore, it would be beneficial to test whether these findings are exemplary across the wider 3PL sector, not only in the UK but also across Europe to see how corporate agenda for executive supply chain skills could be devised.

Corporate supply chain training and development staff can develop specific programs based on the 3PL senior management skill sets especially on relational and behavioural skills, which are needed for future managers as well as up-skill senior managers' skills which are deemed to be most important in the current 3PL market.

This paper contributes to the supply chain skills discussion and reports subject relevant challenges for today’s senior management in the 3PL industry. The findings have generated preliminary discussions on whether senior management skills are changing with the broadening scope of supply chains.

With supply chains expanding in scope and scale globally, the academic literature underlined the increasing role and importance of soft skills. Traditionally, the supply chain literature geared towards hard skills including functional and technical skill sets with limited discussion on soft skills. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to assess and explore the soft skills demand in supply chain management arena.

This study has utilised a mixed methods study in two phases, with the first stage including a questionnaire distributed to 120 supply chain employees in the UK, followed by six interviews with supply chain experts in the UK.

The results suggest that soft skills, especially behavioural skills such as communication, planning, initiative and negotiation, were seen to be more important when compared to decision making, negotiation and management skills. The findings indicate that the changing supply chain scope encourages the requisition and development of different supply chain soft skills with varied levels of emphasis in relation to 15 soft skills identified in the literature.

This study employs a mixed-method approach to establish the perceived importance of soft skills in the UK supply chains. This limits the generalisability of the results to other contextual settings.

This paper presents soft skills impact upon the supply chain. Specific soft skills are critical to supply chain employees compared to others (e.g. behavioural and people management skills), which may lead to articulation of supply chain soft skills training initiatives.

This paper contributes to the soft skills discussion in the supply chain context and discusses the role of soft skills. Topical gaps in the literature are identified as areas for future research. The findings have generated additional supply chain skills to the academic literature as well as provided an understanding of the weighting of soft skills in terms of their importance and application to industry needs.

Examines work investigating the impact of the crisis on social welfare policies two Asian countries — Hong Kong and Korea, and argues that these two states were not prepared for the crisis. States that Hong Kong is adopting a neoliberal approach to social welfare, contrasting this with Korea taking unprecedented steps to restructure the social security system, after its economy nearly collapsed, taking a more developmental approach to social policy. Posits that only time will tell whether Korea’s momentum of change can be sustained, while in Hong Kong social security policy will still be dictated by a neoliberal agenda in the near future.

This chapter starts with a short discussion of social work and how it interlinks educational issues with forms of support to enable people to cope with difficult situations. An example shall illustrate that a global perspective on questions of governance in social work has to consider the historical, economic, and political context in which it takes place. It will then be argued that “governance building” might be a fundamental necessity in strengthening the empowerment of people, and this means accepting the ambivalence of support and control. In this context, some distinguished authors will be identified who considered social movements as motors of governance bringing in normative aspects, which cannot be reduced to functional theory. Finally, the chapter concludes by reflecting on the role of research in defining support programs in welfare states.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Citizens are substantial stakeholders in every e-government system, thus their willingness to use and ability to access the system are critical. Unequal access and information and communication technology usage, which is known as digital divide, however has been identified as one of the major obstacles to the implementation of e-government system. As digital divide inhibits citizen’s acceptance to e-government, it should be overcome despite the lack of deep theoretical understanding on this issue. This research aimed to investigate the digital divide and its direct impact on e-government system success of local governments in Indonesia as well as indirect impact through the mediation role of trust. In order to get a comprehensive understanding of digital divide, this study introduced a new type of digital divide, the innovativeness divide.

The research problems were approached by applying two-stage sequential mixed method research approach comprising of both qualitative and quantitative studies. In the first phase, an initial research model was proposed based on a literature review. Semi-structured interview with 12 users of e-government systems was then conducted to explore and enhance this initial research model. Data collected in this phase were analyzed with a two-stage content analysis approach and the initial model was then amended based on the findings. As a result, a comprehensive research model with 16 hypotheses was proposed for examination in the second phase.

In the second phase, quantitative method was applied. A questionnaire was developed based on findings in the first phase. A pilot study was conducted to refine the questionnaire, which was then distributed in a national survey resulting in 237 useable responses. Data collected in this phase were analyzed using Partial Least Square based Structural Equation Modeling.

The results of quantitative analysis confirmed 13 hypotheses. All direct influences of the variables of digital divide on e-government system success were supported. The mediating effects of trust in e-government in the relationship between capability divide and e-government system success as well as in the relationship between innovativeness divide and e-government system success were supported, but was rejected in the relationship between access divide and e-government system success. Furthermore, the results supported the moderating effects of demographic variables of age, residential place, and education.

This research has both theoretical and practical contributions. The study contributes to the developments of literature on digital divide and e-government by providing a more comprehensive framework, and also to the implementation of e-government by local governments and the improvement of e-government Readiness Index of Indonesia.

Public sector audit has grown in importance since the 1980s across the world. In this chapter, the authors outline the state of the current debate about public sector audit – including the role of the auditor, the purpose of audit, developments in the content of audit and the function of audit. The authors argue that these can be conceptualised through the literature of regulatory space. Drawing on the work of Ferry and Ahrens (2021), the authors set out categories which can be used to compare the ways in which different systems of local government audit can be compared and provide the justification for the intellectual approach taken by the rest of the volume.

In this chapter, I consider how and why gender continues to impact motivation, task engagement, self-regulation, and educational aspirations, choices, and outcomes among both boys and girls. How can motivation theory and research contribute to understanding gender differences in achievement at school, where girls now tend to do better than boys, especially in less advantaged social groups, and at work, where women still tend to achieve and earn less than similarly qualified men? In the first section of this chapter, I review evidence of gender-related motivational orientations whereby boys tend more to “prove and protect” and girls tend more to “doubt and try to improve” their abilities. I analyze the benefits and costs of these orientations, focusing on how they contribute to the superior school performance of girls, to spurring high-achieving boys to succeed more in later life than similarly able girls, and to placing lower-achieving boys, who often belong to minority groups, at particular risk for academic disengagement. I then consider how boys and girls construct and maintain motivating and motivated beliefs and strategies in interactions with parents, teachers, and peers within the social and educational contexts of their daily lives. In the final section, I first present some educational recommendations that follow from my analysis. I then engage directly with the overarching theme of this volume by considering some broad societal trends that present continuing challenges to educators concerned to promote optimal motivation for learning among both boys and girls in the twenty-first century.

LONG before man learnt to make fire by the friction of wood, he experienced the burden of friction in dragging home his kill. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suppose that the torn sides of his beast gave the first solid lubricant. Blood and mutton fat were seriously recommended as lubricants for church bell trunnions as recently as the 17th century. Indoed we still reckon fatty acids the best of all boundary lubricants. The range of man's activities has increased enormously in the present century, and particularly in the last few decades. Men have circled the earth in space; a space ship is on its way to examine another planet; terrestrial man is boring to the bottom of the earth's crust; others have descended to the depths of the ocean, and oven established a home on the floor of the Mediterranean, Speeds have increased by factors of thousands, temperatures range from near absolute zero to thousands of degrees; and a new environment of high‐intensity nuclear radiation has been created. Still, objects must move over and along each other in these exotic conditions; and to a large extent solid lubricants can provide the answer to the frictional problems.