Search results

The target costing method works “backward” from traditional cost‐plus methods and begins with a targeted sales price for a product. This price is set based on what the customer is willing to pay. It considers not only the preferred current selling price but also the later life cycle pattern of prices. This technique has key managerial implications. This article considers these implications along with implementation guidelines. Examples of industries successfully using target costing are included. Ongoing controversies concerning where the techniques can best be used are discussed. Further considered are international differences in target costing as well as challenges of global outsourcing along the supply chain. The article ends with implementation challenges, significance for practice, and suggestions for future research.

Increasing consumer consultation is a priority for those involved in health and social care research and practice, with promoting greater public participation being widely accepted as ‘a good thing’ (Reason, 1994: 3). However, whilst such consultation may improve the quality of research and practice, there is a need to recognise the considerable investment of time and energy that is required for success (Baxter et al., 2001). Given the extra resources needed, it is important to understand how consultation and user involvement can work to benefit all parties.This paper describes our experiences of working together on a research project exploring people's involvement in decision‐making processes when using care services in later life. When we started the project in March 2001 each of us could draw on a range of experiences that we hoped would make a valuable contribution. We have now worked together for over two years and this paper describes how our combined efforts have not only enhanced the overall quality of the research but also had personal benefits that we did not anticipate when we started out.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

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.

The history of the public library is long and rich, and continues to reflect this institution's initial mission: to respond to the needs of an evolving democratic society. From its early days as a subscription service for the middle-class, through its evolution to become an educational site for the lower-classes and new immigrants, the public library has served as a touch-stone for urban industrial society in North America (Lerner, 1998, p. 138; Shera, 1974). Over the past century, public libraries have evolved to respond to the growing needs of the communities they serve and continue to do so with recent advances in technologies (such as DVDs, electronic books, the Internet, etc.), and with a more global outlook on the ways that people seek and share information. Indeed, the public library's constituents today are exceedingly diverse, including children and adults from a broad range of socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, all of whom seek information for a variety of personal and work-related purposes. The fact that public libraries have been fulfilling patrons' information needs for well over a century is a testament to their enduring success and versatility as information providers, and also points to the overall effectiveness of public librarians as intermediaries in the provision process.

As a network analyst, I am fascinated by social interactions. The ways in which people connect with one another and exercise power and authority by deploying different forms of capital. This piece returns to the underlying and changing kinship network structure of the village of Ambridge over time, explores the role of ‘kin-keeping’ as deployed by the matriarchs Peggy and Jill. I am most interested in the ways in which gender as performed by the women of the village intersects with abundance or lack of other forms of capital, and how far inequalities persist and why. It is clear that there is an intergenerational power dynamic at play in the spreading or hoarding of the various dimensions of power layered together and how forms of capital intersect for protection or precarity. Social and cultural capital at birth in the village is defining in terms of both ‘serious’ life outcomes as well as how more minor infractions and foibles are viewed. Further, I return to discuss how my various network-based predictions have fared over time. The Headlam Hypothesis and the fate of Ed Grundy – King of Ambridge are revisited and their durability explored.

Long before calories and joules were used to indicate energy values in relation to food, popular belief had it that some foods could increase man's output of labour, his physical strength and endurance, even his fertility. The nature of the foods varied over the years. From earliest times, flesh foods have inspired men to “gird their loins” and “put on armour”, but too long at the feasting tables produced sloth of body and spirit. Hunger sharpens the wit, which makes one wonder if that oft‐quoted statement of poverty and hunger before the Great War—“children too hungry learn”—was quite true; it is now so long ago for most of us to remember. Thetruism “An army marches on its stomach” related to food in general and relating feats of strength to individual foods is something more difficult to prove. The brawny Scot owes little to his porridge; the toiling Irish labourer moves mountains of earth, not from the beef steaks he claims to consume, but for the size of the pay‐packet at the end of the week!

Purchased goodwill conforms to the current accounting definitions of an asset. However, as the descriptive framework contained within this paper will show, purchased goodwill is not an asset and, therefore, should not be shown on the balance sheet. This would not necessarily matter, from a marketing viewpoint, was it not for the linkage of brand asset recognition to purchased goodwill asset recognition. Currently, the recognition of a purchased goodwill asset tends to be a prerequisite for the recognition of a brand asset extracted from it. If it can be shown that purchased goodwill is not an asset, then the prerequisite disappears. The widespread recognition of brand assets is then unfettered by its association with purchased goodwill. Weakening the basis for the recognition of a purchased goodwill asset is an important first step in encouraging the accounting profession to devise new ways of dealing with the different kinds of intangible assets that are becoming paramount in the governance of companies.

THE hope we expressed in recent pages, that the Library Association might resume its normal methods of life and government, remains a hope. London, where only we suppose the Council could do its work really well, has been of late no place for the meetings of people; and we dare to say that for the key people of any profession or movement to gather there at present would be unwise, even though imagination may increase the risk beyond the warrant of the facts. Nor do we know yet if the worst has been experienced. Meanwhile it is probable that the affairs of librarianship must be delegated to even fewer workers than now. Only the chronically ungracious part of our fraternity will be without gratitude to those who keep things going for us.