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Does education still serve as a great equalizer today? Does today’s worldwide expansion of schooling foster a global economic convergence? These questions need fresh answers at this time of growing concern over inequality. Past studies have abundantly documented the effects of schooling on within-country inequality, but we know little about corresponding effects on between-country inequality. We fill this gap by drawing on two innovations. The first is to formulate a theory of global inequality that integrates international differences in both the quantity and quality of education. The second, methodological, innovation is to propose and apply a method for decomposing trends in global inequality in GDP in terms of five social forces that include the quantity and quality of schooling. Analyses focus on the 1990–2010 period. The results confirm the continued salience of education: Trends in education account for as much as 80% of the 1990–2010 decline in between-country GDP inequality. However, we find a declining significance of “quantity” over “quality.” In sum, education remains salient as a global equalizer but its salience increasingly depends on bridging international differences in school quality.

At the passing of the Fair Trading Act, 1973, and the setting up of a Consumer Protection Service with an Office of Fair Trading under a Director‐General, few could have visualized this comprehensive machinery devised to protect the mainly economic interests of consumers could be used to further the efforts of local enforcement officers and authorities in the field of purity and quality control of food and of food hygiene in particular. This, however, is precisely the effect of a recent initiative under Sect. 34 of the Act, reported elsewhere in the BFJ, taken by the Director‐General in securing from a company operating a large group of restaurants a written undertaking, as prescribed by the Section, that it would improve its standards of hygiene; the company had ten convictions for hygiene contraventions over a period of six years.

Historically, public services were provided by public institutions because they were seen as either the best-insulated or most sensitive to public sentiments. Today, the fusing of public responsibility with private expertise draws on research and theory stretching from Taylor’s scientific management to Osborne and Gaebler’s reengineering of government. This paper focuses on the historical promises and pitfalls that have come to define public service contracting in the twenty-first century. It describes the experiences of the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) with purchase of service contracts. The exploration of LAWA’s approach provides insight on how managers meet the community’s needs for efficiency and equity by capitalizing on contracting for public services.

This paper aims to examine relationships between vision realization factors (vision communication, motivation and empowerment of employees), employee satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment in a state‐owned energy provider in Thailand.

Subjects are drawn randomly from employees working at the Thai state‐owned energy provider who completed a questionnaire made up of valid and reliable instruments that measure each of the variables studied. Hypotheses are tested through a series of regression analyses.

Findings indicate that vision communication, motivation and empowerment of employees, and follower affective organizational commitment are three direct predictors of enhanced employee satisfaction. Empowerment of employees and employee satisfaction are two direct predictors of employee affective organizational commitment. These findings indicate a reciprocal relationship between employee satisfaction and affective organizational commitment, with a stronger effect from employee satisfaction on affective organizational commitment than the reverse.

How supervisors empower and motivate their subordinates in the Thai state‐owned energy provider still needs a further investigation. The relationship between employee satisfaction and affective organizational commitment needs to be re‐examined by future research, using a different research design and statistical technique.

Leaders at all levels of the state‐owned energy provider should frequently communicate their vision to, motivate and empower their subordinates to enhance subordinate satisfaction and affective commitment.

The body of knowledge about vision‐based leadership in an Asian state‐owned energy provider is scanty. The present study contributes to this area.

School consolidation reforms are underway in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The purpose of this paper is to establish an evidence base of research literature on school consolidation in regional, rural and remote locations.

A scoping study of empirical literature on school consolidation, with a particular focus on regional, rural and remote education, since the year 2000 was undertaken. A corpus of 35 papers were identified and subjected to analysis based on: year of publication, country of origin, unit of analysis, data sources, timeframe and theoretical model.

There remains a limited evidence base for the success of school consolidation reforms for turning around student outcomes. In addition, a number of social implications are experienced by communities losing their local school. These issues are amplified in regional, rural and remote locations.

School consolidation reforms are used by governments/systems wanting to reduce costs and address issues of student disengagement and under-achievement. Despite a lengthy history internationally, there is at best mixed evidence regarding these reforms. With a consider disparity gap between urban and regional, rural and remote school outcomes, robust evidence on the success of reforms has major policy implications for government, systems, educators and communities.

With reforms already underway in NSW (and elsewhere), the need for a rigorous and robust evidence base, such as this scoping study, is timely and significant.

This study aimed to investigate associations between the organisational and cultural contexts in which Chinese teachers work, the influence of these on their understandings of professionalism, and relationships between these and their perceived willingness and commitment to be effective in teaching to their best.

The research was part of a two-country collaboration between the universities of Beijing and Sydney into Australian and Chinese teachers' perceptions of influences on their professionalism in which research protocols were jointly developed and implemented. This paper focusses mainly upon the Chinese research but also refers to key differences between Australian and Chinese teachers' perspectives. Seventeen teachers in early, middle and later career phases were recruited from a convenience sample of primary and secondary schools in Beijing. Qualitative data analyses of individual interviews, and cross case comparative analyses were conducted.

The analyses of the data from Beijing indicated that almost all teachers emphasised their strong moral purposes and commitment to teach to their best, despite identifying the challenges of workload, school contexts and cultures and personal circumstances, which tested their resolve. In contrast, concerns about teacher autonomy and agency, which were common in the Australian study and other published research literature, were not highly visible in the Chinese data.

The authors acknowledge that this study was small scale and data were collected from a narrow sample from one urban region of China, and we should be cautious with the generalisability of findings to other regions and schools of China since there are significant discrepancies between developed coastal areas and large cities and the remote rural areas in China. Furthermore, interview data were only collected once, restricting insight to a snapshot in time. This research may be seen as an encouragement to researchers from other regions and countries to further explore the impact of socially situated understandings of teacher professionalism on practice. Future research could also benefit from utilising multiple data sources, longitudinal design and cross-cultural collaborations to further explore the challenge of defining teachers' understandings of professionalism locally while engaging with global perspectives.

The practical implications relate to (1) expanding conceptualisations of teacher professionalism by developing locally nuanced understandings of perceptions and enactments of professionalism in different contexts across the profession, which take account of the unique roles of national and local cultural contexts; (2) designing initial teacher education and continuing professional development programmes so that they take account of the influences on the professions' ideals and individual teacher identities, of the ideological and practical interplay in the workplace of structures such as mandated standards, and different socio-economic geographical settings (e.g. rural and urban); (3) designing leadership development programmes that take account of research on associations between school leaders' values, qualities and practices on school cultures and their effects on teachers' well-being, and capacities and capabilities to fulfil their understandings of being professionals and teach to their best.

The social implications relate to (1) further research on the associations between the effects of external policy demands on teachers' work and work–life tensions, teachers' sustained commitment and quality; and (2) further research on the impact of the collective influences of national cultures, broad-based policy conditions, personal values and the demands of particular schools, parents and students that influence teachers' experience, perceptions and enactments of professionalism in order to provide further insights into understanding the complexity of teachers' lives and promoting teachers' sustained enactments of professionalism in broad contexts.

The research findings, though tentative, revealed that the altruistic nature of their mission to serve students and the parental community was the dominant marker of professionalism for teachers in China, regardless of school structures, cultures, academic achievement imperatives and personal circumstance; and that their professionalism was informed by the socio-cultural formation of individual and collective moral responsibility, reinforced through national educational policies. These findings differed from the concerns reported by the teachers in the Australian study, which aligned with literature that suggests that teacher professionalism is being eroded through neo-liberal government policies, excessive workloads and performance-oriented cultures. Though the comparative data set is small, these findings suggest that whilst there are increasing policy convergences across nations, which seek to define teacher professionalism through their abilities to make improvements in students' measurable academic achievement, how teachers in different countries and cultures define themselves as professionals may differ.

Instructional leadership has been an active area of educational administration research over the past 30 years. However, there has been significant divergence in how instructional leadership has been conceptualized over time. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of 25 years of quantitative instructional leadership research, up through 2013, using a nationally generalizable data set.

The authors conducted a meta-narrative review of 109 studies that investigated at least one aspect of instructional leadership using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) administered by the US National Center for Education Statistics.

There were four major themes of instructional leadership research that analyzed SASS data: principal leadership and influence, teacher autonomy and influence, adult development, and school climate. The three factors most researched in relationship to instructional leadership themes were: teacher satisfaction, teacher commitment, and teacher retention. This study details the major findings within each theme, describes the relationships between all seven factors, and integrates the relationships into a single model.

This paper provides the most comprehensive literature review to-date of quantitative findings investigating instructional leadership from the same nationally generalizable data set. This paper provides evidence that leadership for learning is the conceptual evolution of 25 years of diverse instructional leadership research.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the benefits of an inclusive community singing group towards well-being.

This study used an exploratory qualitative study (EQS) approach. Semi-structured questions were devised and used to elicit participants’ experiences on the impact of an inclusive community singing group towards well-being. A thematic approach underpinned by the four phases of The Silences Framework was used to analyse the data.

This study found the following benefits of an inclusive community singing group towards well-being Connecting with others, Physical improvement, Learning new skills, Giving to others and Mindfulness.

This study concluded that inclusive community singing plays a pivotal role in enhancing the health and well-being of communities.

This paper aims to focus on the most popular technique nowadays, the use of microwave irradiation in organic synthesis; in a few years, most chemists will use microwave energy to heat chemical reactions on a laboratory scale. Also, many scientists use microwave technology in the industry. They have turned to microwave synthesis as a frontline methodology for their projects. Microwave and microwave-assisted organic synthesis (MAOS) has emerged as a new “lead” in organic synthesis.

Using microwave radiation for synthesis and design of fluorescent dyes is of great interest, as it decreases the time required for synthesis and the synthesized dyes can be applied to industrial scale.

The technique offers many advantages, as it is simple, clean, fast, efficient and economical for the synthesis of a large number of organic compounds. These advantages encourage many chemists to switch from the traditional heating method to microwave-assisted chemistry.

This review highlights applications of microwave chemistry in organic synthesis for fluorescent dyes. Fluorescents are a fairly new and very heavily used class of organics. These materials have many applications, as a penetrant liquid for crack detection, synthetic resins, plastics, printing inks, non-destructive testing and sports ball dyeing.

The aim value of this review is to define the scope and limitation of microwave synthesis procedures for the synthesis of novel fluorescent dyes via a simple and economic way.