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Although a supportive workplace is increasingly considered important for employees' performance, much of the evidence remains speculative, for example, it lacks offsetting mechanisms. This study addresses circumstances when perceived support helps and when it hurts work performance, depending on the mediating effects of job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction under the boundary conditions of perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and felt stress.

This study collected data using a questionnaire protocol that was adapted and refined from the original scales in existing studies. The sample consists of 900 employees from the public healthcare industry in Vietnam. To test the hypotheses, the partial least squares (PLS) technique was used.

This study finds that job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction are important for the perceived support and work performance relationship in which perceived helpfulness of social media platforms plays a critical confounding role. The findings also confirm that felt stress negatively moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and work performance, weakening the effect job satisfaction has on employee work performance.

This study specifies the boundary conditions under which work performance is mostly affected while enhancing the understanding of how to reinforce intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. The findings offer organizational and human resource management (HRM) scholars and practitioners a closer look at perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and support the suggestions that autonomy-supportive workplaces are superior.

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, both educators and students adapted to course delivery modes no longer centered on in-person interactions. Resiliency and self-regulation are key to success in online contexts, but the rapid transition to remote learning left many students without the necessary support to develop these skills. Much of the existing literature on self-regulation and resiliency focuses on cognitive processes and strategies such as goal orientation, time management, and mindset. However, the added stress and trauma of learning in the context of a global pandemic highlighted the many other factors relevant to students’ development of these skills. Drawing from the literature, the authors explore evidence-informed teaching practices to foster self-regulation and resiliency, highlight the power and privilege of being able to be resilient, advocate for the development of pedagogies of kindness, and emphasize the “how” of implementing techniques to best support students. The authors provide evidence-informed suggestions with the goal of assisting instructors and students during times of high stress, while acknowledging their limitations in addressing structural inequalities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the authors argue that evidence-informed techniques and compassionate pedagogies adopted during a period of upheaval remain applicable to future in-person and online pedagogies.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

In my last column in Collection Building, I was concerned with an article that appeared in a 1982 issue of Publishers Weekly which dealt with the ways book publishers are attempting to deal with economic hard times. I commented that all the nickel‐and‐dime belt‐tightening measures outlined in the article ignored one of the most serious and costly aspects of the publishing business: the entire process of book distribution, the improvement of which The Book Industry Study Group called “an essential ingredient for the [book] industry's future growth,” in its 1982 report Book Distribution in the United States: Issues and Perceptions. But just how seriously the book industry takes one of its own most critical problems was brought out in the Publishers Weekly Yearbook: News, Analyses, and Trends in the Book Industry (Bowker, 1983), a volume summarizing the year's activity in the book business. Book distribution is mentioned just once, on page two, where the book's editor, John F. Baker, says that “the traditional patterns in which books were manufactured, distributed, and sold [were] rapidly changing.” No further discussion of how these distribution patterns were “rapidly changing” can be found, and from the viewpoint of one who has to deal daily with the distribution problem, I can only wonder what “rapid” changes Mr. Baker refers to—or even what non‐rapid changes have occurred since the Book Industry Study Group's 1982 report, which concluded emphatically, that “of all industry segments, publishers' practices would need to change most to achieve significant distribution improvements.”

This paper seeks to add historical perspective to the contemporary debate concerning the efficacy of executive bonuses. That debate has become particularly significant in the USA as a result of the recent economic collapse and the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, turning the government – at least temporarily – into a shareholder of numerous companies.

The article is primarily an intellectual history of an idea: that executive bonuses are required to achieve top performance. The main primary source is two sets of articles from the Harvard Business Review from the 1930s and the 1950s. These are supplemented by other primarily and secondary material.

Arch Patton, a McKinsey Consultant and the most published author in the Harvard Business Review during the 1950s, constructed a defense of executive bonuses based on ideology rather than empirical evidence.

Constituents of the current debate on executive bonuses should be aware of the degree to which statements of support for efficacy are often presented as universally and exclusively correct which may result in distortion and concealment of real interests.

Despite the ubiquity of executive bonuses, no study has looked at the historical roots of the debate. Agency theory, which is presented as a rational and legitimate argument in favor of such bonuses, fails to address the historical context in which bonuses actually took root in corporate America.

If this is the only voice that is heard it will be deplorable. These restaurants and many like them, but which do not actually carry the official title, could and should fulfil as essential rôle in peace‐time as under war conditions. They are almost universally popular—mass observation reports 96 per cent. favourable comments by those who use them—they serve nutritious meals, based, as are school meals, on a defined nutritional plan, they are economic, they show very low wastage figures. On the whole, the same is true of industrial canteens, now over 4,000 strong and increasing at the rate of 100 a month. In these two closely related types of communal restaurant we have the essentials of what might become, with competent handling and appropriate guidance, one of the most vital foundations of our industrial machine, the health and efficiency of the workers. In 1937 I saw what could be achieved in this direction. It was in Soviet Russia, and I was deeply impressed. I could long exceed my time by referring to other developments in practical nutrition that will, I believe, proceed at a greatly accelerated speed in the post‐war years as a result of what has happened during the war. One more matter I would like to discuss. It is not only of outstanding importance, but one on which most of the others depend. I refer to education about food and food values. Outside Soviet Russia, no such effort has ever before been made to teach a nation the simple facts of nutrition and what to eat as the publicity campaign carried on since the war began by the Public Relations Division of the Ministry of Food. Its success is not measured by the expenditure of many thousand pounds, but by the millions who tune in their wireless sets at 8.15 a.m. for the “Kitchen Front” and by the popularity of the ubiquitous “Food Facts.” The campaign might have been a dismal failure. Had it been presented in scientific jargon about calories, proteins and vitamins, its fate would have been sealed within a few months. As it was planned, the basic idea was to draw attention to the natural foods good for health and the best ways of serving them. It aimed at making the people “food conscious,” in the best sense of the term, and left all but the barest scientic outline to the experts, who know how to fill in the detail, and the cranks, who usually do not. It was sound judgment and, in my opinion, any continuance on an extensive scale of food propaganda after the war must have a similar basis if it is to lead to better feeding and better cooking and not result in half the nation becoming hypochondriacs and the rest faddists. It was touch and go in the United States, already for some years past very much more “food conscious” than we are. Commercial exploitation of the sale of special vitamin products has been on such a scale in recent years that to‐day every drug store counter is loaded with a bewildering choice of pills and tablets, capsules and candies, every one guaranteed to contain all the vitamin alphabet. The movement actually gained such strength that it threatened at one time to pervert men of standing in the nutritional field. There was a more serious aspect of this than the mere possibility that they would themselves acquire the tablet habit. There is about to be launched in the United States a vast nation‐wide and Government‐sponsored propaganda campaign for promoting sound health by ensuring good nutrition. The plans for this campaign are now approved, and it is shortly to open in every one of the 3,000 counties of the 48 States of the Union. The really important thing is that it is planned on the note “eat good food.” What is the message? Consume every day a pint of milk—more for children—an orange, grape‐fruit or fresh vegetable salad; one big helping of green or yellow vegetables; other vegetables (potatoes); whole grain products or “enriched” bread; meat, poultry or fish; at least three or four eggs a week; butter and other “spreads.” Then, “eat other foods you like!” Do you appreciate what it will mean when a nation of the size of the United States wholeheartedly adopts such a programme, as I am convinced it will, cost what it may? It will mean even more than a new era of health for millions who have in the past lacked the means to buy the food they need. It will call for a vast expansion of agriculture. Seventy per cent. more tomatoes and citrus fruits than are now eaten will be needed; over a third more eggs, nearly 25 per cent. more milk, and so on. In all, an increase representing at least 35–40 millions more acres of land under cultivation, and not an acre of it for cereal crops. I was surprised during a recent visit to Washington to find how great an interest is being taken in the agricultural implications of the new nutrition programme, and how many influential people have accepted them as indicating the general line of agricultural development there in the very near future. There is an atmosphere of anticipation. How they will bring the more expensive “protective foods” to the poorer families is not yet clear, but they have already shown by Mile Perkins' admirable Stamp Plan that simple and effective measures are not hard to devise. This ingenious relief measure would repay study here. We have certainly to tackle the same problem on an even wider front than at present, and the post‐war period will be every bit as important as the times to‐day. As Sir John Orr recently said in commenting on nutrition as a foundation of the New World Order : “A system which of set purpose in the interest of a few, limited the production and distribution of food and other necessities of life urgently needed by the vast majority of men is incompatible with human welfare.” In the wide expansion of the application of knowledge about food and its influence on health that will take place after the war, largely as a result of the striking successes that have followed its application to the problems of war‐time feeding, we shall need more active help from the doctors. America can show us the way. Her medical profession is solidly behind the nutrition “drive” in that great country. You will not find a hospital in the U.S.A. or Canada where the scientific planning of the diet of patients is not a first consideration. You will not find there that any sort of food is thought fit for nurses; I often think that the obsession of nurses in this country with purgatives of every type reflects more than tradition. I do not believe that such an historic innovation as the free distribution by the Government of cod‐liver oil and orange juice for every infant in the country would have been treated by the medical press of America as a matter worth no more than passing reference. I am certain the merits of an 85 per cent. wheaten flour of good quality would have evoked a warmer response from the American doctors, as a body, than they did here. But our doctors cannot be blamed if they do not know about these things, and the hard fact is that few outside the younger generations have the knowledge. I once remarked some years ago that a group of intelligent housewives could talk more sense about food values than a random selection of middle‐aged or elderly medical men. That is still a fair statement. The fault lies in our medical education. Apart from a few lectures during his physiology or bio‐chemistry course in the pre‐clinical years—and those of us who teach medical students know how little impression that makes—and seeing a certain amount of happy‐go‐lucky therapeutic administration of vitamins when he is in the wards, the average student has few opportunities to get anything like a proper comprehension of a subject vital to his whole life's work.

The recent debate in the House of Lords showed that the official plans for milk of better quality, set out in the White Paper three years ago, are only slowly being put into effect. A more active policy was, however, promised by Lord Ammon when labour and plant made it possible. Farmers have come to accept the view that a safe milk supply depends both upon the improvement of animal health and on the heat‐treatment of milk. Some recent figures issued in the Monthly Bulletin of the Ministry of Health show what the pasteurisation of milk has already achieved in reducing the number of deaths among young children from abdominal tuberculosis, a form of the disease which is generally due to tubercle bacillus of bovine origin. In 1921, in the administrative county of London, 136 out of every 1,000,000 children died from this disease. In 1944 the corresponding figure was six. In rural areas the rate in 1921 was 252 and in 1944 still sixty, or ten times the London rate. The London figures for 1944 show a reduction to one‐twenty‐third of the 1921 rate, while for rural areas the reduction is only about one‐quarter. These figures suggest a high degree of correspondence between the increase of pasteurisation and the decrease of mortality from abdominal tuberculosis. In 1944 99 per cent. of London milk supplies was pasteurised; and though more milk has been treated in rural areas and in urban areas outside London during the past twenty years, nothing like the London standard has yet been generally reached. Large towns such as London are at one disadvantage in regard to milk safety in that they receive their supplies in bulk, and samples, before pasteurisation, show a high degree of infection. To this extent rural areas might be expected to have better figures. That they do not would appear to be proof of the greater safety provided by pasteurisation. In the House of Lords debate Lord Rothschild estimated the annual casualties from raw milk contaminated by bovine tuberculosis germs as between 7,000 and 8,000. The case for speedier progress with the provision of pasteurisation plant will be generally endorsed. This development under the auspices of the Ministry of Health needs to be supported by a vigorous effort by the Ministry of Agriculture to build up the health of dairy herds. The problems involved in establishing clean areas, beginning with isolated districts and extending them gradually until in ten or fifteen years' time the whole country is clear of tuberculosis and contagious abortion, were recently discussed in these columns. The Milk Marketing Board, the producers' organisation, has now declared its support for a national drive to clean up the dairy herds; and the Government are assured of general support when a comprehensive plan for ensuring safety in milk is put forward.