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Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

Mental health is a growing concern amongst UK employers, yet eight in ten employers currently have no mental health policy. This paper aims to highlight why employers should implement such a policy and gives advice on implementing an effective well-being policy.

Punter Southall Health and Protection recently released “Employee Wellbeing Research 2018”, carried out in association with Reward & Employee Benefits Association. This research report looks at the current trends in workplace well-being.

The Employee Wellbeing Research 2018 report revealed that 73 per cent of respondents said high pressure working environments are now the biggest threat to well-being and are worried about the negative impact on their employees. But one striking issue the research revealed is that programmes are not being driven by the Board. Less than one in ten (8 per cent) said that their Board actively drives the organisation’s well-being agenda and one in 20 (5 per cent) reported that their Board has little or no interest in employee well-being.

This paper is aimed at HR professionals, senior management, CEOs and board members.

This study aims to explore the need for improved data sources and models for COVID-19 and climate-related risk scenario analysis in primary production. The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting global markets for agricultural produce, making short-term forecasting highly uncertain. Meanwhile climate-related risk continues for agricultural businesses. Farmers and their accountants need to plan and make estimates about the potential effect of COVID-19 and ongoing climate risks to their natural and financial capital and so they need accounting-integrated biophysical and socio-economic data streams.

This research note reviews the current state of scenario-based planning for COVID-19 and other risks for Australian businesses generally, in addition to planning for farming businesses more specifically. Discussion of the authors’ current research in integrating accounting and farming data for water-related risk caused by climate and other challenges is presented as an analogous case.

Review and analogous case comparison demonstrate the need for farm data to be integrated more efficiently and effectively with accounting data for accurate scenario planning for COVID-19 and other risks, including those posed by climate.

While not strangers to the need for scenario analysis, given exposure to ever-increasing natural resource and climate variability, this research note highlights how primary producers and their accountants require increased accounting-integrated farm data and systems to make judgements, assumptions and estimates about the potential effect of COVID-19 and ongoing climate risks to their business.

The sustainability of the agricultural sector is of great relevance to all of us and so the development of tools and resources that can assist food producers in times of ongoing climate pressures and new crises, such as COVID-19, is important. Better understanding of such risks can help farm businesses develop effective strategies which minimise the potential loss of agricultural value resulting in improved flows of greater capital value for society.

Through application to the analogous case of water-related risk and decision-making, the research note demonstrates that linking of biophysical and accounting data streams will be essential for evidence-backed numbers included in scenario plans with enough legitimacy to be interrogated inside and outside of the business. The “best estimate of the directors” is no longer enough in challenging socio-economic and biophysical times ahead for primary producers.

Agriculture is under pressure to produce more food under increasingly variable climate conditions. Consequently, producers need management innovations that lead to improved physical and financial productivity. Currently, farm accounting technologies lack the sophistication to allow producers to analyse productivity of water. Furthermore water-related agricultural technology (“agtech”) systems do not readily link to accounting innovations. This study aims to establish a conceptual and practical framework for linking temporal, biophysical and management decision-making to accounting by develop a soil moisture and climate monitoring tool.

The paper adopts an exploratory mixed-methods approach to understand supply of and demand for water accounting and water-related agtech; and bundling these innovations with farm accounting to generate a stable tool with the ability to improve agricultural practices over time. Three phases of data collection are the focus here: first, a desk-based review of water accounting and water technology – including benchmarking of key design characteristics of these methods and key actor interviews to verify and identify trends, allowing for conceptual model development; second, a producer survey to test demand for the “bundled” conceptual model; third and finally, a participant-based case study in potato-farming that links the data from direct monitoring and remote sensing to farm accounts.

Design characteristics of water accounting and agtech innovations are bundled into an overall irrigation decision-making conceptual model based on in-depth review of available innovations and verification by key actors. Producer surveys suggest enough demand to pursue practical bundling of these innovations undertaken by developing an integrated accounting, soil moisture and climate monitoring tool on-farm. Productivity trends over two seasons of case study data demonstrate the pivotal role of accounting in leading to better technical irrigation decisions and improving water productivity.

The model can assist practitioners to gauge strengths and weaknesses of contemporary water accounting fads and fashions and potential for innovation bundling for improved water productivity. The practical tool demonstrates how on-farm irrigation decision-making can be supported by linking farm accounting systems and smart technology

The history of the early years of the library movement in Ireland must be read in conjunction with its political counterpart in order to understand why, although the enabling Acts were almost contemporaneous with those in Britain, little or no growth took place in public sector libraries outside the major cities in the turbulent times before 1928. The academic libraries looked for scholarly excellence and subject specialisation in their staff and were satisfied that, given these qualifications, the collection and organisation of their book resources were adequately catered for. But the pressure of a lending system, with its requirement of an organised and controllable lending stock, ensured that those engaged in it in the major urban centres quickly recognised the need for special qualification, and turned to the Library Association in Britain to follow its courses leading to Fellowship. The need for an Irish library school was perceived, and Adams suggested Dublin as its base, as early as 1919. Little progress was recorded until 1928 when two major developments took place simultaneously — the School of Library Training was established in University College Dublin and the Library Association of Ireland was founded. William Martin in his thesis for the Fellowship of the Library Association of Ireland suggests that the impetus for the establishment of the school came from within University College Dublin where it was perceived as a vehicle for enabling graduates to obtain posts in the emerging County Libraries. Others, with perhaps more authority, have held that there were pressures on the College by the fore‐runner of the Library Association of Ireland (Cumann na Leabharlann) to provide an opportunity for Irish people engaged in library work to obtain a qualification in their own country. Whichever the reason, it is clear that there was conflict between the School, which was conceived by the University as offering a postgraduate qualification, and the public library sector which saw only the danger that such a regulation would close all opportunity for qualification, and by implication promotion to the new county libraries, to all but a very few of their staff. In the circumstances University College agreed to admit non‐graduate public library staff having an approved length of experience and having successfully completed a year's study of the Arts course to the Diploma Course. This practice has continued to the present day.

The CW’s long-running horror-drama series Supernatural (2005–) has been accused of undoing progressive advances for women made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003). While it’s hard to deny the truth in that claim, Supernatural also problematizes conventional gender roles from a very different approach, one that plays with perceptions of masculinity and social class.

Buffy Summers may initially seem to have more in common with Supernatural’s Sam Winchester, a chosen one with special powers who wants a normal life away from the supernatural. However, Buffy shares more in common with Dean Winchester. Embodying popular gendered stereotypes in their introductions, it’s gradually revealed that there is more complexity to each. Both form alliances with Others; both recognize elements of the Other in themselves. Both transgress conventional gender boundaries, complicating the notion of a binary gender system. Both series introduce the seemingly familiar only to alter it into the uncanny. See the little cute blonde virginal cheerleader? She can kick your ass. See the stupid cocky womanizing jock? All he wants is family and a home. This chapter explores the increasingly gender-blended, social-class-crossing behaviours of Supernatural’s Dean Winchester as an heir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1997, Congress enacted legislation to transition the Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae) from status as a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) to a fully-private, non-federally chartered organization. The process through which this legislation was enacted will have precedential value for future legislation affecting other GSEs.

This article reviews the unique context in which the Sallie Mae Privatization Act was considered and enacted. Sallie Mae was an active participant in the development of the privatization legislation, and Congress had little precedent in considering the diverse interests of stakeholders such as other entities involved in student loans, taxpayers, and Sallie Mae shareholders. Full assessment of the 1997 legislation requires a review of how the “privatizing” of Sallie Mae changes the student loan marketplace.