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This study investigates Chinese consumers' responses to foreign and domestic sponsors engaged in the Beijing Olympic Games. It identifies direct causal relationships between consumer ethnocentrism, attitudes towards the sponsor and product judgement. Findings reveal that event involvement mediates the positive relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and attitudes towards the domestic sponsor. Attitudes towards foreign sponsors are found to be a significant mediator in the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and judgements of the sponsors' products. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

THE Woolwich Borough Council have made the retirement of Dr. Baker from the post of Borough Librarian the opportunity of adopting the reactionary policy of dividing the Woolwich library system into three independent parts. They do not propose to fill Dr. Baker's post, and have made three members of the staff librarians‐in‐charge of the Woolwich, Eltham, and Plumstead libraries. Within recent years West Ham and Lewisham have adopted a similar policy; while an opposite course has been taken by Southwark and Westminster. It is obvious that an already limited income will be even more inadequate when it is administered in three separate parts. A small temporary advantage may accrue to certain localities of the borough, but the library service of the borough as a whole is bound to suffer. There is plenty of evidence that the greatest library service can be given to a district when the libraries form one organic whole. So much for the present; now for the future. Woolwich is growing rapidly in some localities, and when the inevitable library extension is required, what is going to happen ? Each of the older districts is going to be mulcted of a part of its already far from adequate share in order to finance still another separate administration. Instead of the Borough library service under one administration becoming increasingly efficient with the growth of the district, it is going to remain a series of small and comparatively ineffective units. Then there is another aspect of the question which touches us even more closely professionally. If library systems are going to be divided in this way, men and women are not going to be found willing to go through the long and special training necessary for an administrative librarian, because the position of “librarian‐in‐charge” is no return for such training. In this way, if this policy is going to spread, a much more serious blow still will be struck at the library efficiency of the country.

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

The text of a lecture given by Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, to mark the opening of the new facilities for the Department of Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. The theme of the lecture is public trust in what journalists write. Argues that, despite the public’s lack of trust in newspapers, they do in fact uncover many truths that business, industry and Government are attempting to conceal. Examples are provided from the energy industry, science and the environment, transport, Home Office and food safety. Describes the important role The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor has had in increasing public trust in the newspaper.

This article aims to look at the intersection between corporate governance and information and records management.

The information provided in this article is based on the author’s own experience and literature reviews.

It is necessary to check that whatever systems are in place are working, and keep working, as organisational structures and requirements and laws and other circumstances change.

This article will assist in understanding what corporate governance is, what it involves and what its purpose is. In addition, some of the issues which arise in turning the concept into reality are also, hopefully, clear.

William Blackwood, the founder of the firm of the name, saw service in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London before opening in 1804 as a bookseller at 64 South Bridge, Edinburgh. Blackwood continued in his bookselling capacity for a number of years, and his shop became a haunt of the literati, rivalling Constable's in reputation and in popularity. His first success as a publisher was in 1811, when he brought out Kerr's Voyages, an ambitious item, and followed shortly after by The Life of Knox by McCrie. About this time he became agent in Edinburgh for John Murray, and the two firms did some useful collaborating. Blackwood was responsible for suggesting alterations in The Black Dwarf, which drew from Scott that vigorous letter addressed to James Ballantyne which reads: “Dear James,—I have received Blackwood's impudent letter. G ‐ d ‐ his soul, tell him and his coadjutor that I belong to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither give nor receive criticism. I'll be cursed but this is the most impudent proposal that was ever made”. Regarding this story Messrs. Blackwood say: “This gives a slightly wrong impression. Scott was still incognito. William Blackwood was within his rights. He was always most loyal to Scott.” There has been some controversy as to the exact style of this letter, and it has been alleged that Lockhart did not print it in the same terms as Sir Walter wrote it. Blackwood came into the limelight as a publisher when he started the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in 1817, which was to be a sort of Tory counterblast to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. He appointed as editors James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle, who later said that they realised very soon that Blackwood was much too overbearing a man to serve in harness, and after a time they retired to edit Constable's Scots Magazine, which came out under the new name of The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany. [Messrs. Blackwood report as follows: “No. They were sacked—for incompetence and general dulness. (See the Chaldee Manuscript.) They were in office for six months only.”] Blackwood changed the name of The Edinburgh Magazine to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and became his own editor, with able henchmen in John Wilson, Christopher North, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg as contributors. It was a swashbuckling magazine, sometimes foul in attack, as when it told John Keats to get “back to the shop, back to plaster, pills, and ointment boxes”. Lockhart had a vigour of invective such as was quite in keeping with the age of Leigh Hunt, an age of hard‐hitting. The history of Blackwood in those days is largely the history of the magazine, though Blackwood was at the same time doing useful publishing work. He lost the Murray connexion, however, owing to the scandalous nature of some of the contributions published in Maga; these but expressed the spirit of the times. John Murray was scared of Blackwood's Scottish independence! Among the book publications of Blackwood at the period we find Schlegel's History of Literature, and his firm, as we know, became publisher for John Galt, George Eliot, D. M. Moir, Lockhart, Aytoun, Christopher North, Pollok, Hogg, De Quincey, Michael Scott, Alison, Bulwer Lytton, Andrew Lang, Charles Lever, Saintsbury, Charles Whibley, John Buchan, Joseph Conrad, Neil Munro—a distinguished gallery. In 1942 the firm presented to the National Library of Scotland all the letters that had been addressed to the firm from its foundation from 1804 to the end of 1900, and these have now been indexed and arranged, and have been on display at the National Library where they have served to indicate the considerable service the firm has given to authorship. The collection is valuable and wide‐ranging.

IN 1947 JAMES HOGG'S NOVEL The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was republished with an enthusiastic introduction by André Gide. Gide wrote that he had read the novel ‘with a stupefaction and admiration that increased at every page’, but nevertheless he was unable to find a cultured Englishman, American or Frenchman who had read the book or knew anything about its author. Since 1947 Hogg's novel has won a high reputation, a reputation which has been further enhanced by its recent publication in the Oxford English Novels series.

SO much controversy has raged around the subject of newsrooms in the past two years, that librarians are, as a rule, utterly tired of it, and the appearance of still another article upon the subject is not calculated to tone down the general spirit of vexation. It requires no little courage to appear in the arena in this year of Grace, openly championing those departments of our institutions which were originally intended to convey the news of the day in the broadest manner.

By stepping outside of the consumer socialization model (Ward, 1974) which for many years has resembled a ‘body of verified truths’ when it comes to understanding the complex intimacy between young consumers’ identities and the marketplace, this research aims to offer a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of the tangible light and shade, indeterminacy and yet ambition in which these young adolescents’ consumption practices and social contexts are inextricably intertwined.

Five different data collection methods were employed; namely personal diaries, in-depth interviews (which were conducted at two separate intervals), accompanied shopping trips, e-collages and researcher diaries. Each method was chosen so as to fulfil a specific purpose and reflect a specific angle of repose on the lived experience and consumption practices of a liminar – those at the heart of marketing’s newest strategic boundary.

This chapter describes some of the constituent elements of metaconsumption; the proposed theorization of the liminars’ consumption practices and a suggested diversion from ‘the effects’ perspective on young consumers’ socialization.

This chapter adds to those which problematize the tendency to view young consumers’ interactions with consumption as measurable by having to pass through pre-defined stages if they are to become recognized as complete consumers. Instead this research aligns with the perspective that young consumers, like adults, must mediate the shifting milieus of their social lives through engagement with a myriad consumption practices.

This perspective responds to an acknowledged empirical dearth (e.g. Martens, Southerton, & Scott, 2004). However, secondly in line with Arnould & Thompson’s (2005) original motivation that CCT encapsulate those who see our discipline as ripe with the potential for new theory generation and widespread applicability, this research aligns micro understandings and theorizations of children’s social worlds and consumer culture practices with existing meso- and macro-levels of consumption theory.