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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the Great Recession on small- to medium-sized municipalities within the states of Georgia and Florida using a newly developed set of quantitative indices.

An examination of the methods and strategies utilized by individual cities to maintain public service levels despite distressed revenues is performed. From the data, performance measures are developed and used to evaluate the efficacy of the various strategies used by the cities. Outcomes of Georgia municipalities were compared to similarly sized Florida municipalities to study how underlying differences in tax structures and economies might have affected those outcomes.

Georgia and Florida municipalities relied on very different strategies for surviving the recession and its aftermath. Enterprise activities were critically important in both states with transfers to or from governmental activities rationalized in various ways. While Georgia is generally anti-property tax, more than half the Georgia municipalities relied on property tax increases to survive. Municipalities were unable to count on increased intergovernmental revenues during the recession. Finally, even with a tourist activity advantage, Florida municipalities fared only marginally better during and just after the recession, and fared worse four to six years post-recession.

The measures developed in this study provide a new, customizable methodology for the evaluation of financial condition that does not require in-depth comparisons to peers.

Small- and medium-sized cities, and especially those in rural areas, are worthy of targeted research to better understand their unique problems.

This research is novel in utilizing a fiscal condition methodology that can be applied to a single municipality and does not require comparisons to peers for validity. However, it represents a very intuitive and customizable tool for making comparisons between municipalities of any size when such comparisons are desired. Additionally, the focus of this study is on small- to medium-sized municipalities which generally do not receive as much research attention as larger cities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the adoption of videos on US hospital web sites in an attempt to find out how this new medium had been used by hospitals for marketing purposes.

Based on a systematic probability sample of the 6,456 US hospital web sites, a content analysis is conducted to measure the effects that hospital service quality, hospital size, hospital affiliation, and geographic population had on the diffusion of online videos.

The paper has found that, although the critical mass for using videos on hospital web sites has been reached, for the overwhelming majority of the hospitals, including those that are already using videos, there is still a long way to go in learning how to harness the power of video for marketing and to make videos an integral and routine part of their marketing strategy.

Further studies need to be conducted to uncover hospitals' attitudes and users' attitudes toward new media adoption on hospital web sites for presenting healthcare information.

The paper gives readers an overview of the current state of hospitals' efforts in adopting new media for marketing and can greatly help hospitals better position their marketing strategies to serve their patients, communities, and hospital staff, and invest in the right technology and new recruits.

The literature search indicates that this is the first study of its kind that has attempted to find out how hospitals have taken advantage of video, a salient Web 2.0 phenomenon, to present healthcare information on their web sites as a marketing strategy.

International relations and security studies suffer from an inadequate understanding of established theories in organizational leadership and management studies. This chapter contributes to these disciplines by drawing upon such models to analyze the changes in political leadership approaches of China and the United States in their interactions over maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS). Using the transactional–transformational and directive–participative leadership paradigms as its foundation, the analysis argues (1) that contextual factors unique to the each country shape its political leadership styles and (2) the leadership styles within each case study have changed dramatically over the past decades in terms of their rhetoric and policies for managing the SCS disputes. Empirical evidence is based on the policies, leaders’ statements, and official documents of China, a claimant to SCS maritime territory, and the United States, an influential stakeholder in the disputes. In the two case studies, the chapter discusses the implications of the changing leadership styles for the understanding of political interaction in the region and the future of the SCS disputes.

Historically, Panama has always been “a place of transit.” While technically the isthmus formed part of Colombia in the nineteenth century, it was linked geopolitically to the United States soon after the California gold rush, beginning in the late 1840s. The first attempt at building a canal ended in failure in 1893 when disease and poor management forced Ferdinand de Lesseps to abandon the project. The U.S. undertaking to build the canal could only begin after Panama declared itself free and broke away from Colombia in 1903, with the support of the United States.

The importance of learning how to disagree constructively has long been valued as a fundamental aspect of democratic life. Yet, while well-known discussion methodologies such as seminars, Structured Academic Controversy (SAC), and discussions of Controversial Public Issues (CPIs) foster essential skills for constructive disagreement, there is little explicit emphasis on connecting constructive disagreement with the concept of a loyal opposition in a democracy. The process of learning how to disagree constructively is also presented as one that is learned solely through intellectual exercises — any exploration of the body’s role in this process is generally ignored. This document argues that by more clearly linking constructive disagreement with the place of a loyal opposition in a democracy and by considering the body as an additional “entry point,” educators would be making a stronger case for the place of constructive disagreement skills in the social studies curriculum.

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.

The major findings of this exploratory research are that a firm’s level of market commitment through future investments will increase in strategically important markets, regardless of high consumer complicity to purchase fake goods; that companies will employ additional anti‐counterfeiting tactics in markets with a high level of pirates and a high degree of enforcement of its intellectual property rights; and that companies employ a standardized approach of anti‐counterfeiting tactics targeted at consumers.

Roots of global Terrorism are in ‘failed’ states carved out of multiracial empires after World Wars I and II in name of ‘national self‐determination’. Both sides in the Cold War competed to exploit the process of disintegration with armed and covert interventions. In effect, they were colluding at the expense of the ‘liberated’ peoples. The ‘Vietnam Trauma’ prevented effective action against the resulting terrorist buildup and blowback until 9/11. As those vultures come home to roost, the war broadens to en vision overdue but coercive reforms to the postwar system of nation states, first in the Middle East. Mirages of Vietnam blur the vision; can the sole Superpower finish the job before fiscal and/or imperial overstretch implode it?