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The aim of this paper is to express a point of view concerning recent recommendations to reduce or eliminate the authority of state securities regulators.

The paper cites three recent reports by the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, McKinsey & Co., and the US Chamber of Commerce and makes a case for a continued, strong role of state securities regulators, working alongside federal and SRO regulators.

The study contends that the cited reports reach the wrong conclusions concerning US capital markets competitiveness and the need to weaken the securities regulatory framework.

The paper expresses a state securities regulator's point of view and provides the reader with web site references for three important recent reports in US capital markets competitiveness.

There is a need for project management practitioners to adapt and thrive in today's volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) project-based workplaces. In this paper, the linkage between work readiness and career resilience is developed, presenting both concepts as critical for effective strategic responses and adaptation to the changing labor market in organizations.

The resource-based view (RBV) and integrated dynamic capabilities (IDCs) are the theoretical lenses that are used to link the concepts of work readiness and career resilience across the individual and organizational levels.

A framework and model are proposed to establish a holistic understanding of catalysts for addressing the VUCA context that organizations face. The proposed conceptual linkage adds a chronological dimension to the formation of the interrelated dynamic capabilities during the early career phase of project management practitioners.

The contribution to the project management literature includes a theoretically driven conceptual framework that links two complementary concepts to address the career challenges faced by project managers. Work readiness is positioned as an enabler of career resilience and together they constitute vital attributes which foster talent retention in the current VUCA work environment.

Work readiness and career resilience are underexplored topics in the project management literature, both individually and in conjunction. Specifically, there is a research gap in view of linking these two concepts to present them as a catalyst for project management talent sustainability, and the proposed framework is an initial step in addressing these gaps.

This study examines the effects of organizational attention on technological search in the multibusiness firm. We argue that attentional specialization and coupling, or (respectively) attention given to problems within and across units, affect a unit’s ability to engage in distant and local search by shaping how problems are perceived and addressed. We test this theory by applying a probabilistic topic model to all Motorola patents issued from 1974 to 1997, thus identifying and measuring attention to technical problems. Our results suggest that (a) subunits with specialized attention are not myopic but instead explore broadly and (b) tight attentional coupling across units increases the breadth of search. This study contributes to attention-based views of the firm and to studies on organizational design and search.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience. Alongside, the mediating role of career-management fit was also tested on the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience.

Cross-sectional data were collected from the employees of higher-education institutes via an online survey questionnaire. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique using the SmartPLS application was employed for the data analyses.

Results showed that career-management fit positively mediates the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience. Further, a direct positive relationship between career adaptability and career resilience was also substantiated.

Theoretical implications, managerial implications, study limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

The authors put forward the field by probing the developmental strategy for career resilience. This is because, in academics, career-resilient individuals can better contribute towards academic growth and can also maintain a good life balance (Mishra and McDonald, 2017). Hence, this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to investigate the career-management fit as a pathway bridging career adaptability and career resilience.

Insurance in Malta has been very largely influenced by English practice and law. The influence of the English market insurance practice and law not only shaped the Maltese market but practically that of all common law jurisdictions in former members of the British empire. Since the London insurance market continues to be a very dominant force globally until today, the connection has undoubtedly served Malta well.

The origins of UK insurance principles of utmost good faith and insurable interest under contract law, date back to times which were very different from today and the need to revise the laws has now been felt in the UK as well as in other jurisdictions which were influenced by its law and practice. In Malta, minimal legislative intervention and the Maltese courts were and continue to be mostly guided by English case law, some of which has now been superseded by the updated statute law which was recently introduced in the UK by virtue of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act (2012) and Insurance Act (2015).

We herein lay out a case study of the development of utmost good faith and insurable interest in insurance contracts within the Maltese legal context, based on empirical literature findings and semi-structured interviews together with several legal experts who are specialized in the field and experienced insurance professionals.

Reports on Management Round table′s conference on “Mass customization – at a profit: any variety, any time, anywhere”, which attempted to explain the implications of mass customization and how companies are utilizing it to satisfy customers. Provides a summary of the methods, ideas and conclusions from the conference, giving ideas from Joseph Pine and Stan Davis on responding to the customer; outlines a report from IBM′s senior director of product design, explaining how IBM used creative imagination in engineering to customize PCs for its consumers. Concludes that mass customization will define leading organizations in the next century, along with rapid turnover from customer specification to actual product.

The present study aims to conduct a critical review of an existing set of practices within the Maltese public sector.

This study is based on interpretivism (people-centred approach) embedded in a pragmatic research paradigm (the use of mixed methods).

Misconceptions about the role and practice of executive coaching in Malta relates to the similar roles ascribed to mentoring, supervision, therapy, consultation, coaching, audit and watchdog under the misnomer of “coaching”.

The main contribution of this research is to the community of professional practitioners as well as to the Maltese central government to improve managerial effectiveness in the Maltese public sector with several endorsed policy-level recommendations presented in the study.

The results suggest a restructuring of a well-defined, structures, systems and dynamics within the Maltese public administration, the ability by senior management including senior public officers (SPOs) to recognise high-potential talents, the need to expand leadership capacity, the establishment of a professional coaching body and a national coaching network framework.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the role and impact of executive coaching in the Maltese public sector using quantitative and qualitative empirical data.

This paper seeks to discuss recent research concerning the subjective experience of recovery from severe mental health difficulties, with the aim of appraising the extent to which this literature has attended to the role of environmental and social conditions.

Following an overview of research focusing on environmental and social conditions and mental health generally, a focused literature review was undertaken to analyse gaps within the recovery literature, specifically in relation to the importance of environmental or social contexts. Thematic analysis was used to derive salient themes from this literature. Research methodologies are appraised with regards to the extent to which they are congruent with an examination of the context of recovery.

A total of 11 papers relating to the impact of place or context on recovery were reviewed. Key themes identified were: the relationship between place, social context, and identity; safety and security; social connectedness; and contradictory impacts of the mental health system. The authors argue that recent qualitative research has over emphasised the subjective experience of recovery at the expense of a rich description of the place in which research is conducted. This approach dislocates recovery from its geographical location and the wider political and economic system in which it occurs.

A gap is identified within the current literature concerning recovery from severe mental health difficulties. In order to better understand the environmental factors that contribute to recovery, research needs to include rich descriptions of place, i.e. the physical and social environment as situated within the wider political and economic context.

The main purpose of this paper is to propose a quasi-impedance source (QIS) converter fed switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive. The proposed converter topology is configured for DC link capacitance minimization and power factor (PF) correction.

A QIS converter is used as a front end converter to reduce the bulk capacitance requirement during current commutation and to decline the power ripple. To improve the PF with reduced total harmonic distortion at the input current, the PF current control loop is merged with the QIS converter control loop.

The overall SRM drive speed is regulated over a wide range by controlling the DC link voltage. The voltage regulation can be achieved by pulse width modulation of the QIS converter. Hence, the overall system efficiency has been improved by operating the proposed converter at a low switching frequency. Moreover, the proposed QIS converter uses an advanced repetitive controller to achieve voltage regulation and fewer ripples in torque.

The steady state and dynamic analyzes have been performed on the proposed drive topology. The performance of the proposed topology has been simulated through MATLAB/Simulink environment. A hardware prototype with a processor of Xilinx SPARTAN 6 field-programmable gate array has been used to validate the experimental response with the simulation results.