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The purpose of this paper is to share experiences of attending Sixth Form (SF) and to provide reflections on coping, stress management and support for an underresearched cohort of students in Britain. This will be the first in several papers dedicated to the experiences of Sixth Form (SF) students and the need for more research into this area as well as the exploration of the sources of stress that SF students may face.

Reflective, narrative first-person approach with supporting literature and own research over the master’s thesis of the author and current PhD research.

Key reflections are SF education lacks support for students who may feel undersupported. Many things other than academics are occurring in this time of life and can become problematic to the students if not supported. Students experience a myriad of changes across this time period but are left behind the author’s support and revision systems that cater to General Certificate of Secondary Education students but are unable to provide support for SF students.

Social implications are focussed on building awareness and research into the support needs and sources of stress for SF students.

This paper is one person’s experience with the institution of SF and the expectations, challenges and sources of stress that the author experienced. This paper contributes to the exploration of this underresearched cohort of students.

To analyze the main elements of continuous improvement (CI) in higher education and the concerns of academia's stakeholders in the implementation of such an approach. Suggests guidelines for the development of a culture more receptive to the implementation and maintenance of a CI approach in higher education.

A review of published literature (1982‐2004) facilitates identification of elements of CI, and concerns of academia's stakeholders for the adoption of a CI approach in higher education. The reviewed sources are grouped into three major sections: the CI approach, implications of CI, and an illustrative example – EQUIS.

The adoption of a CI approach in higher education requires not only upper administration commitment, but also uncovering the current underlying culture and examining the appropriateness of the objectives to adopt CI. A culture of a long‐term commitment to CI implies engaging the administrative and academic systems and all the stakeholders of the institution. This was identified as a major road‐block for quality initiatives.

There is a wide range of stakeholders to consider and some stakeholders have diverse objectives in pursuing a CI approach. Future research should explore these agendas to identify core issues needing to be addressed to speed up the shift towards a CI culture.

Required accreditations in colleges and universities offer an increasingly important role to a CI approach in higher education and its impact on academic stakeholders.

This paper fulfils an identified information/resources need and offers practical help to colleges of business seeking accreditations and institutions of higher education pursuing CI initiatives.

The grade of membership function for fuzzy monotone functions is defined and investigated. An algorithm for finding the membership value is presented. A minterm even function and minterm odd function are defined and studied. It is found that these two functions are the two most alternation functions. The relationships with threshold functions are also presented. In addition, three ways to implement a fuzzy monotone increasing function are investigated. Applications to function representation, data compression and error detection are illustrated. The results have useful applications in fuzzy logic, expert systems, fuzzy expert systems, and also management of uncertainty.

A fuzzy symmetric threshold (ST) function is defined to be a fuzzy set over the set of functions. All ST functions have full memberships in this fuzzy set. For n variables, there are (2n+2) ST functions. A distance measure between a nonsymmetric threshold function and the set of all ST functions is defined and investigated. An explicit expression for the membership function of a fuzzy ST function is defined through the use of this distance measure. An algorithm for obtaining this distance measure is presented with illustrative examples. It is also shown that any function and its complement always have the same grade of membership in the class of fuzzy ST functions. Applications to concise function representation and simple function implementation are also presented with examples. In addition, most inseparable unsymmetric functions are defined and investigated. Fuzzy ST functions are relevant to the development of practical applications of fuzzy methods and might contribute to the state of the art in the implementations of fuzzy methods in the areas requiring utilization of ST functions.

According to the most recent theories, the competitiveness of organizations is based on the development of competencies. Core competencies result from greater mastery than competitors of organizational abilities valued by customers. This paper seeks to investigate how a more thorough integration of the supply chain may be associated with greater mastery of operational competencies.

The study is based on a mail survey carried out among Canadian manufacturing companies.

The statistical analyses identified four clusters of respondents with regard to their supply chain management practices. These practices may be either distant or integrated with upstream or downstream partners. The other component of the study made it possible to identify four operational competencies – i.e. cost, delivery, logistic services, and design. It was observed that the group with the most highly integrated supply practices mastered an operational competency in logistic services.

The limited size of the sample and its regional character may limit the generalization of results. The study will therefore be reproduced in other regions of the world.

Very little research has been done on the impact of supply chain management on operational competencies. Using the results of an empirical study, the paper provides a better understanding of the relationship between supply chain management practices and the development of operational competencies. It also offers a somewhat different view of the concept of supply chain integration.

The embedded researcher is a healthcare-academic partnership model in which the researcher is engaged as a core member of the healthcare organisation. While this model has potential to support evidence translation, there is a paucity of evidence in relation to the specific challenges and strengths of the model. The aim of this study was to map the barriers and enablers of the model from the perspective of embedded researchers in Australian healthcare settings, and compare the responses of embedded researchers with a primary healthcare versus a primary academic affiliation.

104 embedded researchers from Australian healthcare organisations completed an online survey. Both purposive and snowball sampling strategies were used to identify current and former embedded researchers. This paper reports on responses to the open-ended questions in relation to barriers and enablers of the role, the available support, and recommendations for change. Thematic analysis was used to describe and interpret the breadth and depth of responses and common themes.

Key barriers to being an embedded researcher in a public hospital included a lack of research infrastructure and funding in the healthcare organisation, a culture that does not value research, a lack of leadership and support to undertake research, limited access to mentoring and career progression and issues associated with having a dual affiliation. Key enablers included supportive colleagues and executive leaders, personal commitment to research and research collaboration including formal health-academic partnerships.

To support the embedded researcher model, broader system changes are required, including greater investment in research infrastructure and healthcare-academic partnerships with formal agreements. Significant changes are required, so that healthcare organisations appreciate the value of research and support both clinicians and researchers to engage in research that is important to their local population.

This is the first study to systematically investigate the enablers and challenges of the embedded researcher model.

This study aims to examine the “external effect” of a migrated star player on their domestic sport industries. By exploring the new aspect of star power, this study provides important insight and critical implication to many relevant stakeholders in the professional sports league. Particularly, this is critical under the recent circumstance where the globalization of sports products becomes the central strategic issue of the world-class leagues.

In this paper, the external effect of star players migrated from three Asian leagues (Japan, Korea and Taiwan) to Major League Baseball in the USA, the world-class baseball league, on their domestic league attendance demand was empirically investigated. For the analysis, comprehensive historical data from various reliable sources from each league were collected.

The findings of the paper strongly support the external effect of migrated stars significantly existing in all the three leagues. The effect is consistent across various measurements of migrated star players. More interestingly, the effect was found to be mixed across different leagues; for example, migrated star players increases in domestic league attendance in Japan, while it decreases in Korea and Taiwan. This indicates that the external effect of migrated star players depends on the characteristics of the domestic leagues. In addition, it was found that the external effect was substantial enough to compare to the effect of major demand drivers such as team winning, competitive balance and star power. For managerial implications, this study also provides revenue projections induced by the impact of migrated star players.

This study opens a new chapter related to star power topic and immediately calls for future studies regarding this external effect, particularly, theoretical and behavioral approaches.

Black fathers, and specifically fathers who identify as African American, represent a group of parents who are at once not well understood and pervasively stereotyped in negative ways. In this chapter, we describe the risks and resilience of Black fathers and their children, with a special focus on mental health and coping with stress. We emphasize a cultural practices approach that takes into account both the risks specific to Black fathers’ capacity to parent their children and a theoretical foundation for understanding the inherent strengths of Black men and their families. Finally, we address the need for early childhood educators to partner with Black fathers as a means to best support children and their families.

This chapter explores the migration decisions and motives of a group of academics who were recruited to three Australian higher education institutions during the period 1965–2003. The chapter furthers our understanding of historical patterns of academic mobility and the experience of academic mobility and adds to our understanding of the academic profession. The research used a micro approach to migration history and focussed on academic migrants’ decision-making processes. The research used semi-structured interviews with three groups of academics who were interviewed in 1982 and 2003. The academic migrants in this research were not committed to any particular institution or curriculum. What was most important in their migration decision was simply obtaining any academic position. Many, if not most of them, owed their academic careers to the growth in Australian higher education caused by its transition from an elite to a mass system. They obtained their academic posts because of the global nature of academic work. The question that arises from this study is what Australian universities will need to do to attract a new generation of academics as they compete in a global market for academic personnel.