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Volume 25 celebrates the 25th year of publication for the American Journal of Business (AJB). Launched by eight MAC schools of business in March 1986, the Journal has featured more than 700 authors who have contributed more than 330 research articles at the intersection of theory and practice. From accounting to marketing, management to finance, the Journal prominently covers the breadth of the business disciplines as a general business outlet intended for both practitioners and academics. As the Journal reaches out beyond the MAC in sponsorship, authorship, and readership, we assess the Journal’s first quarter century of impact.

Renaissance Hotels and Utell International have developed custom strategies with a common purpose: getting the guests.

The Personnel and Training Management Yearbook and Director appears in its seventh edition from its consultant editorial board of Michael Armstrong, Terry Ball and Terry Page — a formidable team combining business, personnel, and journalistic interests and experience.

In the Spring 2003 issue of this publication, Bernard Bulkin, chief scientist at what was once known as British Petroleum, outlined the corporate vision for his company. He defined sustainability as would be nurtured in BP as: “environmental protection, economic development, social progress and building for the future” (Bulkin 2003). This Journal Executive Viewpoint appeared in what was a very contentious debate within the Journal over the research on corporate social responsibility. I was then an editorial board member and was mightily entertained.

The IT sector lost both workers and output following the dot‐com crash of 2000. Despite this loss of employment and earnings, information technology has become a more ubiquitous part of commerce and daily activities. This division between observed use of IT and industry growth is due both to the changing nature of IT investment towards emerging media and the changes in the structure of occupational deployment within firms. This paper describes the type and growth of emerging media with particular emphasis on growth of interactivity applications. This is followed by a description of occupational and skill shifts within traditional firms and the IT sector. We conclude that growth in emerging media occupations and skills represent a significant change in the labor force composition of both IT and traditional firms. The IT sector may be stagnant, but workers who deploy and employ IT related (primarily emerging media) applications is rising. Finally, we trace the value chain of emerging media and outline how it may affect the geography of new firm development.

Ageing populations provoke the question of how much bespoke housing should be provided for the elderly. Older people are generally reluctant to move but as they age health circumstances may encourage moves into specialised accommodation. This paper aims to report on an exercise in estimating the future demand for specialised independent living housing and the extent to which that demand will be for owner occupied accommodation or renting, using data for England.

The most important predictor of demand for specialised housing is the extent of the requirement for at least some degree of long‐term care due to loss of mobility. Therefore, the forecast is formulated around a behaviour‐based model centred on demographic, personal physical mobility and housing tenure factors.

The forecasts indicate a substantial increase in demand, growing at a faster rate than the population as a whole. If supply does not rise to meet these demands, serious problems arise in the quality of life of, and cost of caring for, older people with implications for health care and social services. Moreover, some of the greatest growth is going to be amongst those aged 75 to 84 and amongst the very old 85+ group.

The forecast is based on ELSA estimates. Data on activity and ageing are available from the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing's (ELSA) Wave 4 2008 data set.

The implication is that in the future far more provision of housing for the elderly will have to take place in the private sector. However, the market provision of specialised retirement housing is likely to be very inadequate for predicted needs. A significant cause of this is a chronic planning‐induced land shortage which keeps the price of retirement accommodation high.

The continuing shortage of specialised housing will mean that hundreds of thousands of the elderly will continue to live in their existing accommodation when bespoke property would better suit their needs. This will further exacerbate general housing shortages, especially as the empty nester elderly do often own substantial family homes. It will also put pressures on care home sector because, in the absence of an appropriate intermediate stage, more will be pushed into care.

It could be argued that the assumptions made in this forecasting exercise contain a number of essentially arbitrary statements. But that is to miss the point of this exercise, which is to suggest that a large potential demand exists on plausible estimates of who might benefit from living in specialised retirement housing.

There is a growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing. The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in Southern England.

Information on a 180 major residential projects in Southern England are collected from the records of planning authorities and the data analysed for information on the extent of delay and variability in the processing time for applications.

The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets.

If these results are representative of the country as a whole, they indicate that planning delay could be a major cause of the slow responsiveness of British housing supply.

This is the first time that planning delay in the UK has been measured in a comprehensive project‐based manner from original records.