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By almost every measure manufacturing quality has improved tremendously in the past decade; unfortunately, the same is not true for service. Yet, manufacturing processes represent less than 5 per cent of all business processes. Clearly, the opportunity area for the twenty‐first century is in the understanding and improvement of the service processes that drive value and customer experience. There are two major characteristics of service that distinguish it from product. The understanding of these differences and often‐painstaking attention to detail in delivery determines ultimate success and competitiveness of service. The first is that almost every service is a series of situations where every subsequent process depends on those that precede it. The second unique characteristic of service is that the customer usually plays an important role in the process and each involvement strongly influences downstream processes and requirements. The vast riches and opportunities of the future service‐oriented world belong to those who understand the customer experience from the customer’s viewpoint and can and will offer high value solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate farm financial stress within the USA over the past 20 years and the agricultural and economic factors which have impacted farm businesses. The effect of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) on farm financial stress is further evaluated. In particular, Chapter 12 bankruptcies – which can only be filed by farmers – were only a temporary measure until BAPCPA made Chapter 12 a permanent fixture in bankruptcy law.

Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings from 1997 until 2016 are used as a proxy for farm financial stress. Panel fixed effects models are used to determine relevant factors affecting financial stress for farmers from agricultural and macroeconomic perspectives. Further, models incorporating pre- and post-BAPCPA regimes are utilized.

The results show that macroeconomic factors (interest and unemployment rates) are strong predictors of farm bankruptcies for farms while agricultural land values are the only consistent strong predictor among the agricultural factors. When evaluating the post-BAPCPA regime, only agricultural land values continue to be a significant predictor of farm bankruptcies. The findings also indicate a dynamic relationship with agricultural land values, where current year values are negatively related but previous year land values are positively related to bankruptcies.

The authors provide an analysis of the post-BAPCPA regime on farm bankruptcies that has not been evaluated within the literature yet. Further, the findings illuminate discussion on a potentially dynamic relationship with financial stress and agricultural land values.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of business students in India toward business managers (not self-employed) and entrepreneurs.

Students’ perceptions of the ethical behaviors of business managers and entrepreneurs were measured using the Bucar and Hisrich (2001) model. The scale comprises 20 behavioral descriptors, and the students were asked to indicate the degree to which they believed entrepreneurs and business managers would consider these actions as ethical.

Responses to general items of ethical behavior demonstrated a difference in the perception of Indian students between business managers and entrepreneurs.

This study contributes to the field of entrepreneurship in two ways. One involves the results of the hypothesis testing presented herein to evaluate the perceptions of business students in India toward entrepreneurs and business managers. The second contribution is comparing these results to that of a similar study using a US sample (Batchelor et al., 2011) to compare the differences in perceptions toward entrepreneurs and business managers across these two nations.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

A television comic announces a satiric Golden Fleece Award for the faux pas of some government official. The San Diego Chicken hams it up in the stands of the baseball park. A Swiss mime troupe advertises the services of a communications corporation. All these may be more familiar to young people today than is a circus clown. These and other entertainers are all in the business of laughter and provide commentaries on current society.

Stable high growth in the service sector has made India free from the stigma of slow and steady ‘Hindu rate of growth’ of about 3.5% per annum during the first three decades of independence. Service-led growth has placed India among the top performing giant economies in the world. India is now a 3 trillion USD (United States Dollar) economy in terms of Nominal GDP (IMF, 2020). Under this milieu, the chapter aims to examine whether the growth in the service sector in India is inclusive or not. The observations of the study have shown that the service sector has been growing at fast pace compared to the other two sectors, which makes the system into jobless status. The sectoral contribution of service sector to the GDP is increasing after the new economic reform of 1990, but the employment contribution is going down. So the country is now in the grip of ‘jobless’ growth, and the grip is strengthening because of some structural issues such as changes in consumers’ demand with rising per capita income. Further deepening of finance capital in the savings sphere of service sector has made the wide disconnect between the real economic activity and growth of finance capital. Revival of high linkage sectors with higher potential for employment growth, such as agriculture and manufacturing, can be game changer towards the goal of inclusiveness.

Bosco, Liu, and West's chapter on underground lotteries in rural China is one that begs permission to cross the boundaries between parts of this volume, for it deals with the integration of the Chinese economy with others, and it also poses certain moral questions about the nature of markets and rationality in economic exchanges (see also Suarez, this volume). But the authors, after reviewing the evidence, ultimately conclude that China's underground lotteries must be viewed in relation to that country's phenomenal economic development in recent decades. They show that the rise of illegal underground lotteries in China is tightly connected to the development of the modern capitalist economy there, and that although it seems at first glance to be powered by irrationality and superstition, it actually functions according to capitalist principles – at least as viewed by the participants. They also argue that rural villagers who place bets in them are not mere victims of nonsensical beliefs or of opportunistic “outsiders,” but rather that they are participating in their own way in a system in which luck clearly plays a very large role, but one over which they have little control, and one that is grounded in the historical commercialized economy of China (see also Richardson, 1999). It is interesting to note the way that participants rationalize the lottery and their actions through their assumption that it is rigged – their approach to it is markedly different from that of someone from, for example, Japan or the United States, where such a lottery is assumed from the start to not be rigged. Bosco and co-authors well demonstrate here the importance of viewing a cultural phenomenon as part of a greater whole, and one in a constant state of flux.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on various methodological issues and statistical techniques pertinent to the conflict management literature. First, issues related to use of laboratory studies, college students, and the study situation are reviewed. Second, two recent innovative statistical techniques, meta‐analysis and confirmatory modeling are described and potential applications in the conflict management field are given.