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Investigates, using survey results compiled by Humberside Local Education Authority (LEA), the perceptions and future intentions of headteachers regarding the purchase of education services. Presents the results in quantitative and qualitative formats. Indicates that headteachers have an expectation that the LEA will respond to the findings of the questionnaire.

The article discusses future relations between school governing bodies and the LEA in Humberside. A Governors′ Development Programme, which has been launched involving all governing bodies has been well received.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of South African companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) using adjusted earnings as a part of an impression expectation management strategy focused on demonstrating how reported earnings measures meeting or beating analysts’ earnings forecasts.

A multiple response analysis approach is used. Earnings adjustments are coded according to a defined typology and assessed for their status as either valid or invalid. The number of occurrences of adjusted earnings measures over a five year period (2010-2014) meeting or beating analyst forecasts is calculated.

The use of adjusted earnings by JSE listed companies is a common occurrence. There is evidence to suggest that this is used part of an impression expectation management strategy. Most of the adjustments are invalid. When otherwise valid adjustments are used in a particular year, these are frequently repeated, and when adjusted earnings are reported, these normally exceed analysts’ forecasts.

The paper is based on a relatively small sample from a single jurisdiction and limited time period. Nevertheless, the findings point to the need to revisit how financial performance is measured and reported, evaluate additional regulation to protect investors and understand in more detail exactly how and why companies use adjusted earnings as an impression expectation management tool.

The paper adds to the limited body of research on performance reporting outside of the USA and Europe. It also examines the use of adjusted earnings in a unique setting where, in addition to IFRS numbers, companies are required to report a mandatory adjusted earnings figure (headline earnings).

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.

The article identifies and examines key elements of a work-based learning framework to consider their use as part of the higher education response to the apprenticeship agenda for the public sector in England.

This article draws upon work-based learning academic literature and the authors 28 years’ experience of the development and implementation of work-based learning at higher education level in the UK and internationally.

The article suggests that while the experience of work-based learning at higher education level appears to offer many ready-made tools and approaches for the development and delivery of higher and degree apprenticeships, these should not be adopted uncritically and in some cases may require significant repurposing.

This article is intended to inform practitioners developing degree apprenticeships. Given the degree apprenticeship is still at a relatively early stage in its implementation, this has limited the extent to which it has been possible to review entire degree implementation to the point of participant graduation.

The article draws upon real-life implementation of innovative curriculum design and is of direct practical relevance to the design and operation of work-based learning for degree apprenticeships.

Degree apprenticeships have the potential to increase productivity and enhance social mobility. Effective design and implementation of degree apprenticeships in the public sector has the potential to make a significant impact on the quality of public services.

The article provides an informed and sustained examination of how degree apprenticeships, especially those designed for public sector employees, might build upon previous higher education experience in work-based learning.

Isolation, large distances and geophysical adversities have influenced common perceptions, and with this have reinforced Northern Australia’s (aka Capricornia’s) image as a difficult and unattractive environment. This representation of ‘otherness’ often is contradicted by the fascination of tourists during their temporary encounter with the ‘North’ and its atmosphere. They appreciate its natural beauty and culture, which in their imagination represents the ‘real’ Australia. Thus, the region’s atmosphere is constructed by aesthetic values defined through social and cultural sensemaking of the place. This chapter explores the atmosphere of northern regions of Australia by adopting a historical, geographical and imaginative perspective to better understand the perceptions that define and distinguish the region from the rest of Australia. Through an auto-ethnographic account of travelling along the Gibb River Road in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, the authors accentuate the atmospheric dichotomy and inbuilt contradictions of tourists’ contemporary quest for ‘otherness’.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Although the commodification of black bodies amid state violence and widespread racism is nothing new, considering the histories of Hollywood, jazz, minstrelsy, or even athletes enslaved on plantations (Rhoden, 2006), the hyper commodification of the contemporary black athlete, alongside expansive processes of globalization, growth in the profitability of black bodies, and their importance within colorblind discourse, demonstrates the importance of commodification within our new racist moment. Likewise, the shrinking opportunities afforded to African American youth, alongside clear messages about the path to desired black masculinity (Neal, 2005; Watkins, 1998; West, 1994), push black youth into a sports world where the possibility of striking it rich leads to a “win at all costs” attitude. Robin Kelley argues that African American youth participate in sports or engage in other cultural practices as an attempt to resist or negotiate the inherent contradictions of post-industrial American capitalism (Kelley, 1998). Patricia Hill Collins describes this process in the following terms: “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, they put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own. These message was clear – ‘the world may be against us, but we are here and we intend to get paid’” (Collins, 2006, p. 298). Celia Lury concurs, noting that heightened levels of commodification embody a shift from a racial logic defined by scientific racism to one centering on cultural difference. She argues that commodity racism “has contributed to shifts in how racism operates, specifically to the shift from a racism tied to biological understandings of ‘race’ in which identity is fixed or naturalized to a racism in which ‘race’ is a cultural category in which racial identity is represented as a matter of style, and is the subject of choice” (Lury, 1996, p. 169; as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). In the context of new racism, as manifested in heightened levels of commodification of Othered bodies, racial identity is simply a choice, but a cultural marker that can be celebrated and sold, policed, or demonized with little questions about racial implications (Spencer, 2004, pp. 123–125). Blackness, thus, becomes little more than a culture style, something that can be sold on Ebay and tried on at the ball or some something that needs to be policed or driven out-of-existence. Race is conceptualized “as a matter of style, something that can be put on or taken off at will” (Willis as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). Collins notes further that the process of commodification is not simply about selling “an essentialized black culture,” but rather a particular construction of blackness that has proven beneficial to white owners. “Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons” (2006, p. 311). bell hooks, who describes this process as “eating the other,” sees profit and ideology as crucial to understanding the commodification of black bodies. “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races…affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the other” (Hooks, 1992, p. 23). She, along with Collins, emphasizes the importance of sex and sexuality, within this processes of commodification, arguing that commodification of black male (and female) bodies emanates from and reproduces longstanding mythologies regarding black sexual power.