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The use of celebrities, and particularly athletes, to influence consumers and sell products is not a new practice, but one that is gaining considerable steam in the sports marketplace. However, many academics and practitioners have long questioned the means by which celebrity endorsement is measured and evaluated. Through the use of validated surveys among US students and the inauguration of the Celebrity-Hero Matrix (CHM), some of their questions are answered. Being labelled a 'heroic' athlete does, it seems, have tremendous power for marketers, and provides endorsement clout for the athlete.

Discharging frail older people from acute hospital settings has been an issue of concern for over 40 years and recent studies suggest that enduring problems remain. This paper explores the experiences of discharge from three different units: an acute surgical ward, an acute medical ward and a specialist ward for older people. Based on extensive data from interviews with older people, their family carers and ward‐based staff, a grounded theory of the discharge experience is presented. This suggests that the quality of discharge hinges largely on whether the focus of efforts is on ‘pace’ (the desire to discharge older people as rapidly as possible) or ‘complexity’ (where due account is taken of the complex interaction of medical and wider social issues). When pace is the focus, ‘pushing’ and ‘fixing’ are the main processes driving discharge. However, when attention is given to complexity, far more subtle processes of ‘informing’ and ‘brokering’ are in evidence. These latter processes are conceived of as forms of ‘relational practice’ and it is argued that such practices lie at the heart of high quality care for older people.

In March 1974, in the midst of the three‐day working week crisis that was crippling industry, Jacquet Weston Plant Ltd. was formed at Crowthorn, Berks, to recondition electroplating plant. The “premises” at Cambridge Road consisted of a corner of the factory belonging to Allplates Ltd., now a thriving trade plater. In a statement to the finishing trade press shortly after the formation, Mr. Ken Weston, Jacquet Weston Plant's managing director for the past ten years, said: “We have been formed to offer an engineering service to the metal finishing industry, which we will expand in order to make it as comprehensive as possible. As part of that service we find that in these days of escalating costs there is frequently a case where a reconditioned plant will fit in with the new. We aim to supply both, thus offering considerable savings to our customers.”

In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.

Financial struggles affecting universities across the United States have caused debate about whether business schools are cost prohibitive or cost savvy, especially for small liberal arts universities that lack large endowments and are highly dependent upon student enrolment. In other words, are they too expensive for small schools to operate? The presence of a business school necessitates hiring business faculty with comparatively high salary expectations.

This paper analyses the cost effectiveness of business schools at four small liberal arts universities.

Our results show that cost is most strongly correlated with class size and adjunct instruction as opposed to faculty salaries.

Thus, class size and the implementation of adjunct instruction can make having a business school not only affordable but also advantageous.

Business schools offer a way for universities with missions centred around developing the whole person through a liberal arts education to remain a going concern in such a volatile climate.

This paper uses proprietary data to analyse the cost of faculty in different disciplines.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual resilience‐based model that takes account of the competing success factors of patient safety, finance, improvement targets and staff workload in NHS hospitals in the UK.

A safe working envelope model was developed from the literature and adapted for use in the NHS. The proposition that finance and targets receive greater management attention was then tested by a pilot study using content analysis of risk management documents of four NHS hospitals.

The need to succeed on finance and targets received greater attention in the risk management documents than patient safety and staff workload.

This is a pilot study only, using content analysis of risk management documents from four hospitals to see whether the model developed from the literature warrants further study.

Using the proposed safe working model will allow the setting and monitoring of failure and marginal boundaries and make more explicit the pressures from the competing success factors in public sector hospitals in the UK.

The development of the conceptual model using ideas from resilience engineering and applying them to NHS hospital management provides a policy and practical approach to improving patient safety.

The purpose of this paper is to set out to explore how cancer patients and their carers perceive and evaluate the healthcare experience in order to develop and validate a classification framework for experience quality in healthcare.

The empirical work is centred on the systematic analysis of 200 cancer patient stories published on an independent healthcare feedback web site. Using the critical incident method, the authors captured 1,351 experience quality data items. Three judges independently sorted and classified these data items.

The authors identify and describe 22 main categories and 51 sub-categories that underlie the experience quality concept in healthcare and present them in a classification framework. The framework is informed through the categorisation of direct, indirect, and independent interactions. It also suggests a relationship between experience quality and satisfaction and loyalty behaviours.

This study provides researchers with a foundation for the further development and validation of a measurement scale for experience quality in healthcare.

The framework assists managers and healthcare professionals with the definition, evaluation, and improvement of the quality of the experience of patients and their carers.

The main contributions of this study lie in: first, a comprehensive classification framework for experience quality in healthcare; second, dimensions that extend existing health service quality models; third, dimensions that contextualise the generic concept of customer experience quality to healthcare.