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Foreign businessmen frequently carry preconceived ideas with them to Japan. Such ideas can result in disastrous consequences when applied to business in that country. If your company's strategy calls for doing business in Japan, here are ten “maxims” that could affect the long‐term success of your plans. They should be carefully considered before going into a meeting with Japanese customers or partners.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

This paper aims to reexamine the link between board racial diversity and firm performance. It focuses on the mechanism through which board racial diversity could affect performance. The paper proposes and empirically tests the role of employee productivity and R&D productivity in the relationship between board racial diversity and firm financial performance.

The paper adopts a mediation analysis framework with the bootstrapping method to test both the direct and indirect effect of board diversity on firm performance. The data used in the study come from S&P 1500 with variables composed from COMPUSTAT, Institutional Shareholder Services and Wharton Research Data Services.

Contrary to prior findings, the results indicate that there is neither direct effect of board racial diversity on firm performance nor is there an indirect effect through either employee productivity or R&D productivity.

Because the data used in the paper are based on large public firms, the results may not generalize to small or private firms.

The findings of the paper suggest that not all diversity measures matter in the same way and firms should carefully make board appointments to reduce the perception that they select directors for any reason other than qualifications.

The paper advances the literature on board diversity by examining two previously unexplored mediating variables of employee productivity and R&D productivity. It also uses more rigorous mediation analysis with bootstrapping method and a validation sample to improve robustness of the results.

This paper aims to investigate the application of adaptive integration in element-free Galerkin methods for solving problems in structural and solid mechanics to obtain accurate reference solutions.

An adaptive quadrature algorithm which allows user control over integration accuracy, previously developed for integrating boundary value problems, is adapted to elasticity problems. The algorithm allows the development of a convergence study procedure that takes into account both integration and discretisation errors. The convergence procedure is demonstrated using an elasticity problem which has an analytical solution and is then applied to accurately solve a soft-tissue extension problem involving large deformations.

The developed convergence procedure, based on the presented adaptive integration scheme, allows the computation of accurate reference solutions for challenging problems which do not have an analytical or finite element solution.

This paper investigates the application of adaptive quadrature to solid mechanics problems in engineering analysis using the element-free Galerkin method to obtain accurate reference solutions. The proposed convergence procedure allows the user to independently examine and control the contribution of integration and discretisation errors to the overall solution error. This allows the computation of reference solutions for very challenging problems which do not have an analytical or even a finite element solution (such as very large deformation problems).

Much has been made of economizing. Yet, social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economizing of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economizing and marketizing of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. The authors consider a specific case of the economizing of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a “failure regime” for NHS Foundation Trusts modeled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favor of a regime based initially on the notion of “de-authorization.” The notion of de-authorization was then itself abandoned, in favor of the notion of “unsustainable provider,” most recently also called the Trust Special Administrators regime. The authors suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of health care, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that “exit” models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economizing and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.

The chapter Technological Advances in Special Education provides information on advances of technology and how such technological advances have influenced students with disabilities and special education across the globe. The chapter presents technological advances that benefited students with disabilities in developed countries as well as potential technologies to support students with disabilities in developing countries. The scant exiting literature on developing countries suggests some universal themes regarding technology for students with disabilities including access and training. Additional attention and research is needed on assistive technology to support students with disabilities in both developed and developing countries, with recognition that what works is developed counties may not work in developing.