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One of the biggest public school reform movements in the past decade has been the passage of charter school laws. Forty states and Washington, DC have approved legislation that allows charter schools to operate within their jurisdictional boundaries. The academic research thus far has focused on where charter schools have been located and the achievement consequences of the schools. This paper addresses a direct effect of charter schools by examining their enrollment consequences. We find that in Michigan approximately 17 percent of the students who enroll in charter schools were previously enrolled in private schools and approximately 83 percent move from the traditional public schools.

Situation and problem: a course‐writing team needs to converge rapidly to what it regards as: an agreed topic structure, which is keyed to agreed learning objectives, which specify relevant assessment questions in a natural learning sequence. Only then can the team members go away individually to write, knowing that everything that they write will fit together. In normal practice, this convergence is only partial: the topic structure harbors gaps, ambiguities and contradictions; the learning objectives are not keyed explicitly to the concepts in the topic structure; and questions for assessment of learners’ understanding do not directly exemplify conceptually keyed learning objectives. The result is courseware which does not help people to learn as well as it otherwise could, and which has been created with more effort than otherwise would have been needed. This paper shows how systemic methods inspired by Gordon Pask can be used to complete the necessary convergence with ease.

Sleep apps installed on smartphones are increasingly being used to help people overcome sleep problems. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the discourses that underpin discursive constructions of the potential sleep app user in sleep app marketing communication. According to critical marketing theory, discursive constructions of the potential consumer in marketing communication promote the potential consumer’s identification and alignment, priming the potential consumer to consider positively the product being marketed. In that sense, marketing (of sleep apps, or indeed anything) is culturally significant, as it provides templates for forms of identity, and affects the meanings and objects that circulate within a culture.

A data set consisting of the promotional material that was used to market acclaimed sleep apps was analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). The following discourses were identified in the data: disempowerment, pathologisation, ignorance, behaviourism, responsibilisation, mindfulness, seduction, convenience or common sense, empowerment and individualisation. These discourses indicate how sleep apps are legitimised as technical appendages to be installed into people’s phones and integrated into their lives. They also underpin the discursive identities that summon potential consumers into alignment. This chapter contributes to our understandings of the discursive mechanisms that lie behind the growing uptake of sleep apps. It also demonstrates the value of combining discourse analysis with relevant critical theory to gain insights into the emerging phenomenon of app culture.

Public schools can be environments in which students exhibit either tremendous achievement and growth or complete stagnation and decay. Public school districts, schools, administrators, and teachers continue to struggle to address the needs of children in dire conditions, within a climate of high-stakes accountability. Many of these children experience risk factors, such as single-family households, low incomes, and crime-ridden environments. However, these risk factors do not mean that they cannot experience school success. There are enough data to show that at-risk learners can be reached.

The study compared values represented in infomercials with values represented in conventional commercials. A total of 318 infomercials and 861 commercials broadcast in Israel in the late 1990s were coded to examine the prominence of value systems and of specific values. Of the three value systems examined – functionalism, hedonism and altruism – functionalism was over three times more frequent in infomercials than in commercials, and altruism was over three times more frequent in commercials than in infomercials. The frequency of hedonism in commercials was 25 percent greater than it was in infomercials. Joy, the most prominent value in commercials, ranked only third in infomercials. Overall, the results show that in spite of the fact that the infomercials are longer than the commercials, they present a more limited selection of values. Infomercials repeatedly mention only the product’s price, its basic qualities and its obvious uses.

Highlights the importance of research and development to orthopedics company Zimmer.

Reports information gathered during the author's visit to a Zimmer plant in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland, and a presentation to journalists by Richard Fritschi, Zimmer president (Europe and Australasia).

Shows that, in 2004, products introduced in the previous 36‐month rolling period accounted for 18 percent of Zimmer sales – up from 17 percent the year before. These new products contributed $541 in sales. In 2004 alone, Zimmer delivered more than 40 major development projects to the market. Describes some of the company's leading products and their uses.

Illustrates the key role of research and development for organizational success in the medical technology industries.

The purpose of this paper is to present an extended version of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM‐model) to explain and predict which of the four cognitive processes that are distinguished in the literature, with respect to Country of Origin (CoO), can be expected to occur: the halo‐effect, the summary construct‐effect, the product attribute‐effect or the default heuristic‐effect.

Contrary to most of the previous theoretically‐oriented work on cognitive CoO‐effects, the epistemological background of the CoO‐ELM model proposed in this paper is of an inductive nature with theoretical propositions being derived from empirical data already gathered in the existing studies.

The outcome of this paper is a flow chart model leading to a set of theoretical propositions on which cognitive CoO‐effects can be expected to occur under different situational contexts.

This paper only focuses on the explanation of cognitive CoO‐effects, not on affective or conative/normative effects. Also, the CoO‐ELM model applies only to the processing of consumers' prior knowledge about a country's products and not about the country itself. Finally, the CoO‐ELM model still needs to be subjected to empirical verification. An important implication of this paper is that the CoO‐ELM framework makes the bulk of empirical data become more transparent given the four effects of cognitive CoO‐processes.

The CoO‐ELM model provides marketing practitioners with an easy and practical tool for the management of CoO‐cues.

This paper is the first attempt trying to catch all the cognitive CoO‐effects previously identified within a theoretically solid framework.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how brand origin (BO) cues affect the consumer’s association of a new brand with BO learning and the subsequent effects on brand image (BO semiotics). An integrative theoretical framework is proposed that includes both processes.

The proposed model is based on analogical learning theory and triadic semiotic theory.

Two types of BO knowledge form BO meanings in consumer minds: country-related categories and exemplar brands, which have a classification and/or inferential role. The brand cues (indexes or icons) used by consumers to identify BO generate one or the other type of BO knowledge. Indexes trigger the classification function of country-related categories while icons trigger the inferential role of country-related categories and exemplar brands. BO knowledge informs the meaning transfer when consumers interpret the meaning of a new brand, leading to either a transfer of relations or a transfer of attributes to the new brand.

Marketers should monitor BO exemplar brands that consumers use as meaning sources and carefully select the signs used in their communications to evoke BO.

The proposed framework contrasts with dominant categorisation perspectives, re-establishing the dual role of categories and emphasising the relevance of brand cues in BO identification and BO exemplar brands in the BO meaning transfer process. A meaning-centred perspective is adopted to integrate BO identification and the related transfer mechanisms.

This paper reviews studies that have examined how accounting information impacts commercial lending judgments. Issues discussed involve the usefulness of accounting data in lending decisions, effects of different accounting methods on lenders’ judgments, bankruptcy and default judgments, and decision processes pertaining to the use of accounting information in lending decisions. Additionally, the paper reviews the research on how audits and other forms of assurance influence commercial loan officers’ judgments. Topics include the way perceived auditor independence influences loan officers’ judgments, the impact of financial statement audits and audit opinions on lending decisions, how internal control reports and other CPA firm reports influence loan decisions, ways in which audit report disclosures and wording impact lending decisions, how perceived auditor quality affects lending decisions, and the effects of limited assurance engagements on loan officers’ judgments.

Looking to the future of green marketing, examines the dynamic nature of ecologically conscious consumer behavior. The study also provides a method of profiling and segmenting college students based upon ecologically conscious consumer behavior. Findings indicate that, despite a significant amount of past research attention, demographic criteria are not as useful a profiling method as psychographic criteria. Consistent with past findings, the study indicates that perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) provides the greatest insight into ecologically conscious consumer behavior. Further, the inclusion of altruism to the profile appears to add significantly to past efforts. Additional constructs examined suggest that environmental segmentation alternatives are more stable than past profiles that have relied primarily on demographic criteria.