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Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent of online communication by festivals regarding their sustainability practices using Cultivation Theory as the framework to determine perceived value creation.

A mixed method approach was utilized to achieve data triangulation through a content analysis of websites, content analysis of social media sites as well as interviews.

Findings indicated that 64% of festivals did not communicate any sustainable practices through their websites and only 6% communicated via social media. The most common sustainability practices communicated were waste management and sustainable transportation, yet few festivals engaged in effective, consistent and sufficient marketing of initiatives to festivalgoers. Best practice festivals (having communicated 5.47 initiatives or more) were found to have been significantly more likely than non-best practice festivals to be music festivals and have been in operation longer. Best practice festivals were also more likely than non-best practice festivals to have sustainability engrained into their corporate philosophy via a communicated sustainable vision and mission. Interviews revealed that most festivals did not have a designated role responsible for all sustainable initiatives and the responsibility was often taken on by volunteers or festival organizers. Festival organizers that communicated sustainability initiatives efficiently, consistently, and sufficiently perceived these efforts to benefit the festivals value amongst festivalgoers and host communities. Propensity to communicate sustainability initiatives was found to have been impacted by awareness, categorization, timing, policy and funding.

While the findings are limited to the country of Canada and the extent of communication on websites and social media platforms as well as those festivals who participated, interviews helped to overcome these limitations as they gained an understanding of what was undertaken but not necessarily communicated.

The findings generated from this study could be used as a guide for establishing a benchmark for festivals regarding sustainable communication as well as strategies for overall corporate responsibility. Content regarding sustainability at festivals is scarce, as is information on festival communication. As a result, this paper seeks to understand the sustainable initiatives that are being communicated by festivals.

This is the first time Cultivation Theory was used within a tourism context and may be a useful tool to determine value creation. Through Cultivation Theory, festival organizers believed to have the ability to impact perceived value of the festival by implementing efficient, consistent and sufficient communication of sustainability initiatives.

This overview aims to compile information pertaining to Canadian public libraries in the areas of legislation, structure, governance, and funding models, and briefly describes issues common to public libraries across the country.

Information was gathered by consulting the most recent versions of provincial and territorial legislation that govern public libraries, as well as by referring to various web sites at the provincial, territorial, and national level. After a general overview of public libraries in Canada, this paper provides individual examination of each province and territory.

Many commonalities and some differences exist across most provinces and territories in Canada with regard to public libraries in terms of legislation, structure, governance, and funding models.

This paper brings together in one document comparable information about how public libraries are structured, governed, and funded across Canada.

CANADA, until the last generation or two, has been basically a pioneer country but two world wars have changed all this and the economy has moved from an agricultural to a manufacturing community able to provide a standard of living second to that of the United States. (At the present time only 10.8 per cent of Canadians live on farms according to the 1961 census.) Natural resources, such as timber, wheat and mining, continue to play, however, an important role in the life of the nation. As in most developing and pioneer countries, learning has had to assume a secondary role compared with other enterprises and activities. This is gradually beginning to change as more people continue in school and the percentage of individuals attending university increases. Established organizations, like the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, catering to mass culture, have been strengthened and enlarged and new establishments, like the Canada Council and the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, of narrower function and appeal, have been set up. The Library movement, not the least of learning agencies, is gaining strength every day. In this paper some of the interesting new developments of the last ten years in the latter field will be discussed. Of necessity, much is abbreviated; a lot is ignored. Data selected has been based on the most recent sources; hence the variety in dates.

There have been many research studies on students’ satisfaction of services in universities in developed countries. However, students’ expectation and satisfaction of public and private higher education institutions (HEIs) with regard to service quality in Eastern Europe have been under-researched. Therefore, this study aims to offer an empirical examination of student satisfaction of the service quality of public and private HEIs in Albania by evaluating the gap between students’ expectation and perception and the effect of student satisfaction on retention in HEIs.

The survey instrument used in this study was the student satisfaction inventory in the USA. Primary data were collected from a survey of students in two private and four public HEIs in Albania. A total of 554 valid responses were collected from the survey.

The findings suggested that there were performance gaps between public and private HEIs. Public universities performed well in terms of concern for the individual, campus support services, student-centeredness and instructional effectiveness. Private HEIs scored well in terms of concern for the individual, academic advising effectiveness, instructional effectiveness and safety and security (parking). There is a significant difference in students’ perception of the overall satisfaction of HEIs. Students’ overall satisfaction positively impacts their retention.

Overall, this study provides valuable insights to private and public HEIs’ administrators regarding to student satisfaction and retention. The findings will have far-reaching managerial implications for all groups of stakeholders in terms of the service delivery by universities in Albania and Eastern Europe.

This paper aims to provide an example of how to review information and social-marketing initiatives using financial well-being as a case point.

Literature review and content analysis is used. The audience, channel, message, and evaluation framework is applied. Existent financial well-being initiatives are identified and selected, and further described and analysed in terms of their audience, channel, message and evaluation. The message is further discussed according to the transtheoretical model of change.

Most financial well-being campaigns focus on a particular audience, use a multichannel approach to reach their audience, and report some evaluation, consistent with the audience, channel, message and evaluation framework. Message analysis shows that several initiatives address all processes posited by the transtheoretical model of change to trigger behavior change. Potential areas of improvement and boomerang effects are identified.

Initiatives enhance their effectiveness by using theory, using proper segmentation and channel(s) selection, creating messages based on the audiences’ readiness for change and incorporating evaluation.

Theoretical and practical insight regarding financial well-being initiatives has been achieved. Campaign designers can inspire from this example to conduct their own research and analysis of existent initiatives as one of the starting points in the process.

The intention of this study is to investigate the state of benchmarking in a variety of organizations in Egypt. More specifically, the study aims to understand the state of benchmarking in Egyptian organizations as well as the driving forces, benefits behind undertaking benchmarking and the reasons for not benchmarking in non‐benchmarking organizations. Also investigates the most important influential factors for effective benchmarking.

The present study is based upon the results of an empirical research in which the state of benchmarking in Egyptian organizations is studied. Mail surveys carried out on 500 organizations and 45 percent responded.

Results indicated that the most important reasons for initiating benchmarking are to maintain and increase competitive advantage, increased profitability and achieve continuous improvement. Moreover, the most important benefits derived from benchmarking include improved customer satisfaction and improved response time. Further, top management commitment was found to be an important influential factor for effective benchmarking.

Egyptian managers should be aware of the importance of top management commitment, employee involvement and participation and effective communication for effective benchmarking implementation. Also, benchmarking should be made consistent with organization's strategic direction and the provision of the appropriate resources.

It adds to the body of knowledge in the field of benchmarking in developing countries, with a particular focus on Egypt.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the processes and results of implementing and evaluating the Releasing Time to Care™ (RTC™) model in a 45‐bed Neurosciences unit in a tertiary care hospital in Saskatchewan province of western Canada.

Organizational restructuring in healthcare systems has impacted the ability of clinical registered nurses (CRNs) in participation and in influencing the decision making that affect the delivery and outcomes of patient‐centered care. At the same time, CRNs' work has intensified because of increases in patient acuity, technological advances, complexity of care provided to patient families and communities, in addition to the intensifying demands put on by an aging population and dwindling resources. The work reported in this paper shows that significant improvements have been made based on the current needs and the change is forever imminent. Establishing solid people connections and networking opportunities proved valuable for current and future exchange of information and knowledge translation.

Model implementation resulted in positive narrative and empirical data including: improved patient safety, staff engagement, leadership opportunities and an affirmative shift in organizational culture. Improved patient safety was evidenced by a reduction in falls and decreased medication errors.

The paper focuses on including the clinical nurse in organizational and system change towards improving patient‐centered quality care. Neurosciences 6300 at Royal University Hospital (RUH) in Saskatoon, was viewed as an RTC™ champion and one of the first to implement and complete the 11‐module toolkit.

As our correspondent on another page suggests, the economic crisis may have reactions upon libraries. The most obvious one he mentions is the increased difficulty we shall experience in obtaining American books. Not all libraries, public or private, make any special collection of books published in the United States, although there has been an increasing tendency to buy more as the relations of the two countries have grown closer through their common struggle; in fact, we know libraries which have spent many hundreds of pounds in the course of the past year or two on the select lists of books which have been made for us by American librarians. It is most unfortunate that the manipulation of dollar currency should have brought about a situation in which even the exchange of ideas between the countries becomes more difficult. One suggestion might be made and that is that our American colleagues should continue to sift the literature of this time of famine for us, so that further select lists may be available in better days.