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At the beginning of the production year producers face a complex risk management decision environment given by risks specific to their operation, multiple crop insurance contracts and hedging opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a producer-level framework for risk management decision making, focusing on the interaction between crop insurance and hedging.

The authors develop a Monte Carlo simulation model that generates a producer’s net income (NI) distribution that incorporates historical producer risk, price-yield correlation via a copula, price risk, and production costs. The authors evaluate the NI distribution through a modified Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) decision framework. The authors use the modified MPT decision framework to explore tradeoffs between expected NI and farm ruin (defined as 1 or 5 percent expected shortfall) from different crop insurance contracts and pre-harvest hedging options.

Only revenue protection and the highest two levels of coverage level exist on the efficient frontier. The level of hedging on the efficient frontier ranges from 0 to 55 percent of Actual Production History. The authors find that increasing coverage level 5 percent (from 80 to 85 percent) negatively impacts the optimal hedging amount by 26 percentage points (from 35 to 9 percent).

The model provides the precise identification of financial benefits from different risk management strategies by incorporating producer-level historical yield data, using a copula to capture yield-price dependency structure and producer production cost in generating the NI distribution. This model can be applied to any producer’s characteristics and data.

THE New English dictionary on historical principles founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society, edited by James A H Murray, forty‐four years in the making, and now known the world over as the Oxford English dictionary holds an unchallenged place in that remarkable series of substantial works of learning and scholarship planned, nurtured, and executed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Rolls series, the Dictionary of national biography, and at the turn of the century, the Cambridge moderm history and the Victorian history of the counties of England, all bear witness to the tremendous, almost incredible, energy of the Victorian middle classes who, sometimes holding academic posts at the universities, or perhaps earning their bread as publishers (regarded then as one of the very few commercial pursuits allowed to gentlemen), formed clubs and learned societies to occupy their ‘leisure’ hours, and conceived and brought to fruition their costly schemes for ambitious publishing programmes, refusing to be deterred by years of unremitting toil which consumed their time, their money, but never sapped their vision or their dedication.

This paper aims to present a detailed examination of the relationship and debate between realist understandings of HRM, on the one hand, and discourse‐based notions of HRM, on the other. The objective is to provide a basis for a possible debate between these, seemingly contradictory, perspectives.

The paper argues that these perspectives can be integrated if one adopts a perspective that overcomes this dualism by thinking of HRM as a “project” where speech acts and non‐linguistic forms of action are seen as interdependent. The paper uses interview extracts in order to illustrate how the HRM Project gets constituted but also resisted in the context of a post‐privatisation electricity company.

This paper is predicated on the notion that the discourse of HRM is closely intertwined with the shift in power relations between employers, managers, employees and trade unions from the early 1980s onwards. In order to capture the broader context of the discourse it is suggested that the notion of an “HRM Project” includes not only language but also practices, boundary‐spanning linkages, and external agents such as regulators and financial institutions.

Builds on the notion of discourse as a strategic resource.

‘WITH HIS hundred up, CB lifted his cap for a moment and turned again quickly to get on with his task.’ Do any of you, Dear Readers, remember C B Fry's 144 against the Australians at the Oval in 1905? It does not matter really because it is Clive Bingley's 100 for NLW which is my concern here. To score a hundred runs at cricket is success indeed, but to buy a professional periodical in declining economic conditions and still to breathe more life into it again is quite phenomenal. And that is no criticism of previous editors, Roy McColvin and Ken Harrison, without whom LW would probably have collapsed altogether!

The practice of tele‐ or home‐working, has been adopted by an increasing number of companies and workers in response to the changing economic and social needs that characterise the world of work today. Working from home brings new challenges as well as benefits, and a variety of studies have examined the impact of tele‐working in terms of such benefits and costs. Few studies, however, have focused on the emotional impact that working away from the office may have on workers as they cope with new technologies, reduced support, increased social isolation and other changes. This neglect of the feelings of workers reflects a somewhat wider neglect in the arena of emotion at work in general. The present study aims to redress this balance through a qualitative pilot study that examines the changing emotions that tele‐workers experience. The implications of the study for tele‐workers and managers are outlined.

When evaluating the worthiness of field guides to trees, there are several criteria which might be considered; perhaps the first should be geographic coverage. If one is attempting to identify a tree in Iowa, one should not be using a guide covering only trees of the Pacific Slope. Although this may seem obvious, problems can occur in guide selection due to geographically misleading titles. Some guides may imply a geographic coverage which is in fact quite different from the actual coverage.

Financial‐ and growth‐oriented marketing objectives of traditional marketers have been criticized by marketing ethicists, because these objectives may lead to socially irresponsible marketing practices. Marketing based on the quality‐of‐life (QOL) concept posits that marketers should strive to enhance consumers’ wellbeing without harming other publics or stakeholders. Shows how marketing managers can set marketing objectives based on the QOL concept to guide socially responsible marketing practices. Develops a conceptual framework for setting marketing objectives. The framework shows that marketing managers with a QOL frame of mind should first examine the marketing policies that have been criticized by marketing ethicists. Second, marketing managers should logically drive specific marketing mix objectives based on the QOL concept. Third, general marketing objectives should be deduced from the marketing mix objectives for socially responsible marketing.