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The purpose of this paper is to consider the way in which the police service in England and Wales may be able to deal with significant cuts in government funding. The concept of “lean”, as developed in Japanese manufacturing in the 1950s, is proposed as a method by which waste can be reduced at the same time as improvements being made in policing outcomes. Characteristics of police culture and leadership are presented as potential blockages to the successful implementation of lean.

This paper reviews literature within the sphere of operations management, policing and organisational behaviour to make appropriate recommendations. A case study, considering the performance challenges facing the Metropolitan Police Service in London, is provided to aid understanding and act as a catalyst for further discussion and research.

This paper argues that the simplistic approach to managing austerity so far has been short sighted – rather than considering the longer term development of policing and how a methodology such as lean may be better placed to deliver genuine improvements in public service, whilst also meeting unprecedented fiscal challenges.

Consideration of lean within public sector management has received recent scrutiny, but very little is offered in terms of the opportunities that lean thinking can offer within policing.

The purpose of this paper is to compare measures of socio-economic status (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage values (ICSEA)), school performance, school funding and school readiness in terms of their impact on student performance. In this respect, the paper tests the proposition – given research that suggests the teacher is the important ingredient in improved student learning performance – that a school principal who has strategical worked to “ready” their teachers for a whole of school teaching improvement agenda will generate increased student learning results than those who have not and further this improvement will occur irrespective of the circumstance of the socio-economic circumstance of the school.

In total, 22 Government schools from a single school district in Australia participated in the study, after having been involved in a system sponsored “teaching improvement program”. A survey, consisting of 30 seven-point Likert-style scale items, was administered to all teachers and school leaders in the school district. The survey was designed to rate levels of staff perceived alignment, capability and engagement to the programme as it was implemented by the Head in each school. The information regarding each school’s ICSEA value, funding per student and student learning performance, was obtained from the database provided by the relevant authority (ACARA). All statistical analysis was completed using SPSS Version 22.

The findings of this study indicate that high levels of organisational readiness, as defined by the alignment, capability and engagement (ACE) approach, are associated with effective teaching and improvement in student outcomes. In turn, the authors interpret this to mean that the internal organisation of a school has important effects on student achievement that are independent to external factors such as school funding or even the socio-educational positioning of the school.

The findings of this study indicate that high levels of organisational readiness, as defined by the ACE approach, are associated with effective teaching and improvement in student outcomes. The implications are that the ACE provides a framework for what the school leader needs to focus on when whole of school teaching improvement is the goal. The study did not investigate what the school leader did in each school to ready their staff.

These findings indicate the importance of leadership in a school and provide an insight into what the school leader needs to focus on when whole of school teaching improvement is the intended goal. This focus can thus be understood as the leader working to ensure all staff members are ACE to the improvement agenda.

The improvement of educational outcomes is a global goal of governments. In this respect, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) school systems in particular have linked education system performance and international competitiveness in ways that place pressure on the “black box” of individual schools. Reports, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment and local testing regimes testify that governments and communities are interested in the academic performance of students within and across schooling systems. The benefits of high performing schools contribute to the standard of living of citizens and the well-being of a society more generally. This paper investigates propositions that focus the work of the school leader to achieving such inherent goals.

The paper introduces the concept of school readiness. The premise is considered important to the current research because it represents the ability of schools to participate in reform agendas that are characteristic of government policy positions. The “school readiness” approach lies outside the education literature, motivated by the idea that the literature on turning around failing organisations in sectors outside of education provides clear guidelines for reforming schools. The implications for turnaround leadership are particularly encouraging and important particular organisational factors, in common with sectors outside of education, are of significant importance in enhancing teacher motivation, teacher learning and consequential improvements in student outcomes. This paper seeks to add empirical evidence in support of these approaches by adopting what the authors refer as organisational “readiness” for reform developed by Schiemann (2014).

Radical shifts are taking place in management theory; equivalent shifts need to occur, we argue, in the theory of training and development. The move towards a knowledge economy makes such a shift particularly urgent. Notions of training tend to foreclose on outcomes; typically they are short‐term and assume transferability of skills. Notions of personal development may be insufficiently focused on the workplace. We argue for a conception of workplace learning that foregrounds the dialectical relationship between persons and their organisations. Crucial in that relationship are notions of openness, uncertainty, complexity, relationships, reflection, reframing and restoration.

Based on a request by a local authority to advise it as to the means of avoiding Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 and the effect of the methods it used, examines the various options for avoidance, the provisions of the Act, the relevant case law, and the traps which may beset landlords hoping to avoid the Act. Also examines how parties may inadvertently fall within the Act and how this can be avoided. Recommends appropriate means of avoidance according to circumstances, and indicates what avoidance devices are not safe to use. Aims to assist landlords and their agents who wish to grant commercial occupation rights outside the Act, and to tenants and their agents who wish to know the effect of the various avoidance measures.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative opacity of the “About” page at PubPeer, which is a whistleblower website, primarily of the academic literature. The site refers to itself as an online journal club. It is important to assess whether the PubPeer site, organization or leadership display opacity because PubPeer attempts to hold the authors who have published errors in their literature to the high standards of transparency.

The paper examined the statements of the “About” page at PubPeer to assess the aspects of opacity. The “About” page is the face and image of an organization to the public.

In 2015, The PubPeer Foundation was created as a charitable organization to receive funding in the USA, and at the end of 2016, the PubPeer Foundation received funding (US$ 412,000) from a philanthropic organization, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Several of these details were not indicated in the older version of the “About” page at PubPeer. Other aspects of that page are opaque.

To fully assess the opacity of PubPeer, continual monitoring is needed. The examination of the “About” page gives a limited perspective.

Academics are under intense scrutiny by a vigilant anonymous and pseudonymous community at PubPeer. Any opacity by PubPeer, as was documented here, reduces trust in its objectives and operations. Reduced trust is at the heart of the replication crisis.

This paper represents the first published critical assessment of PubPeer. Science watchdogs, which watch various science-related organizations, also need to be watched.

Seventy‐five years in the aviation business is being celebrated by Lucas Aerospace through the launching of a hot‐air balloon.

Trade credit (TC) is a financing provision by non-financing firms. The multi-disciplinary research field has sustained scholarly attention for long. Pursuant to the gap for a comprehensive summary of the literature confined to the areas of Finance and Economics, this study aims to provide quantitative and qualitative insights not fully captured or analysed in previous reviews.

Contextualized systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric techniques are used to map the thematic, intellectual and conceptual structures latent in 138 articles published in top journals.

The top authors, top journals and major themes are recognized using bibliometric techniques followed by an in-depth bibliographic-network-based-content-analysis. Five major clusters indicating the five research dimensions within the specialized field are identified and extensively reviewed. Empirical validation of key theories is discussed in the contents and a conceptual model is developed. Finally, the study has identified key research gaps to set the direction for future research.

The scope of the literature selection is confined to the areas of finance and economics. Future studies could elaborate on a broader perspective.

The study contributes by offering a conceptual model latent in the literature on TC. It derives major research gaps to set the direction of future research. Also, the combination of SLR and bibliometrics is a methodological contribution in this research domain.

As I suggested earlier, Stabile's “lessons” typically take the form of questions. For example, what is the conceptual basis for defining a minimum income sufficient to sustain a labor force (what Stabile dubs the argument from sustainability)? Is there an absolute standard based strictly on basic biological needs, as Rose Friedman argued (p. 53)? Or do the necessities of life also include “whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without,” as Adam Smith declared (quoted in Stabile, p. 17)? Introducing Amartya Sen's notion of capability broadens our scope even further, for now we are concerned about developing the traits, abilities, and opportunities that can make workers more productive, effective, and valuable citizens (a concern that Stabile finds implicitly in numerous authors, including Aristotle, Smith, Marshall, and Richard Ely).

A strange phenomenon among women writers of the late eighteenth century, both conservative and liberal minded, was the predominance of female villains in their novels. While this can be seen as an after-effect of masculine patriarchal discourse, particularly for those women writers who possessed a more religious-based ideology, why was it prevalent among feminist writers of the time who should have been aware of misogynistic stereotypes? Two such writers who emulated this strange paradox were Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Both these women had been vilified by the Anti-Jacobin British 18th press as notorious and corrupt ‘female philosophers’ who followed in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. This chapter will conduct a historical feminist close comparative reading of Robinson's novel, Walsingham, and Smith's novel, The Young Philosopher, based on feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century female writers. It will examine how the female villains in the novels overpowered even the male antagonists and were often the cause behind the misfortunes, directly or indirectly, of the heroines/heroes. While these villains did serve as warnings against inappropriate behaviour, they illustrated the disaster for women when there is a lack of female community. Specifically, in the case of Robinson, her Sadean villains illustrated that no one is spared from the corruption of power and that the saintly female figure is nothing but an illusion of the male imagination. They were fallen Lucifers, rebels who relished in their freedom and power despite their damnation and punishment. The patriarchal system was temporarily demolished by them.