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This chapter introduces a model for school libraries in Scotland, based on best practices as identified in the literature, and on five case studies undertaken in schools, two in the United States and three in Scotland. The research design was qualitative, and used grounded theory and multiple case study methods. The model represents an ideal set of circumstances for school libraries in Scotland, highlighting the interconnected web of influences that affect the success of a school library in meeting professional standards. These influences primarily fall in three areas: the school librarian, the school environment, and the professional support available to the librarian. The school librarian is the primary leader of the school library program, but factors in these other two areas can provide opportunities and barriers that can help or hinder the success of the library service. For instance, the findings suggest that school-based factors such as curriculum, scheduling, technology facilities, and staffing can have significant influence over the access the librarian has to teachers and students. Our model includes all three areas in describing a set of circumstances that would allow a school library program to thrive and meet the highest professional standards.

This article examines the effect of the customer focus (CF) group of competencies, which includes communication and negotiation skills, on project performance as measured by reaching the internal and the overall budget, the quality, and the deadline goals.

The multiple regression model was based on a dataset from Trimo, an engineering and production company of prefabricated buildings.

The inverted U-shaped relationship of the CF group has been proven to exist with all project goals.

The present study provides a starting-point for further empirical research on the international construction sector, projects, teams, and competence research.

Nursing facility inspections routinely produce statistics revealing sharp disparities in care at both the facility and the state level. But whether high rates of deficiencies are more indicative of stringent enforcement of standards, leading to improved care, or ongoing poor quality care remains unclear. Until this question is answered, families of nursing facility residents, responsible public officials and interested professionals, are all unable to make sound decisions about long-term care quality. We employ cross-sectional, panel data to compare states on multiple indices of both care quality and enforcement stringency. We use the multi-method-multi-trait approach to distinguish these concepts. We find that low rates of deficiencies are positively associated with independent measures of high quality care. But, a prominent nursing facility enforcement index likely registers poor quality care more than stringency of enforcement since it is associated positively with independent indices of poor quality care and negatively with independent measures of enforcement. Attentive publics can have reasonable confidence that low rates of deficiencies indicate high quality care. High rates tend to reflect glaring deterioration in care quality. They are less signals of stringent enforcement than of obviously poor care which prompts more visible enforcement activities. Sadly, there is little evidence suggesting that these enforcement measures improve state-level care quality and thus reduce cross-state disparities in the quality of nursing facility long-term care. However, at least some of the factors responsible for sharp disparities in nursing facility care lie within the capacity of states to rectify even in the short term.

Luxury branding, in the context of tangible luxury consumables, has received academic attention. But the notion remained inconclusive in the context of consumption of luxury intangibles. The travel setting provides an excellent backdrop to explore the complex cognitive process of assigning meaning to the relationship between travellers and luxury travel brands. The shifting image of luxury consumption from elitism to mass aspirational, too, needs to be studied for its transformative implications. The chapter focused on developing a brand relationship scale, namely, TraveLux, in the context of luxury travel consumption and tested its robustness to explain the shared sentiments and emotions of travellers, engaged in luxury travel, across social media. The chapter identifies a four construct instruments capturing the essence of immersive experience, ethnocultural acculturation, passion and excitement and self-congruence as a seedbed of luxury brand affinity for travellers. TraveLux was also found to capture the shared experience of travellers consuming luxury travel brands, thereby establishing a synch between the instrument constructs and manifested human cognition in real-life situations. The study expanded on the volume of literature pertaining to luxury branding in the context of product-oriented industry and addresses the existing void in understanding traveller–brand relationships in luxury travel contexts. The study implicates a theoretical change in branding concept in perceiving luxury brands as price-based exclusivity to a transformative cultural experience. Further extrapolations of the study could be made by incorporating subtle behavioural patterns of travellers in perceiving luxury and subsequent evocation and predisposition towards decision-making.

The authors propose to estimate a varying coefficient panel data model with different smoothing variables and fixed effects using a two-step approach. The pilot step estimates the varying coefficients by a series method. We then use the pilot estimates to perform a one-step backfitting through local linear kernel smoothing, which is shown to be oracle efficient in the sense of being asymptotically equivalent to the estimate knowing the other components of the varying coefficients. In both steps, the authors remove the fixed effects through properly constructed weights. The authors obtain the asymptotic properties of both the pilot and efficient estimators. The Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed estimator performs well. The authors illustrate their applicability by estimating a varying coefficient production frontier using a panel data, without assuming distributions of the efficiency and error terms.

Peer support work is increasingly recognised as an adjunct support across various systems of health and social care, and is a core principle in trauma-informed care. Those accessing a wide range of human and social services may have experienced prior trauma. As such, trauma-informed care is a universal organisational model that seeks to realise, recognise and respond to trauma, while limiting possible re-traumatisation when individuals are engaging with systems of care. Peer support can play an integral role in supporting those who have experienced prior traumas. However, trauma does not exist in isolation and the wider environment influences, moderates and contributes to how an individual experiences and heals from trauma. Peers can play an important role helping to alleviate some of the environmental influences by helping to build the capacity of those that use health and social care services.