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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the limitations of current accounting practices in an inter‐organisational context; introduce contemporary costing approaches used in inter‐organisational costing (IOC) programmes; and identify the inhibitors of successful implementation of IOC programmes.

The paper uses a structured review of empirical and theoretical literature.

Traditional accounting practices do not adequately fulfil their role in the inter‐organisational context. Contemporary accounting practices overcome only some limitations of traditional accounting practices. The paper uncovers part of the complexity surrounding the implementation of IOC programmes and suggests that we are dealing with a broad inter‐disciplinary phenomenon.

Conclusions are drawn on a conceptual level and further empirical investigation is encouraged.

The paper raises the awareness of the complexity surrounding the implementation of IOC programmes. The broad set of inhibiting factors could be effectively used by managers to assess the readiness of organisations involved in implementation of IOC programmes.

This research is the first that systematically addresses the problem of inhibitors in the implementation of IOC programmes. The broad scope of the paper sets the foundations for more focused research into specific inhibiting factors.

Supply chains directly influence the differentiation and cost of a firm's products and services and its exposure to risk. The purpose of this paper is to use secondary financial data to explore the relationship between supply chain and firm performance by developing a unified proxy for supply chain performance.

Established econometric techniques were used to validate the proxy using a sample frame comprising the annual reports of 117 publicly traded UK manufacturing firms from the period 1995 to 2004.

Increases in change in the proxy lead to an increase in change in the rate of return on capital employed and a change in the rate of cash‐to‐cash cycle length, both of which are traditional measures of improved supply chain management. Moreover, as the rate of change of the proxy increases, so does enterprise value at a level that is statistically significant, indicating that improving supply chain management practices has a positive impact upon improved firm performance.

As annual financial results were used the analysis is at a high level so there is a lack of resolution in identifying discrete causes. The use of annual financial results also means that the research can only take yearly snapshots of firm performance.

The paper indicates that the supply chain is an enabler, not an impediment, to superior organisational performance.

The originality and value of this paper is that it develops a proxy to explain the relationships between supply chain and an organisation's financial performance taking into account the three imperatives of profitability, liquidity, and productivity.

Measures and measurement systems must reflect the context to which they are applied, requiring that the contextual issues relating to retail shrinkage must be identified as a necessary precursor when measuring shrinkage. Without considering these issues any decision on which method of shrinkage measurement to employ will be uninformed, arbitrary and at best intuitive. The objective of this paper is to scope out and summarise the contextual issues surrounding retail shrinkage in Europe's grocery sector and to offer a view on the implications of these issues to shrinkage measurement.

The methodology adopted was a scoping study of the key issues that influence shrinkage measurement, drawing these from prior research and exposing these findings to the informed opinion of a review panel for critique and to highlight areas for further investigation.

The findings from the study were to identify a range of contextual issues relating to shrinkage and to summarise these issues into four categories, namely: stewardship and performance improvement; cost reduction and sales improvement; local effects of systemic issues; and the detailed nature of retailing.

The implications of these key issues are significant to the measurement of shrinkage in terms of the scope across the business from which shrinkage needs to be considered. This finding highlights the need to consider shrinkage as a systemic issue that extends across a business from design, through planning to operational execution. It also identifies the impact of shrinkage on increasing cost and depressing sales and considers the responsibility of management teams in addressing these matters.

This paper is theoretically original and thus of value to the academic community. It is also of value to the practitioner community in grocery retailing where shrinkage and its measurement is of worldwide strategic importance.

The enduring popular image of James Bond is (in the words of the theatrical trailer for Dr No) ‘the gentleman agent with the licence to kill’. Yet the screen Bond is hardly a hero in the manner of gentlemanly archetypes such as Cary Grant and David Niven (reputedly Ian Fleming’s preferred choice for the role). This chapter will explore how the image of Bond in the films has changed over time both in response to wider social and cultural archetypes of masculinity and due to the different performance styles of the various actors to play the role: Sean Connery, whose rough-hewn Scottishness can be seen as a means of representing the ‘otherness’ of Fleming’s character (‘Bond always knew there was something alien and un-English about himself’); George Lazenby, whose one-off appearance as an emotionally damaged Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service anticipated later portrayals of the character; the parodic variant of Roger Moore; the brooding Byronic hero of Timothy Dalton; the ‘Milk Tray Man’ charm of Pierce Brosnan; and Daniel Craig, whose combination of bull-in-a-china-shop physicality and vulnerable masculinity (literally so in Casino Royale) has by common consent successfully transformed Bond from a cartoon superman into a twenty-first century action hero.

FOR MANY YEARS PAST Roy Plomley has persuaded all kinds of people, celebrities every one, but not all of them just transient showbiz personalities hurtling like meteors across the firmament, to enter one of the BBC's studios and there, to the strains of Eric Coates's Blue Lagoon and the cries of sea‐birds, to confide into the microphone the gramophone records they would choose to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island. Week in, week out, listeners have been rewarded with snippets of autobiography, a little amateur philosophy, and sometimes a dabble or two in psychology, accompanied at suitable intervals by a record highspotting significant (or even insignificant) events in the prospective castaway's life. Now I would agree that music is without question the most evocative of the arts, but I would make a strong plea for literature to be regarded as a close second. Why not ‘Desert Island Bookshelf’? After all, the most famous of shipwrecked mariners, Robinson Crusoe, had the benefit of a not inconsiderable library on his island: no fewer than three Bibles, a few Popish prayer‐books, a few books of navigation, some books in Portuguese, and a number of others unspecified. Of course, there would be an odds‐on chance of hearing the latest over‐developed, over‐peroxided Hollywood starlet assure Mr Plomley that of all the Greek classics the one she read most often was little old Plato's Republic. But then every silver lining has a grey cloud attached to it somewhere or other.

On 2 September 2015, it was announced that Tom Ford would again be ‘dressing James Bond’, Daniel Craig, in Spectre (Mendes, 2015) after tailoring his suits for Quantum of Solace (Forster, 2008) and Skyfall (Mendes, 2012). Ford noted that ‘James Bond epitomises the Tom Ford man in his elegance, style and love of luxury. It is an honour to move forward with this iconic character’.

  With the press launch of ‘Bond 25’(and now titled No Time to Die) on 25 April 2019, it is reasonable to speculate that Ford will once again be employed as James Bond’s tailor of choice, given that it is likely to be Craig’s last outing as 007. Previous actors playing the role of James Bond have all had different tailors. Sean Connery was tailored by Anthony Sinclair and George Lazenby by Dimitro ‘Dimi’ Major. Roger Moore recommended his own personal tailors Cyril Castle, Angelo Vitucci and Douglas Hayward. For Timothy Dalton, Stefano Ricci provided the suits, and Pierce Brosnan was dressed by Brioni. Therefore, this chapter will analyse the role of tailoring within the James Bond films, and how this in turn contributes to the look and character of this film franchise more generally. It aims to understand how different tailors have contributed to the masculinity of Bond: an agent dressed to thrill as well as to kill.

THE outline programme of the Library Association Conference at Cambridge has now been circulated. It is eloquent of the change that has come over the Library Association in recent years. Twenty years ago technical papers on cataloguing, binding, classification, class lists and similar matters were frequent. In this Cambridge programme questions of policy and organisation on the larger scale appear to be dominant. County libraries continue to occupy a large share of the programme. It must not be supposed, however, that the programme is not very varied, because that is its main characteristic. Literature, library architecture, publishing and bookselling from the points of view of the author, publisher, bookseller and librarian, university libraries, modern branch libraries, the place of reading in national life, and other subjects, combine very nicely with a civic reception, a garden party in a college garden, the annual dinner, and visits, at choice, to Peterborough, Bedford and Ely.

With fierce competition in capturing tourists, it is crucial that destinations be prepared to adapt and to refresh their event portfolio. The purpose of this paper is to look into the decision-making process that led to the development of a new festival in a middle-sized city, Tomar, in Portugal.

This study analyses the creation process of the Knights Templar Festival, in Tomar, a new event focusing on the Templar history of the city. A retrospective outlook on the evolution of the event is given. Primary data were collected via quantitative survey analysis and semi-structured interviews. The theoretical scope is events and placemaking.

The strengths and weaknesses of the region influenced the conception and setting up of this particular event. This awareness is important for cities in meeting the challenges and opportunities that event portfolio diversification calls for.

This paper helps us to understand the motives and challenges in establishing a new event in the city, through the analysis of a single case study of a European middle-sized city. Simultaneously, it is a longitudinal in-depth case of the first editions of a new historically focused event.

Several practical implications can be derived to the case of Tomar. Overall, it is key that cities align the focus of new events with the city’s identity (as Tomar did).

This paper presents an in-depth and longitudinal case study, from the moment of the creation of a new event to its fourth edition, mapping the decision-making process, highlighting the learning curve of the decision makers.

In this chapter, I utilize insights from symbolic interaction to analyze the identity work processes of larp subculture participants to construct and perform their in-game identities. I extend the research on larp subcultures in two ways. First, I place larping within the larger context of leisure subcultures and society by arguing that larping is representative of changes in leisure and subcultures in postmodern society. Second, I draw upon ethnographic data collected among the New England Role-playing Organization (NERO) to analyze larpers character identity performances. RPG and Larp researchers have developed several theories about the relationship between larp participants and their character performances. While these concepts provide a helpful framework for understanding the participant-character relationship, they undertheorize the in-game constructed performance of identity. Using symbolic interaction theory, I analyze the identity work processes larpers use to construct and perform their larp identities extending our understanding of the similarities between everyday identity and larpers' character identity performances.