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This sermon argues that artistry and understanding are the offspring of whole people: thoughtful, resolute, and passionate. It then considers some illiberal fashions in higher education that stifle passion.

This is an opinion piece.

Current threats to liberal education include metaphors demeaning to professors, incomprehensible or inconsequential learning objectives, and schemes that increase “intentionality” by limiting students' opportunities for exploration and discovery.

This sermon makes vivid to educational leaders and would-be reformers some of the negative consequences of their actions and proposals.

‘All you needed was one mutant cell. It was the perfect environment for a cancer to grow rapidly and it grew into a tumour beyond all proportions. Before we knew it, it had killed the whole body.’ Trader, Barings Securities, Singapore

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The iconic BlackBerry has become so addictive to many of its users that it's earned the nickname “crackberry”. It's not the only such mini‐miracle on the market, of course, but it does punch well above its weight in the “brand icon” stakes against such competition as Nokia, Apple and Palm.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

THERE is, of course, a man (if he isn't a woman) behind the librarian. When the librarian leaves his office or the counter, the man steps forth. What sort of creature is he? A few professions stamp themselves so deeply on their followers that they have even developed something approaching a type of physical feature. The military man, the lawyer, and the parson are the outstanding examples. The teacher is a particularly pronounced type, but not a physical type; it is in manner, way of speaking, etc., that he advertises his calling. The librarian has no outward signs. If someone says “So‐and‐so looks like a librarian,” he is probably thinking in terms of the old‐time librarian, spectacled, round‐shouldered, peering, and surrounded by an astral aura derived from the immemorial dust that time has dropped gently on his books. The modern librarian, at any rate the public librarian, has long shaken off these out‐worn signs of his craft. He might be anybody or somebody, and carries with him no smell of the midnight oil or suggestion of ancient and ponderous lore. Yet no man can live among books, work on books, think on books, and contact all sorts of people in their relation to books, without effects on his mind, his outlook, and maybe his habits. It was a good idea, therefore, of the Editor to try and discover something of the man behind the librarian, by means of that ubiquitous, if often irritating, instrument, the questionnaire. The number sent out was thirty‐one, and twenty‐two replied; far too limited an enquiry on which to found any dogmatic conclusions, but as the librarians questioned were of both sexes, of different types of libraries, town and county, large and small, it may be considered perhaps as affording a useful cross‐section of the profession in its unprofessional aspect. There were ten questions; these are given below, with a brief summary of the nature of the answers.

In recent years, a number of researchers have attempted to make an integration of sustainability with supply chain risk management. These studies have led to valued insights into this issue, though there is still a lack of knowledge about the mechanisms by which sustainability-related issues are materialized as risks in the supply chain management.

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive framework to evaluate the sustainability risk in the supply chain management mechanism. To do so, a novel approach using the double normalization-based multiple aggregation (DNMA) approach under the intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) environment is extended to identify, rank and evaluate the sustainability risk factors in supply chain management.

To provide comprehensive sustainability risk factors, this study has conducted a survey using interview and literature review. In this regard, this study identified 36 sustainability risk factors in supply chain management of the manufacturing firms in five different groups of risk, including sustainable operational risk factors, economic risk factors, environmental risk factors, social risk factors, and sustainable distribution and recycling risk factors. The results of this paper found that the poor planning and scheduling was the important sustainability risk in supply chain management of the manufacturing firms, followed by the environmental accidents, production capacity risk, product design risk and exploitative hiring policies. In addition, the results of the study found that the extended approach was effective and efficient in evaluating the sustainability risk factors in supply chain management of the manufacturing firms.

Three aggregation methods based on the normalization techniques are discussed. A DNMA method is proposed under intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs). To propose a broad procedure for identifying and classifying sustainability risk factors (ESFs) in supply chain management. To rank the sustainability risk factor, the authors utilize a procedure for evaluating the significance degree of the sustainability risk factor in supply chain management.

The Dictionary of National Biography (or DNB as it is commonly called and as it will be referred to in this paper) is a classic. Depending on whether a library owns an original edition published by Smith, Elder and Company or a reprint edition published by Oxford University Press, sixty‐three brown volumes or twenty‐two blue volumes and supplements loom bulkily from the shelves. It would be an odd, ill‐trained reference librarian, historian, or scholar of English literature who has never heard of the DNB, let alone used and perused it. But mere bulk does not explain the lasting fame and staying power of this reference work, whose first volume appeared in January 1885 over a century ago.

In the context of public-private partnerships (PPPs), it has been argued that the standard valuation framework produces a paradox whereby government appears to be made better off by taking on more systematic risk. This has led to a range of approaches being applied in practice, none of which are consistent with the standard valuation approach. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that these approaches are flawed and unnecessary.

The authors step through the proposed alternative valuation approaches and demonstrate their inconsistencies and illogical outcomes, using theory, logic and mathematical proof.

In this paper, the authors demonstrate that the proposed (alternative) approaches suffer from internal inconsistencies and produce illogical outcomes in some cases. The authors also show that there is no problem with the current accepted theory and that the apparent paradox is not the result of a deficiency in the current theory but is rather caused by its misapplication in practice. In particular, the authors show that the systematic risk of cash flows is frequently mis-estimated, and the correction of this error solves the apparent paradox.

Over the past 20 years, PPP activity around the globe amounts to many billions of dollars. Decisions on major infrastructure funding are of enormous social and economic importance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate the flaws and internal inconsistencies with proposed valuation framework alternatives for the purposes of evaluating PPPs.

Challenges facing researcher development are explored in relation to three UK case study initiatives of building research capacity in Education. Drawing evidence from evaluations of these initiatives, we argue that expansive research workplaces build research capacity particularly effectively. The nature of expansiveness is dependent upon the range of learning opportunities, engagement with research communities and interpersonal support. The importance of inter‐institutional collaboration to promote capacity across the academic discipline is also highlighted. We conclude that the development of, engagement with, and investment in inter‐institutional, interproject communities is imperative to the effective building of research capacity.