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To examine the relationship between financial resources and variables associated with institutional rankings in the USA.

Pearson product moment correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationship between endowment funds and variables associated with rankings as determined by the U.S. News & World Report.

College costs continue to increase faster than per capita income. Institutions are relying more on endowment funds to meet their needs. Endowment was positively associated with almost all the variables used for ranking top national doctoral universities with the largest endowment amounts. When endowment per student was used, the association became even stronger with these ranking variables. Endowment was weakly associated with almost all the variables used for ranking top national doctoral universities with the lowest endowment amounts. Relationships of endowment and ranking variables were stronger at medical research schools, business schools, and weaker at engineering schools.

Higher education administrators must realize that these variables are cost‐inducing factors that cannot be fully satisfied. Unbridled pursuit of ranking variables will increase cost without commensurate increase in educational quality. Therefore, leaders must decide what rankings their resources allow and what position within the ranks is acceptable to them. Ranking agencies interested in quality should realize that money plays a significant role in how an institution is ranked. Therefore, institutions should be grouped according to the available resources before comparative analysis of ranking variables is made.

Information regarding best practices of information technology (IT) management in K‐12 schools provides school leaders with a basis for developing their own IT systems or evaluating their existing systems. Important as this information is, limited literature coverage exists on this topic. Over 100 technology audits conducted by graduate students in school organizations in north‐east Ohio in the United States have yielded insights of best practices that school leaders should find useful. The insights discussed in this article include attention to the access rate of users, leadership promise, technology planning, staff development, technical support, strategic hardware and software procurement, the technology budget, and an expanded view of infrastructural facilities. The article concludes with recommendations to school leaders who are interested in taking their IT practices to another level of excellence.

The purpose of this study is to extend the research of Michael, Schwartz, and Balraj pertaining to presidential effectiveness. Faculty senate chairpersons, academic deans, senior‐level institutional officers, and student leaders were surveyed in order to ascertain whether there was a relationship between stakeholders' perceptions and whether the findings support the original study conducted by Michael et al.

A descriptive, survey research methodology was utilized to survey 36 institutions of higher learning in the state of Ohio. Each participant was requested to complete a two‐page survey that included questions related to indicators of presidential effectiveness, factors associated with the president's role at their respective institution, and ways of improving presidential effectiveness. Analysis of the data included a descriptive analysis of means and standard deviations; Spearman rho coefficient to obtain correlations of ranked data; and an Analysis of Variance to identify differences among each independent variable.

Analysis of the data showed that participants agreed that all of the indicators of effectiveness were important. Additionally, stakeholders and trustees agree more than they disagree on the indicators of effectiveness and the role of a president.

The implications of this research suggest that an assessment of the president should include institutional stakeholders in the process coupled with a detailed assessment of the institution. Strong oversight by the governing board is important to ensure integrity of the process, respect for individuals and the office of the president, and support for the professional development of a president.

This study extended the research of Michael et al. pertaining to presidential effectiveness.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Over the past few decades, mainstream and independent films have increasingly represented kinky sexual behaviors of their characters, in ways that are frequently inaccurate, inappropriately titillating, and intentionally extreme. This chapter examines the representation of kinky sex lives in two groundbreaking (although extremely violent) offerings of exploitation cinema: director William Friedkin's 1980 film, Cruising, one of the first feature-length Hollywood movies to portray the sex lives of gay men in New York City's leather bars and sex clubs; and director Brett Leonard's 2005 film, Feed, one of the first feature-length independent offerings to explicitly explore the phenomena of fat fetishism and feederism. Both works are noteworthy for openly depicting nonnormative sexual activities and ways of being targeted primarily to mainstream audiences, at historical moments when doing so was quite rare. At the same time, this analysis demonstrates how both films, because of their exploitative approaches to their subject matter, ultimately communicate that the individuals and sexual activities they represent are “deviant” ones that must be contained or even eradicated in a civilized society.

A product manager at Apple examines the past, present, and future of the PC industry in September 2011 in the wake of Steve Jobs's resignation and HP's announcement that it was exiting the PC industry in favor of enterprise software solutions and consulting. The protagonist thinks through current forces in the PC industry, including market share trends, mobile computing, ultrabooks, and cloud computing services—as well as the position of the Mac in Apple's product portfolio—and is faced with making a decision about the future of the Mac.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Continuing budget pressure is forcing facilities groups to re‐think their current service delivery models and develop initiatives that reduce cost and increase efficiency. Making this task more difficult is the fact that many costs incurred by the facilities department are the result of behaviour patterns of non‐facilities employees. To assist in this task one facilities organisation turned to activity‐based costing (ABC) as a solution. ABC has allowed the facilities group to identify internal and external behaviour changes that affect the cost of delivering services. Once identified, plans of actions are developed in conjunction with the various departments to address equipment and facilities usage, service level requirements and operational process improvements. The execution of these plans allows the facilities group specifically to identify cost drivers that can be eliminated, thus avoiding the traditional arbitrary budget reduction process. Readers will be introduced to the application of the ABC model and how behaviour modification initiatives, using ABC, provide supporting data for the development of the annual budget. In addition, readers will learn how the development of behaviour change initiatives can place the responsibility for corrective maintenance cost control on the end user.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.