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Rapid change in UK food retailing, in particular the entry of European discounters such as Aldi and Netto, has provoked speculation about the effect of these entrants on the major multiples. The discount sector is growing and the major multiples are trying to appear more price competitive. Reviews the emerging discount sector – its development and growth. A case study of one of the majors examines the effect of the discounters on turnover, and provides evidence that the turnover losses to the majors from discounter competition is minimal, and that the significant threat remains other multiples. The multiples still have more to fear from each other than they do from the discounters. However, the majors do now appear to be taking actions to limit the effect of the discounters. The growth of discounting and the success of the major multiple superstores seems to reflect polarizing markets. Examines future prospects for the food discounters.

The purpose of the present research is to examine the comparative values that urban Vietnamese consumers place on attributes of rice that is produced using environmentally friendly methods. The authors consider the impacts that this may have on the livelihoods of rural Vietnamese small farmers. Rice is an “impure public good” that includes both “private” and “public” attributes that consumers consider in their purchase decisions. Consumers make tradeoffs between environmentally and socially beneficial practices (public goods) and perceptions of product quality (private goods). The authors used latent class modeling to investigate the values associated with attributes of rice that is produced using sustainable farming practices.

The authors used a discrete choice experimental design in which consumers stated their choices among combinations of rice attributes. The survey provided responses from 360 urban Vietnamese consumers and allowed to estimate the preferences and nonpecuniary values for rice grown using different levels of environmentally beneficial production methods.

The results identify two segments of rice consumers: one group of consumers who are sensitive to price and the other group who are sensitive to environmental issues. The individual characteristics are reflected in the choices of production methods and in the willingness to pay for environmentally beneficial outcomes of those methods.

Given the number of independent variables measured, the sample was relatively small, such that confirmatory statistical methods were inconclusive. However, the authors used multiple analytical tools that provide corroboration of the significant determinants of the utility functions for the two segments.

The results provide directions for production of rice at a national level, as well as practical implications for consumer-oriented communications.

Results suggest that the emerging middle class of Vietnamese consumers are willing to pay more for rice that is produced using methods that are beneficial to the environment. Results also indicate challenges to provide sustainably-produced rice to poorer groups of consumers.

The study provides important context for consumer preferences within emerging economies. This also adds to a growing literature that uses the choice experiment method to estimate consumer valuation of the outcomes of various agricultural practices.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

Conflict styles are typically seen as a response to particular situations. By contrast, we argue that individual conflict styles may shape an employee's social environment, affecting the level of ongoing conflict and thus his or her experience of stress. Using data from a hospital‐affiliated clinical department, we find that those who use a more integrative style experience lower levels of task conflict, reducing relationship conflict, which reduces stress. Those who use a more dominating or avoiding style experience higher levels of task conflict, increasing relationship conflict and stress. We conclude that an employee's work environment is, in part, of his or her own making.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

This chapter explores the role of postmodern intertextuality in Neil Jordan’s 2012 vampire film Byzantium. This intertextuality serves to place the film in dialogue with earlier vampire fiction, in particular the 1970s cycle of British and European erotic vampire films such as Daughters of Darkness and The Vampire Lovers from Hammer Films. Byzantium recalls these earlier texts structurally and thematically, both through direct reference and more oblique allusions.

While Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern intertextuality as mere nostalgia and the imitation of ‘dead styles’, feminist postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon contend argue for the political potential of postmodernism. This chapter proposes that the postmodern intertextuality of Byzantium is a critical intertextuality, and that the foregrounding of storytelling, writing, and rewriting in the film draws attention to the ways in which the intertextuality of Byzantium is not merely a return to past forms but also a reworking of them.

Taking up the work of Linda Hutcheon and Catherine Constable, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Byzantium critically reworks aspects of earlier vampire fiction in order to critique and expand the representation of the female vampire and through this explore issues relating to female subjectivity and community.

Weaknesses in the grades and standards system in low-income countries across Sub-Saharan Africa undermine the transparency of agricultural markets. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ghana and Mozambique rice is predominately sold in open bags and if rice price does not reflect its quality, then inefficiencies may lead to consumer welfare losses. Importantly, it is possible that impoverished communities are priced out of the market due to inflated and inefficient prices. The objective of this study is to examine determinates of rice price by estimating the impact of selected rice quality attributes on rice prices in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Mozambique.

We collected 363 rice samples from open air markets in Bukavu (DRC), Nampula (Mozambique) and across Ghana in 2019. Each rice sample was analyzed in a food science lab for the quality attributes: percentage of chalk and brokens, chalk impact, length and length-to-width ratio. We used multiple regression analysis to estimate if and to what extent quality attributes were the drivers of price.

Findings suggest that there are irregularities in the Ghanaian market for broken rice and that regardless of quality, imported rice is priced higher than domestic rice. In the DRC and Mozambique, our results indicate price is driven by length and length-to-width ratio in the former and length-to-width ratio in the latter.

Rice samples were purchased from market vendors and thus consumer preferences for attributes were not revealed.

These results provide valuable insight to policymakers regarding the need for proper labeling and regulation of open bag rice sales in an effort to increase consumer welfare and improve food security.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate strategies to manage product recalls where shortages are a critical threat, with impacts such as loss of life. The authors aim to identify key supply chain strategies and opportunities for theoretical advancement by taking a resilience perspective on temporary supply chain design.

First, the authors conducted an impact event analysis of product recalls by exploring the RAPEX database and official statements of individual country regulators. Second, the authors conducted an exploratory case study with the Cambridge University Hospitals on Personal Protective Equipment to explore product recall risks, utilising an action research methodology.

Additional processes, mainly testing, can compensate for the risks that may arise from temporary supply chains, where changes in location and product design are not possible due to the immediate nature of demand caused by COVID-19 pandemic. This finding reflects on the resilience of designing and implementing temporary supply chains from the perspective of product, process and location.

This paper does not employ an in-depth multiple case study methodology. However, the authors argue that the role of institutional actors in global supply chains and its implications on product safety needs to be empirically studied in order to expand existing supply chain management theories to cover resilience in emerging, mature and temporary supply chain.

Managers can learn from the Cambridge University Hospitals case study that a downstream quality inspection system can be deployed to manage product quality and safety risks where recalls are not an option, such as during critical situations in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors’ observations suggest that governments may be socially responsible for implementing rigorous mechanisms to manage product recall risks that compromise consumer safety.

The authors’ study is uniquely designed and studies various specific phenomena of product recalls risks in COVID-19. The unique design features include a dynamic and recent database analysis involving a product, process and location centric perspective complemented with a Cambridge University Hospitals case study.