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The purpose of this paper was to examine the rheological characterisation of thickened water under different temperature and pH conditions and thickened milk with different fat contents.

Beverages thickened with powdered thickeners are used in the medical management of individuals who suffer swallowing difficulties (dysphagia). Each individual requires a specific level of thickness to best meet the needs of their dysphagia. Although the level of thickness is defined, obtaining the correct consistency of thickened fluids is difficult. This is due to fluctuations associated with temperature and type of fluids to be thickened. Rheological characterisation of commercially available xanthan gum-based thickener was performed under different conditions of temperature, pH and fat contents.

The viscosity and the yield stress of thickened water was found to be unaffected by pH. Similarly, temperature did not affect the viscosity at a high thickener concentration, although it did at lower concentration levels. Conversely, viscosity and yield stress increased as fat levels increased in thickened milk. Furthermore, thickened water took less than 2 minutes to reach equilibrium viscosity, while thickened milk required approximately 15 minutes to reach equilibrium viscosity.

These findings have implications for the standing time required for different beverages before they are thickened to a consistency that has been deemed safe for the patient’s physiological needs. Additionally, it highlights that different liquid base substances required different amounts of thickener to achieve the same level of thickness.

Findings from this study confirms and explores the variability of thickened fluids under different conditions of temperature, pH and fat content for the medical management of dysphagia.

Ethics of governance deficiencies including weak management of the principal-agent problem by the board of directors and conflict over the strategic intent of the organisation between groups of employees such as the board of directors, top management team, and the middle-line managers working in small teams are age old problems for stock exchange listed companies. These matters continue to cause shareholders of listed companies much concern, creating tense annual general meetings and robust community debate on how to reign in blatant moments of managerial hegemony (or dominance) with agents exploiting principals, at times at great financial cost to long suffering shareholders. The role of the chairperson and the board applying agency theory is to manage these conflicts on behalf of the shareholders; however, in many instances, company directors have failed in their duties and investors have been aggrieved – the result, war in organisations. The challenge for organisations is to avoid this source of tension and war caused by emergence of managerial hegemony over the organisation and to promote sound executive stewardship and effective social exchange among the board, executive team, and middle-line managers. These challenges are discussed and solutions are developed. The importance of strategic intent as a unifying rhetorical message as a key component of an ethics of governance regime that keeps the peace and prevents war in the organisation is explained.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) transparency claims are propagating a belief in a modern panopticon for ensuring responsible corporate behavior. Corporations use transparency claims to cultivate the impression of full disclosure. The paper aims to explore why people believe transparency ensures responsible behavior from corporations as well as the negative effects of this pseudo‐panopticon.

The paper explores transparency in relation to CSR, CSR reporting, the internet, and activism and describes how their confluence produces pseudo‐panopticon.

The paper finds that the pseudo‐panopticon allows corporations to claim transparency in CSR communication and for stakeholders to accept that claim. The reality is that a minority of activist stakeholders bear the burden of ensuring true transparency by questioning disclosure.

Transparency should be seen as a process, and it fails if activists cannot create public awareness of CSR shortcomings. The challenge is to find ways to make transparency as a process work in a world where apathy and self‐deception, in part facilitated by the pseudo‐panopticon, work against the process.

The paper builds on the process view of transparency by developing its implications for CSR communication. The result is a novel approach to CSR reporting and transparency that contributes to other critical voices concerned about the value and effects of CSR communication.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Building from calls for greater interdisciplinary research in interpreting family business phenomena, we integrate research on work–family conflict, detachment and burnout from both organizational and family studies. Using the characteristic work–family integration of family business settings as a backdrop we develop theoretical arguments that emphasize the reconciliatory role of interdisciplinary perspectives to explain the ostensibly contradictory findings in extant research. The diminishing barriers separating work and life spheres occurring in most global industries illustrate the importance of conceiving the study of work–life phenomena through recursive, rather than linear, logics and emphasizing the relevance of family business research in providing a contextual foundation for interdisciplinary discussions.

This theoretical paper integrates perspectives from the literatures on organizational behavior and family systems theory to form six propositions on the relationship between work–life integration and the antecedents and consequences of burnout and psychological detachment.

This paper explores the nuances that overlapping work and family roles might be a source of both harmony and discord in family firms. In doing so, our research contributes to the growing relationship between family systems theory and family business research, and creates the foundation for future empirical studies on the psychological dynamics that underlie work–family integration.

This research advances a novel perspective on the interactions between work–family integration and burnout and detachment, and does so by noting that the way the family business literature treats work–family integration may apply to any employee that experiences tension between these different spheres of their identity.

Purpose – This chapter examines the role of the media, guns, and violence in the social construction of masculinity in today's mediatized American culture.

Methodology – The chapter draws on critical theory and cultural studies to address crises of masculinity and school shootings. It applies and further develops Guy Debord's (1970) theory on spectacle in the contexts of contemporary violent media spectacles.

Findings – In the chapter it is argued that school shooters, and other indiscriminate gun killers, share male rage and attempts to resolve crises of masculinity through violent behavior; exhibit a fetishism of guns or weapons; and resolve their crises through violence orchestrated as a media spectacle. This demands growing awareness of mediatization of American gun culture, and calls for a need for more developed understanding of media pedagogy as a means to create cultural skills of media literacy, as well as arguing for more rational gun control and mental health care.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter contributes to the contemporary debate on mediatization of violence by discussing it within critical theory and cultural studies. The theoretical framework is applied to analysis of a range of different empirical cases ranging from school shootings to the Colorado movie theater massacre at the first night of the latest Batman movie in the summer of 2012.

As our Flashbacks for this issue clearly show, public relations is no new subject as far as librarianship is concerned. The only thing that seems to change is the name under which it operates. In 1911 it was called, without any subterfuge, advertising. By 1936 it had become publicity. And now it is public relations, and a subject which British librarianship is at last taking seriously.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!