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The purpose of this paper is to trace the establishment of area schools from two vantage points. The first vantage point is those who were legislatively responsible for public education in South Australia from the mid 1930s through to the end of World War 2. The second is the local community, with references to Karoonda (and districts) in particular.

The paper locates the evolution of area schools in the comprehensive public secondary schooling movement and the practice of borrowing policy initiatives from overseas and other education jurisdictions. Primary source documents have been used extensively throughout the article.

Initial resistance to the closure of small schools to form area schools was overcome by the provision of free bus transport, and the wider availability of secondary education, locally. Originally intended to provide instruction to students who would remain for most of their lives in rural communities, within ten years of opening, area schools became the means of mobility for many.

The continuing exodus of youth from rural areas in search of “greener pastures” has become one of the main issues confronting rural communities as they search for ways to maintain viability in a competitive, market driven economy.

The paper is a rigorously documented historical contribution towards debate and discussion about how governments, and others, may ensure access to secondary education in rural areas in light of demographic and economic factors.

Lean supply ‐ the system of purchasing and supply chain management required to underpin lean production ‐ has been characterized as “beyond partnership”. Re‐examines this idea, comparing the techniques which constitute lean supply with those contained in supply chain management, partnership sourcing, and strategic purchasing. The observations and conclusions are based on research principally in the automotive and electronics industries in the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, the USA and Japan.

Ubiquitous Internet access and social media make visual consumption possibly the most vital characteristic of the experience economy. A cumulative, integrative framework for the analysis of visual artefacts has thus been called for as existing analytical tools and theoretical frameworks (such as semiotics, discourse analysis, content analysis, iconography, rhetoric and so on) each provide in isolation only a restricted perspective. To advance best practice towards shaping brand perception and consumer engagement, this paper provides a crucial analytical tool to uncover the unique and specific characteristics of identitary luxury fashion brand discourse by introducing and applying such an integrative framework.

A rigorous grounded theory approach was applied to a corpus of primary data, print advertising in Vogue (UK and US) and Vanity Fair (UK). Outcomes were distilled to first principles of meaning-making and aggregated in a framework which also integrates long-existing classics from diverse fields of knowledge to present a broad cumulative perspective for the analysis of visual discursive practice. This paper demonstrates the methodological rigour and validity of the framework, that is, its practical adequacy and explanatory power in uncovering the identitary brand discourse of luxury fashion.

An application of the integrative framework breaks new ground in uncovering the discreet identitary characteristics of the discursive practice of the luxury brands under investigation, Chanel and Gucci, which can be encapsulated as gendered technology of the confident self (Foucault) and spectacle (Debord), respectively.

To advance theory that illuminates understanding and shaping of brand perception and consumer engagement with luxury fashion brands, the proposed framework is the first to integrate insight from a rigorous analysis of primary data with long-existing classics from salient fields of knowledge. It, thus, provides a broader, more inclusive perspective that elucidates the multifaceted layers of meaning of luxury fashion discourse in a new and comprehensive way which existing approaches with focus on an isolated dimension such as semiotics or nonverbal behaviour and so on would not have been able to reveal.

The inclusive, practicable theoretical framework provides a parsimonious and practical tool that can be applied by non-experts across disciplines to unlock meaning in fashion discourse as a route to shaping brand image and engaging consumers.

The paper provides a new perspective on the communication practice of luxury fashion advertising as the new integrative framework illuminates layers of meaning crucial to understanding the intricacies of identitary brand discourse and to shaping brand perception and engaging consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain a better understanding of the extent to which lean production permeates manufacturing companies in Malaysia by drawing on supply chain management (SCM) managers' or production managers' perception of lean production practices and level of performances in the industry.

The instrument used in this study is a structured survey questionnaire consisting of two major parts. The first part comprises several variables measuring lean production practices, and the second part consists of several performance measurements. Sample companies are chosen from Malaysian manufacturing companies listed in the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers directory. From the 300 companies sampled, 200 responses were completed, representing a 67 per cent response rate.

The results support the conceptual model, demonstrating strong association between lean production, product quality performance, and business performance. The structural equation modelling (SEM) results reveal that “reduced setup time” appears to be of primary importance in the linkage between lean production, product quality performance and business performance. It is also instructive, from a score of 67.21 on the Malaysian Lean Production Index (MLPI), that manufacturing companies in Malaysia must marshal their effort to implement a more effective lean production SCM in order to improve on product quality performance and business performance.

This research adds to the body of knowledge on lean production SCM in manufacturing industry. This paper may be of particular interest to practicing production managers, or SCM managers, as it suggests what factors should be emphasized in lean production.

The originality of this paper lies within the context in which this study is undertaken as it seeks to address key relationships between lean production, product quality performance and business performance within the Malaysian manufacturing industry, where relatively few studies are available. In addition, relationships between constructs are analyzed through SEM that measures not only magnitude but also the causal direction of the relationships.

The practical and philosophical understanding of the mind of the oppressed is an intricate one that involves many different themes. Yet it is one that is central to the study of sociology and exposes to us the human side of society from an individual and a group perspective. So what can we learn from the oppressed? Can oppression promote the drive to try to liberate oneself and, in doing so, enlighten us on aspects of the human condition that will aid our approach to understanding a broader social world‐view? What are the experiences of the oppressed that can teach us more about the pragmatics and the ideologies of social dynamics? The argument put forward in this paper is that the perspective of the oppressed provides a superior vantage point for understanding and interpreting the social world. But in order to have a clear understanding of why this is the case, we must start with a definition of what exactly constitutes to be oppressed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

In theorizing the dynamics of social processes, dialectical thinking informs Marx's historical materialist inquiries and both – dialectics and historical materialist principles – inform his political–economic analysis. In conceptualizing empirical observations during this work, Marx (1973b, p. 101) assumes that the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” and that “With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too” (Marx, 1992, p. 28). This methodological tack strives for the flexibility needed for analyzing patterns in long-term social development (the structure of history) as well as the logic of specific systems in their totality and flux (the history of structures).

Farmer encourages the use of multiple perspectives as a means of developing robust knowledge. He points out that it is impossible to fully know any thing from a single vantage point. Further he encourages us to reflect on how our perspective shapes what and how we see. He also points out that practice is the test of theory. I apply that maxim here, considering how my understanding of the city of Newark, NJ is impacted by the perspective from which I view it, and by exploring how other vantage points may yield different views of the city.

The current study explores the ambiguity of accounting technique in the context of a historical study of the Canadian Indian Department under the direction of Deputy Superintendent D.C. Scott at the beginning of the 20th century. Starting from the work of Bauman and his commentators, we argue that modernity viewed as a set of practices and thought patterns, facilitates bureaucratic constructions of the “Indian problem” In turn, this cultural milieu and bureaucratic construction operated as an ideological circle, encouraging the use of accounting techniques of governance that permitted both the distancing of bureaucrats from indigenous peoples and the downplaying of other vantage points. However, as our analysis highlights, numerical re‐presentations also provided the tools and rhetorical spaces for challenges to government policy.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.