Search results

Examines the severe shortage of skilled professionals and looks at how business is suffering regarding global risk management remuneration. Looks at how until very recently, risk management has been widely regarded not as a specific resource requirement, but as a mere “add‐on” service to product control departments in financial institutions. Closes by saying that over the last year there has been a marked increase in the number of institutions seeking to recruit for their own risk management groups.

During the past few years the British Food Journal has reported a great many prosecutions under the Food and Drugs Act in respect of “ foreign bodies ” in food. Examples have been cigarette ends and pieces of metal or wood in bread, rat dirt and mouse dirt in cereals, nails or small pieces of metal in sausages, splinters of glass in milk, and a host of similar instances. Some of the prosecutions have been for selling food unfit for human consumption, but many have been for selling food not of the substance demanded. I confess that I have always had some doubt whether a loaf is entirely unfit for human use merely because it contains a clean piece of metal quite easily seen and removed. Still, justices never seem to have any difficulty in convicting the vendor under one Section or another. The older readers of the British Food Journal will remember that until the Act of 1938 came into force it was impossible to institute proceedings under the “ prejudice to the purchaser ” Section unless there was a Public Analyst's certificate. I laboured for many years to get this restriction eliminated. First, I was able to persuade my colleagues on the Departmental Committee on the Composition and Description of Food (which reported in 1934) to make a recommendation in that direction, although it was rather doubtful whether it fell within the terms of reference. Then, contrary to the strong representations of the Society of Public Analysts, but with the approval of the Ministry of Health, I persuaded the Joint Committee of Lords and Commons on the Bill of 1938 to enact that a Sampling Officer should be entitled at his discretion to submit or not to submit a sample for analysis. What I had in mind was this: first, that it was sheer waste of time and money to consult an Analyst when an offence could be quite effectively proved without an analysis. Secondly, a wide range of cases in which what was sold was not of the nature demanded could be better proved by an Inspector or by trade evidence than by analysis in a chemical laboratory. Examples particularly in my mind were the substitution of haddock for hake, witches for lemon soles, sheep's liver for calves' liver, the sale of foreign produce as home‐grown, the sale of apples, plums and other fruit of different kinds from those under whose names they were sold, the sale of margarine for butter when the facts were admitted by the vendor, the improper description of wines which could better be proved by skilled tasters than by analysts, and, of course, though to a minor extent, the inclusion of foreign bodies such as those mentioned above. I had always felt that the public needed vastly better protection than could be given by chemical analysis alone, and that the scope of the Act was quite unduly restricted. But I do not pretend that I anticipated such a spate of prosecutions in respect of the accidental and careless admission of foreign bodies in loaves and the rest. One evident cause for this is that the public, through their association with the local Food Office, have become enforcement conscious. In the old days a normal purchaser of a loaf containing a piece of wood did not dream of taking more drastic action than remonstrating with the baker. Now, everyone's first instinct is to repair to the Food Office or the Town Hall with official complaint. Now that I am on the shelf and no longer concerned either with enforcing the Food and Drugs Act or with defending those charged with offences, I find it interesting to contrast present‐day practice with that of forty odd years ago.

Using the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys (2003–2015), this chapter explores the relationship between the gender gap in math test scores and computer (digital devices) gaming, as a potential “swimming upstream” factor in the quest to close that gap. Using a decomposition based on a pooled hybrid specification, we attribute two to three points (from 13% to 29%) of the gender math gap to gender differences in the incidence and returns to intense gaming. The comparison of the negative versus positive girl-specific effects found for collaborative games versus single-player games suggest a potential role for gaming network effects.

There is little research that examines the experiences of individuals who were assessed as having a sexual preference for children. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lived experience of five incarcerated participants who possessed a sexual preference for either prepubescent or pubescent children and had completed an accredited programme for males convicted of sexual offences in HM Prison Service in England and Wales.

Semi-structured interviews were carried out and the data were analysed using the principles of an interpretative phenomenological approach.

Three recurrent themes were identified. These were: internal battle, I am always going to have these thoughts, and there is no help out there. In particular, these participants perceived that their sexual preference was relatively enduring and would require continuous management.

The results have implications for clinical practice and further research. Clinicians may need to think particularly creatively about their therapeutic plans and extend the parameters of desirable treatment goals for clients with sexual preferences for children.

To date there are very few studies that have examined the accounts of men with a sexual preference for children regarding their lived experience. Paedophilia constitutes a stable sexual preference, suggesting that convicted perpetrators with such a preference face an inherent problem. Whilst sexual urges may be regulated and arousability reduced, the underlying attraction may remain intact. In response to the lack of research in this area, the aim of this study was to investigate the lived experience of a sexual preference for children.

The current study examines the strategies that nonbinary people use to communicate their gender identities across contexts, including an exploration of how they modify their gender presentations in response to situations perceived as risky or unsafe. Data were drawn from interviews with 19 nonbinary people, and a modified grounded theory approach was used to identify prevalent or recurring elements in the data. Nonbinary people struggled to communicate their genders to others and felt constrained by the knowledge that others would inevitably interpret their gender presentations within the context of a strict binary. Moreover, they often felt pressure to enact normative, binary presentations in order to feel safer or less visibly gender-nonconforming, particularly in contexts in which social norms were experienced as heightened, such as when engaging with institutions or navigating public spaces such as restrooms or transit systems. This study contributes to the limited literature on nonbinary identities and highlights how dominant transnormative narratives constrain presentation and communication.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the joint effects of performance feedback, assigned goal levels and types of compensation schemes (i.e. fixed-pay, piece-rate and goal attainment bonus) on subordinates’ task performance.

A laboratory experiment was employed to collect data. The subjects consisted of a total of 133 Australian business executives. The study used ANCOVA for data analyses, controlling subject’s practice trial scores as covariate.

The results provide strong support for a three-way interaction between performance feedback, assigned goal levels and types of compensation schemes on subordinates’ task performance. Specifically, the results reveal that the reliance of a piece-rate compensation scheme resulted in higher task performance when compared to fixed-pay and goal attainment bonus compensation schemes in the presence of performance feedback and assigned difficult goal levels situations. In addition, the results reveal that a goal attainment bonus compensation scheme leads to higher task performance when compared to a fixed-pay compensation scheme in the presence of performance feedback and assigned difficult goal levels situations.

These findings have important implications for compensation schemes design in firms that aim to achieve higher employees’ performance and organizational effectiveness.

The issue of duplicate publications has received a lot of attention in the medical literature, but much less in the information science community. This paper aims to analyze the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate publications across all fields of research between 1980 and 2007.

The approach is a bibliometric analysis of duplicate papers based on their metadata. Duplicate papers are defined as papers published in two different journals having: the exact same title; the same first author; and the same number of cited references.

In all fields combined, the prevalence of duplicates is one out of 2,000 papers, but is higher in the natural and medical sciences than in the social sciences and humanities. A very high proportion (>85 percent) of these papers are published the same year or one year apart, which suggest that most duplicate papers were submitted simultaneously. Furthermore, duplicate papers are generally published in journals with impact factors below the average of their field and obtain lower citations.

The paper provides clear evidence that the prevalence of duplicate papers is low and, more importantly, that the scientific impact of such papers is below average.

Employees’ job engagement is a key driver for organizational success and competitive advantage. Based on Kahn’s engagement theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between job engagement, transformational leadership, high-performance human resource (HR) practices, climate for innovation, and contextual performance.

A questionnaire survey, conducted at two different points in time, was employed to collect data from 394 pairs of Vietnamese university academics and their leaders. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel SEM using the Statistical Package for Social Science Version 24 and Mplus Version 7.4.

The findings indicated that transformational leadership and high-performance HR practices were key drivers of employees’ job engagement. A climate for innovation contributed effectively to mediate the effect of transformational leadership on employees’ job engagement. Further, employees’ job engagement was positively and significantly related to contextual performance.

The short time lag between the two data collection phases might limit the ability to reach definite causal conclusions. Future research using a longitudinal design is needed to provide stronger validation for the underlying model.

This study is a rare attempt that investigates the process from which employees’ job engagement is generated and contributes to improve contextual performance in the higher education sector.