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This chapter explores differences in fringe, distant, and remote rural public library assets for asset-based community development (ABCD) and the relationships of those assets to geographic regions, governance structures, and demographics.

The author analyzes 2013 data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture using nonparametric statistics and data mining random forest supervised classification algorithms.

There are statistically significant differences between fringe, distant, and remote library assets. Unexpectedly, median per capita outlets (along with service hours and staff) increase as distances from urban areas increase. The Southeast region ranks high in unemployment and poverty and low in median household income, which aligns with the Southeast’s low median per capita library expenditures, staff, hours, inventory, and programs. However, the Southeast’s relatively high percentage of rural libraries with at least one staff member with a Master of Library and Information Science promises future asset growth in those libraries. State and federal contributions to Alaska libraries propelled the remote Far West to the number one ranking in median per capita staff, inventory, and programs.

This study is based on IMLS library system-wide data and does not include rural library branches operated by nonrural central libraries.

State and federal contributions to rural libraries increase economic, cultural, and social capital creation in the most remote communities. On a per capita basis, economic capital from state and federal agencies assists small, remote rural libraries in providing infrastructure and services that are more closely aligned with libraries in more populated areas and increases library assets available for ABCD initiatives in otherwise underserved communities.

Even the smallest rural library can contribute to ABCD initiatives by connecting their communities to outside resources and creating new economic, cultural, and social assets.

Analyzing rural public library assets within their geographic, political, and demographic contexts highlights their potential contributions to ABCD initiatives.

This chapter explores various aspects of mergers and acquisitions in the banking industry within a simple model that allows explicit comparison of sector performance before and after the mergers and acquisitions. The industry structure we look at involves a few dominant banks and a competitive fringe, which we take as the structure most likely to resemble the Turkish banking industry in the aftermath of the ongoing restructuring process. Using a reasonable set of parameters to simulate the model, we perform comparative statics exercises regarding the impact of mergers among domestic as well as with foreign banks on equilibrium outcomes.

The labour turnover rate is in general 10 per cent in China. Although this rate is especially high for blue collar workers, fluctuation among qualified employees and managers is high as well. As a result, the economic development has led to high competition on the Chinese market. Moreover, companies also have to deal with lack of employees – especially highly qualified ones. The purpose of this paper is to figure out the impact of fringe benefits on the labour turnover rate of Chinese professionals.

The study subjects were 14 managers working for private companies in the Shanghai region. The authors conducted semi‐structured interviews as the primary data collection procedure to investigate reasons, opinions, and views about fringe benefits and employees' loyalty to their organisations.

The paper outlines highly diverse perspectives about fringe benefits. Furthermore, the authors show a series of reasons for labour turnover and motivators of Chinese professionals.

This paper contributes to the compensation literature by analyzing the relation between fringe benefits and loyalty of Chinese professionals. Moreover, it shows to what extent fringe benefits influence labour turnover in China. It also presents the preferred fringe benefits of employees in Chinese companies.

Previous research has found that nonprofit organizations pay lower wages than do other organizations. This has been attributed to altruism on the part of workers who are willing to donate some of the value of their time to organizations that support causes in which they believe. This paper extends that analysis to the cost of fringe benefits. Do nonprofit organizations spend less on fringe benefits than do other organizations? Utilizing a data set containing information on wages and fringe benefits in the nonprofit sector we estimate a standard wage equation to test for such a relationship. We find that not only are nonprofit organizations spending less on fringe benefits than are other organizations, but that they are spending significantly less than would be predicted by the previous research on nonprofit wage differentials.

Against the background of the biggest arts festival in the world, there have been some shocking findings recently about the treatment of performers and other workers at the Fringe. The purpose of this paper is to consider the type of treatment a significant number of Fringe workers experience and how it might be dealt with under the law. The mistreatment of workers includes being: required to work excessively long hours, paid low wages or no wages, subject to sexual or street harassment, lookism, ageism or deprivation of other employment rights. What is unusual about Fringe workers is they normally only work for a short time (often a maximum of two months). Also, in respect of performers and other theatre workers, they might be inclined to work on a voluntary, unpaid basis to gain the necessary experience to kickstart their careers. Employers will often be theatrical promoters in charge of productions at a number of venues. This paper highlights the issues surrounding working at the Fringe and identifies the employment law issues for its workers. This involves identifying likely breaches of legislation under the civil law and contract law by employers. Also, the consideration of how the criminal law could apply to the treatment of workers is undertaken. Finally, it involves an analysis of how the rights of Fringe workers could be better protected. The findings and recommendations in this paper will have application to any situation where someone is employed as a volunteer or worker in an artistic setting on a short-term basis.

This paper is a review of sources drawn from articles in law journals, newspapers, etc.

The findings of this paper suggest that there is a need for reform of the law.

This paper focuses on improving the rights of Fringe workers who have a history of being neglected or abused.

This paper ensures improved rights for Fringe workers.

This paper analyses issues that are relevant for all workers in the arts at festivals, etc., throughout the UK.

This paper is extremely original.

The paper seeks to empirically identify the theoretically ambiguous relationship between employer fringe benefit provision and worker job satisfaction.

Using the five most recent waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, both pooled cross‐section and fixed effects estimates explain the relationship between fringe benefits and job satisfaction. The potential endogenous relationship is also tested using a recursive bivariate probit procedure.

Fringe benefits are significant and positive determinants of job satisfaction. The potential endogeneity between fringe benefits and job satisfaction is not shown in this dataset while controlling for fixed effects does not remove the significant impact of fringe benefits.

A limitation is the inability to control for total compensation within the estimations and control for wage changes as a result of fringe benefit provision.

Higher levels of worker job satisfaction, potentially resulting from fringe benefit provisions, have been linked to important productivity measures such as lower quit rates and absenteeism.

The paper is the first to study the relationship between fringe benefits and job satisfaction in detail while additionally testing for the endogeneity of the relationship and controlling for fixed effects.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the image and associated impression of atmosphere created by independent theatres at two fringe festivals namely, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Melbourne Festival Fringe.

The paper contains a content analysis of promotional materials produced by the independent theatres for their involvement in their respective fringe festival.

The atmosphere created is of fringe festivals replete with serious experimental theatrical productions, with independent theatres being the home of alternative ideas and the performers being skilled in the production of the art form.

The atmosphere created by the independent theatres is similar to that projected by the fringe festival overall.

The paper highlights the importance of the fringe festival organisers establishing a strong working relationship with the managers of independent theatres to ensure the most appropriate promotional material is used to attract the desired target audience to the fringe festival.

This paper is of value as most festival‐related literature provides only a passing mention to atmosphere whereas this paper investigates atmosphere in more depth. The paper adds to the limited research on fringe festivals.

Details are given of a simple extensometer with a gauge length of 0·50 in. which uses the mechanical interference of two sets of parallel straight lines as the means by which to measure displacement and hence strain. The interference effect exhibited by two pieces of Dufaycolor reseau placed in surface contact has been employed for development purposes since the reseau provides a convenient and ready‐made source of fine parallel rulings, after the removal of the photographic emulsion. Some of the related aspects of mechanical interferometry and its possibilities are discussed by way of introduction.

Objective – The current biotechnology revolution has been associated with newly developed genetic modifications (GM) that offer new prospects for increasing agricultural productivity. This has stimulated a rapid adoption of GM corn hybrids by U.S. farmers. Yet, there is concern about the structure of competition among biotech firms that own patents over GM traits. This chapter evaluates the spatial differences in pricing of biotech corn hybrids, with a focus on the fringe versus core regions of the U.S. Corn Belt.

Methods – The analysis examines how local conditions and market concentrations affect the pricing of GM corn hybrids in different locations.

Results – We find evidence of more extensive subadditive pricing in the fringe region. We also examine how both own- and cross-market concentrations affect prices across regions. For GM hybrids, the results show that market power is generally more prevalent in the core region compared to the fringe.

Conclusions – The evidence shows that the pricing of GM corn hybrids varies across space. The observed pricing schemes benefit farmers more in the fringe than in the core region of the Corn Belt.

Social media tools are in increasing use across higher education and Twitter hashtags, live blogs, Facebook events, and Flickr groups are becoming a regular feature of academic conferences and event. In this chapter the author reflects on the experience of planning, moderating, and analyzing social media amplification of the 2009 Beyond the Repository Fringe event. Based upon this experience several important issues regarding social media usage are considered and a series of practical guidelines for planning amplification of higher education events are proposed.