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The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework to better understand incentives and obstacles to consolidation of materials in humanitarian logistics.

This study uses a content analysis for its literature review method to code 87 articles related to supply chain and logistics and understand what are the incentives and obstacles to consolidation. It then discusses these issues from the point of view of humanitarian logistics.

Through the combination of a literature review and discussion, the framework developed in this conceptual paper identifies specific sources of delays and impediments to cooperation present in disaster response and development activities. These issues can be related to disaster type, the focus of the organization and the stakeholders as well as the resources required for consolidation themselves.

There are limitations to a conceptual paper, one being the lack of empirical proof for the findings. Another limitation is the use of coding; even though the coding grid was iterative to take into account the findings in the literature, there might still be shortcomings inherent to the categories.

This study offers a comprehensive review of consolidation activities in the last decades and offers an abstract model to further investigate consolidation in the context of humanitarian logistics.

Consolidation, the grouping of several small shipments into one at a designated location, can reduce total logistics cost. Total logistics cost includes consolidation, transportation and inventory costs. Identifying where cost‐saving opportunities exist is often confused by the interrelated nature of these various costs.

School consolidation reforms are underway in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The purpose of this paper is to establish an evidence base of research literature on school consolidation in regional, rural and remote locations.

A scoping study of empirical literature on school consolidation, with a particular focus on regional, rural and remote education, since the year 2000 was undertaken. A corpus of 35 papers were identified and subjected to analysis based on: year of publication, country of origin, unit of analysis, data sources, timeframe and theoretical model.

There remains a limited evidence base for the success of school consolidation reforms for turning around student outcomes. In addition, a number of social implications are experienced by communities losing their local school. These issues are amplified in regional, rural and remote locations.

School consolidation reforms are used by governments/systems wanting to reduce costs and address issues of student disengagement and under-achievement. Despite a lengthy history internationally, there is at best mixed evidence regarding these reforms. With a consider disparity gap between urban and regional, rural and remote school outcomes, robust evidence on the success of reforms has major policy implications for government, systems, educators and communities.

With reforms already underway in NSW (and elsewhere), the need for a rigorous and robust evidence base, such as this scoping study, is timely and significant.

Gaining access to the cost savings and production efficiencies derived from lowering inventories in the supply chain is as vital for small‐to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) as they are for larger manufacturing firms. Lean procurement as a concept has been advanced as a method for achieving this. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a method of addressing some of the critical barriers to implementing lean procurement methodologies in an SME environment through the application of procurement consolidation techniques.

First the relevant theoretical and practitioner literature is reviewed, a theoretical consolidation model is developed, and a worked example is presented.

The barriers face by SMEs trying to implement a lean procurement philosophy are significant. Low volumes, small lot sizes and high frequency purchases incur significant additional distribution costs. The paper argues that the use of a double freight consolidation model (DFCM) is useful to SMEs for maximising the trade‐offs between volume and frequency in an international supply chain.

Whilst this research suggests that SMEs can indeed use the DFCM for lean procurement, the next step is to apply the model in practice.

This paper synthesises consolidation modelling and lean procurement principles. This synthesis is further enhanced by applying a simulated example to the challenging SME environment. The application of the categorisation of both buyers and vendors to the consolidation model is novel.

The paper focuses on the potential benefits of fair value accounting (FVA) in the public sector and the shift towards the entity theory of consolidation supported by international accounting standards. The analysis of the Italian cases shows neither adjustments of the assets to their fair value, nor any recognition of intangibles other than goodwill in consolidated financial statement (CFS), maintaining the configuration of a municipal corporate group based on historical costs. These findings suggest a lack of focus on FVA by local governments (LGs), which is in contrast with international accounting standards. Using a combination of sources (such as annual reports and interviews), part of this paper is based on multiple-case studies of Italian LGs on the voluntary adoption of CFS.

Effective farmer participation in the rural land consolidation process has become increasingly important because it improves results in rural land consolidation and land use efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism of farmers’ effective participation in Chinese rural land consolidation.

The authors empirically assess farmers’ effective participation in the rural land consolidation process in ten counties of China’s Hubei province. Focusing on an effective decision-making model, the authors comprehensively evaluated farmer participation using surveys that incorporated an index system and analyzed survey results using a structural equation model to examine factors that influenced farmer’s effective participation.

The results of the study suggest that the correlations between farmers’ effective participation and the impacting factors the authors proposed were particularly strong. In addition, participation ability, participation opportunity and participation incentive are strongly associated with effective farmer participation. Thus, the authors highlight that incentives should be provided to encourage farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation.

Because of the chosen approach and the set of the research object, the geographic context of the empirical survey work was limited; furthermore, the authors only studied the influencing factors at the individual level, leaving the interaction effects between governmental factors and farmer individual factors inadequately explained.

Despite those limitations, these results serve as an important reference for government agencies and stakeholder groups in rural land consolidation decision making.

Development theory in college describes and explains how students develop. This chapter explores ways to balance and consolidate differentiation and integration in this theory. First, it traces the origins, history and current development of the theory, which evolves from an integrative understanding to a differentiated one. Subsequently, it identifies the tensions between integration and differentiation in this evolution. This chapter consider two directions towards the theoretical consolidation of differentiation and integration: (1) returning to how integrative understandings were achieved and exploring research directions that further advance integrative understandings; (2) recognizing the parallel evolution of North American student development theory in theorising about learning from a critical realism perspective, and, by overlaying this theory upon such a perspective, reconstructing it towards consolidation. This chapter concludes by discussing two implications for further higher education research that draws on student development theory.

The purpose of this paper is to: investigate the current state of intellectual capital (IC) as an academic discipline, and explore the impact of IC on the state of practice.

The most influential articles published in the Journal of Intellectual Capital were identified. Analysis of their cited and citing works was done.

The IC discipline: first, successfully disseminates its knowledge beyond the English-language world but ignores research published in languages other than English; second, has higher self-citation rates; third, uses books for the development of its theoretical foundation; fourth, successfully converts experiential knowledge into academic knowledge; fifth, exerts a limited yet potentially increasing practical impact; and sixth, is at the theoretical consolidation stage of pre-science and is progressing toward becoming a reference discipline. No anomalies in the development of the IC discipline were observed.

IC researchers should pay more attention to works published in non-English journals. Given the status of IC as a professional discipline, they should continue using non-peer reviewed sources to convert experiential knowledge into academic knowledge. They also need to promote their research far beyond the traditional IC domain.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first empirical analysis of the IC discipline from the reference discipline perspective.