Search results

The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.

This chapter reviews three analytical perspectives – ‘structural’, ‘network’ and ‘cultural’ – on the study of power and their implications for theorizing elites. It builds on this initial theoretical review by developing a critical realist approach to the study of organizational elites out of the structurally based perspective identified in the first section of the chapter. The explanatory potential of this critical realist approach is then illustrated through two case studies of ruling elites embedded in contrasting historical, political and social contexts. The final section of the chapter provides a discussion of the wider implications of these case study analyses for understanding and explaining the ‘new feudalism’ which is emerging in advanced political economies and societies.

This research study seeks to identify what graduating students and alumni perceive to be of most value in courses, and in turn the relationship of those perceptions with the information in evaluations conducted by students at the conclusion of courses.

The project involves empirical research utilizing standard student course evaluation data, and rigorous matching alumni survey data. A focus group, as well as prior academic research, informs the design.

There are several key conclusions from this study comparing student and alumni perceptions of course satisfaction. Consistent with end‐of‐program survey and focus group observations, career relevance clearly grows with time in importance for determining course satisfaction. Career relevance is not a statistically significant factor for course satisfaction using end‐of‐course student survey responses, but grows to a statistically significant determinant utilizing alumni survey data, larger than both the extent of learning and instructor performance; moreover, instructor performance appears to become less important.

While survey responses for individuals as both students and alumni cannot be linked in this study, the high response rate of alumni and the pooling of data suggest results are robust.

If instructors want students, once they become alumni, to be satisfied with their course experience, they need to teach material which will be truly useful in their careers, even if students do not fully appreciate it during class. And if university presidents want satisfied alumni, they need to ensure their school's curriculum includes material that may be applied in the real world, and that the measures of teaching effectiveness utilized for compensation purposes do not stress too highly traditional measures of student satisfaction.

Educators can provide students with a more long‐term satisfying educational experience by ensuring curriculum includes practical material that is truly relevant for careers.

Student evaluations have been commonly used in determining the success of a course, and the effectiveness of their instructors. However, there has only been limited analysis of student evaluations as a measure of what matters most – the benefit to the student once they graduate and move into the working world. Empirical results based on student and alumni survey data identify differences in perceptions between students and alumni, and suggest key recommendations for both instructors and university administrators.

This chapter examines the application of exploratory sequential mixed methods design in the context of small accommodation enterprises (i.e., home-stay). This study, therefore, discusses the exploratory sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis and provides practical illustrations based on a study of small tourism enterprise sustainability practices in Ghana. The findings demonstrate that mixed methods overcome the weaknesses of a mono-method and offer an in-depth understanding of tourism and hospitality phenomena. In addition to providing a practical guide to emerging tourism scholars, the current study highlights the ability of mixed methods to develop emerging practitioners' skills in both qualitative and quantitative data. In conclusion, the exploratory sequential mixed methods design offers pragmatic data collection techniques that are non-existent in mono-methods. Accordingly, it is recommended for exploring research questions when there is limited information and high flexibility is needed.

A Review essay on Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka (Eds), The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 2003 pp. xii+215. ISBN 041529648X £60.00. This volume is composed of thirteen short but concentrated essays and an introduction on the rise of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, each written by a distinguished Japanese scholar. Although the contributors are engaged in international scholarly activities, the volume devotes one chapter to “Adam Smith in Japan” and elsewhere draws attention to scholarly interpretations of Smith in the “West.” Both suggest that the perspective, whilst linked directly to international scholarly discussion through modern works consulted and themes identified in earlier literature (the edited volume by Hont and Ignatieff (1983) being cited, amongst others, as historically significant for the development of the approach set out in the collection), carries insights that arise out of earlier but sustained Japanese interest in the notion of social and cultural modernization and reform. It is perhaps also in this context that they hit on the centrality of the issue of “manners,” shorthand for morals, values, political behaviour, economic motivation and so on. Tatsuya Sakamoto makes this notion of “manners” explicit in his interesting chapter on Hume (p. 92) and Shoji Tanaka makes central the formation of free individuals liberated from feudalism and “religious delusions” (p. 134).