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This paper aims to examine the role of “restructuring” in confronting the challenges facing contemporary high streets in the devolved UK. It complements three articles concerned with repositioning, reinventing and rebranding and illustrates the multi-faceted approaches involved in addressing retail change and town centre transformations. This paper emphasises the role of planning and governance in effecting change.

Informed by a literature review, action research involved inter-related interventions in selected locations, and associated workshops with engaged practitioners and community actors.

The findings highlight that the “resilience” of contemporary town centres demands resisting efforts to return to the status quo and necessitate forms of adaptive management. Understanding high street degeneration and the limitations of a retail-only led policy focus as a “wicked issue” further demands socially constructing town centres as an ecosystem requiring a holistic response. New forms of joint-working involve selecting appropriate models, attending to relational aspects and defined roles and responsibilities. Land use planning, including masterplanning and creating evidenced policy options, provides an important democratic space for legitimising action, offering leadership and extending participation to new change agents.

Restructuring of governance is an essential prerequisite in effecting change.

The originality of this study lies in the application of the restructuring element of the 4 Rs Framework which enables a focus on the governance dimensions of town centre and high street regeneration. The findings are enhanced through the experiential evidence which stresses both the importance of place-based diversification and value of prioritising holistic and joint actions developed through participatory visioning exercises.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

This study examined teachers’ cognitive development when interacting with video ethnography. It used grounded theory to discover embedded meanings and relationships that emerge from descriptive data collected from six teachers. Findings revealed (a) the categories of cognitive activities when using video ethnography, (b) the influence of experience and beliefs on these activities, (c) the scaffold that video ethnography provides, and (d) teachers’ progression in a cognitive development process through interaction with video ethnography. The study has implications in improving technology use in teacher development, production of multimedia cases, and research on case-based pedagogy and other related areas.

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of elite women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s: Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). It concentrates on information given about their schooling.

The biographical sketches of the women, defined as “elite” by their inclusion in three collections from the 1930s, were examined for information about their and their daughters' education. Using mixed methods in a prosopographical approach, this is mainly a quantitative analysis. It outlines and compares the schools they attended where given as well as providing basic demographic details of the 491 women.

The paper shows that, for those who gave educational details, the women and their daughters attended private schools almost exclusively. Three types of schools were listed – private venture, corporate, and a very few state schools. The paper demonstrates that the landscape for girls’ secondary schooling was not a settled terrain in terms of type, place, religion, or age of schools available for elite girls' education in the late 19th and early 20th century. Private schools are shown to be part of the “machinery of exclusiveness which characterised the inter-war years” (Teese, 1998, p. 402) and private venture schools survived well into the third decade of the 20th century.

Beyond the histories of individual schools, little is known about the educational profile of Australian elite women in the past. This largely quantitative analysis helps to uncover and compare across state-based cohorts, previously unknown demographic, and schooling details for interwar women who recorded their educational details, as well as for the NSW and Victorian daughters where given.

This paper proposes a Bayesian procedure to investigate the purchasing power parity (PPP) utilizing an exponential smooth transition vector error correction model (VECM). Employing a simple Gibbs sampler, we jointly estimate the cointegrating relationship along with the nonlinearities caused by the departures from the long-run equilibrium. By allowing for nonlinear regime changes, we provide strong evidence that PPP holds between the US and each of the remaining G7 countries. The model we employed implies that the dynamics of the PPP deviations can be rather complex, which is attested to by the impulse response analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine failures in internal and external controls associated with sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), using three caselets to illustrate the fraud triangle theory factors.

This study uses a qualitative research approach. Caselets are used to illustrate the fraud triangle factors associated with SWFs.

Ideally, SWFs would be characterized by opacity and the strategic flexibility to advance political goals, but this operational agility facilitates an environment ripe for fraud, in large part because there is little transparency with regard to their regulatory structure. Elements of the fraud triangle inherent in the structure of SWFs contribute to the fraud found in the three case examples.

The authors use three SWF fraud cases rather than statistical sampling of all SWFs, which limits the generalizability of the findings. Future research should explore additional recommendations for the evaluation of SWF governance.

The overlap between public sector governance and SWF governance creates an environment amenable to fraud, and as a result, fraud has occurred in several SWFs. Governance recommendations should take into account the lessons learned from previous SWF fraud cases.

Ideally, SWFs would be characterized by opacity and the strategic flexibility to advance political goals, but this operational agility may also facilitate an environment ripe for fraud, in large part because there is little transparency with regard to their regulatory structure.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to identify the fraud triangle risk factors associated with sovereign wealth funds using SWF fraud caselets.

Metabrasive hosts foundry executives The Bilston based steel shot and grit manufacturers, Metabrasive Ltd, played host to a party of senior foundry executives from the Southern England and West Midlands Branches of the British Foundry Association (BFA) last month. The party was led by Mr. Norman Gledhill, the newly appointed director of the Association, and included Mr. W. M. Sutherland, chief executive of METCON which represents a group of trade associations including BFA, in areas of trade affairs, labour relations and training.