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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of supplier development (SD) on supplier’s performance by sharing implicit knowledge in mentorship under the influence of supplier’s organizational culture (OC).

A survey questionnaire was employed to collect data from 226 employees of participating suppliers after conducting mentorship training at the suppliers’ site. The data were analyzed by the partial least squares structural equation modeling with software SmartPLS Ver. 3.0.

The empirical analysis indicates that SD by mentorship partially mediates the total effects of OC – power distance and uncertainty avoidance – on performance. It completely mediates the collaborative culture on performance.

This study may confirm that the SD program by mentorship is a viable strategy to enhance the performance of supply chain partners and the selection of suppliers.

This study aims to show what type of directors founders (or entrepreneurs) first appoint to the board and how these appointments differ across experienced and novice entrepreneurs.

The sample consists of the human capital of board members in 443 new ventures in the computer software and information technology industries between 2000 and 2014. The hypotheses were tested using tobit regression.

The findings in this study reveal that compared to novice entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs tend to appoint early boards with greater human capital (entrepreneurial, technical/scientific and industry-specific) and with greater functional diversity. In contrast, novice entrepreneurs tend to appoint early boards with greater finance and director experience.

The value of this research lies in filling the gap in the current literature by comparing the board appointment/selection behavior of novice and experienced entrepreneurs, which is relatively underexplored.

This paper aims to present the design of a new service in a self‐access language centre of a university in Hong Kong. A language action literacy program is being designed to promote independent learning and to support undergraduates in developing preferred qualities, including what the Kano Model would classify as excitement qualities.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is the decision support tool for selecting the literacy program contents to echo the Voice of Customer (VOC). The QFD exercises undertaken include: a telephone survey with 12 employers rating the importance of customer requirements; the program designers selecting program contents that match the customer requirements; determining the relationship between the customer requirements and the program contents; calculating the importance weighting of program contents; and determining the correlation between the program contents. The categorization of qualities by the Kano model is followed when discussing customer satisfaction.

Independent learning was rated as the most important of 20 customer requirements, and excitement qualities such as Critical thinking, Innovation, Creativity were rated as important. The QFD exercises led to the recommendations that seven types of literacy (e.g. Critical literacy, Activism & advocacy) and functional grammar should be prioritized as main program contents for empowering undergraduates to make an impact on a community or profession.

Since the sample size of the importance survey was small, the new program would have to be evaluated by larger‐scale surveys after piloting.

A review of literature found no report on QFD‐based design of self‐access language centre services; this study is likely the first of its kind.

Sociology, narrowly defined and almost universally practiced as the study of human society, is limited in its benefits to human animals because it ignores how hegemonically crafted and unjust human social arrangements are intertwined with the oppressive treatment of other animals. This article promotes a wider definition of sociology and its practice, one that includes the lives and experiences of other species. The analysis uses a recrafted minority group theory that highlights the entangled oppression of humans and other animals. A historicalmaterialist reflection on relationships between humans and other animals demonstrates the efficacy of this more inclusive theory. Sociologists must become aware of and engage this wider approach to the study of society in order to understand how social arrangements create oppressive conditions for both humans and other animals and to increase the possibility for the discipline to have substantive impact on deteriorating societal and global conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a historical development of public relations from its early days until 1970. The study aims to show that in the early stages of development public relations was closely linked with public opinion research.

A historical content analysis is used to establish a “story of identity” through a review of selected articles from Public Opinion Quarterly from 1937 to 1970.

A clear finding is that public relations was once an integral part of public opinion science but later changed its focus to the management field, interested in reaching different publics. From the very beginning public relations was a subject of academic interest.

This paper has a few limitations; one that stands out is that selected articles were analysed from only one journal, which does not offer the recent material (after 1970 and especially from the 1990s). At the end, the paper raises some questions, which should aid the discussion about the identity crisis of public relations discipline (and managerial function) in the postmodern era.

The paper attempts to cover the gap in an interactive relationship between two disciplines: communication studies and public relations. It contributes to the knowledge of historical development of public relations as an academic discipline.

Approaches to the sociology of culture have largely been constituted around the long tradition of functionalism in sociology. This has hampered the field greatly. Among other shortcomings, this intellectual foundation has led to a limited understanding of ideology and civil society, a conservative political orientation and an overdeterministic view of social action and the actor. In this paper, I explore and then apply a new approach to the sociology of culture, one that attempts to conceptualize more robustly the dynamics of ideology, ideological conflict and civil society. As part of this project, I endeavor to map out a critical cultural perspective that establishes a multidimensional understanding of the contingency of social action.

Labour has been well spent in the analysis of nutritional needs, by demonstrating the nature and multiplicity of the individual factors concerned. These labours must still continue. Yet such is the nature of the body as a whole that we must at the same time endeavour to view nutrition from some unitary stand‐point. Every factor in a dietary exercises its functions in union with those of others, and we have yet to learn with more exactness what should be the balance among them in an ideal dietary.

A thematic focus on identity has for years been a mainstay of secondary school literature curricula. Typical curricular units engage students in questions related to what it means to come of age and to develop an integrated sense of individual identity in the face of societal pressures toward conformity. This common thematic focus relies on conventional theories of identity as static, located in the individual, and linked to an autonomous self. Further, this focus positions adolescents as incomplete people, lacking fully formed identities. Current sociocultural theories of identity, however, understand identity as multiple, fluid, performed, and shaped by cultural histories and social contexts. Identity, in this view is always in process. Adolescents are fully formed people with identities that are no more or less complete than those of anyone else. Such a view of identity requires a more complex and nuanced conceptualization of adolescents, their capabilities, and their interactions with texts than does an individual view of identity. In this chapter, we outline a framework for identity focused literature instruction that relies on sociocultural understandings of identity, then draw on illustrations from classroom research to explore three key ways that an identity-focused approach challenges current approaches to pre-service teacher education related to literature instruction. Specifically, we explore challenges to the ways that we teach teachers to select and evaluate literary texts, plan literature instruction, and engage in inquiry and dialogue with students.

This paper aims to explore the concept of public relations in the progressive era to gain a greater understanding of the historical development of corporate public relations in the USA.

The paper provides historical analysis of 87 magazine articles dating from 1900 to 1917, which discussed press agentry, publicity, and public relations.

In the early 1900s, publicity meant both legal requirements of corporate disclosure and press exposure of secret corporate activities. The purpose of publicity was to reveal excess and corruption. The term press agent was used in two ways. First, it was used to refer to literary and theatrical press agents, and second, it was used interchangeably with publicity agent to signify individuals hired by corporations to respond to the publicity and explain corporate policies to the public. By the second decade of the twentieth century, corporations, specifically the railroads, were using the term public relations to refer to the practice of developing relationships with the public.

Most historical studies of public relations in the USA have described the development of the field as a linear progression or evolution from press agentry, to public information or publicity, to two‐way communication. This study suggests that that linear evolutionary model is only partially accurate. At least some corporations in the progressive era had a greater understanding of the two‐way street than corporations in this period normally are given credit for.