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The Isle of Man, a British Isles offshore jurisdiction located in the middle of the Irish Sea, has experienced three separate bank collapses during a relatively brief 26 year period. These collapses have affected in excess of 20,000 depositors and inflicted significant damage on investor confidence in the Isle of Man as an offshore finance centre. The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of deposit protection during this time frame, teasing out the delicate balance required in small offshore jurisdictions between rigorous standards of investor protection on the one hand and the vital importance of remaining competitive with rival offshore finance centres on the other. It critically evaluates the recently enacted Isle of Man deposit compensation scheme (DCS) by reference to this organising principle.

The paper outlines the nature of the Manx jurisdiction and its offshore development. Focussing on the period 1982‐2010, it discusses the three separate bank collapses and insular regulatory and legislative responses. The focal point of the paper is a critical evaluation of the new Isle of Man DCS including comparisons where appropriate with deposit protection schemes in the Channel Islands offshore jurisdictions of Jersey and Guernsey and discussion of the extent to which the new Isle of Man DCS complies with specific features of recently formulated international best practice standards.

The paper reports that insular regulatory and government responses to bank collapses have tended to be distinctly short‐term and reactive. Despite being the first small offshore jurisdiction in the world to embrace the principle of deposit protection in 1991, there has been a conspicuous failure in the Isle of Man to develop related financial safety net policies, and the overriding motive for the introduction and indeed continuation of deposit protection has been to repair enduring reputational damage inflicted on its offshore finance centre by successive bank failures. The new Isle of Man DCS conforms to this model, reflecting insular anxieties regarding risks of lost banking business to rival offshore jurisdictions as opposed to rigorous standards of investor protection.

Analysis contained in this paper sheds light on the problem of effective deposit protection in small offshore jurisdictions, including tensions in policy terms between principled investor protection and finance centre reputational and competitiveness concerns. It also highlights, more broadly, the endemic problem of delivering optimum investor protection at (small) jurisdictional level in the context of international banking groups operating on a multi‐jurisdictional basis and deploying entrenched business models which operationalise offshore banking arms as essentially vehicles for the onward transmission of liquid funds to treasury functions located in parent groups' home jurisdictions.

management practices in a Russian Multinational Company (RMC). The paper is motivated by the lack of empirical evidence on financial management practices outside the Western World (especially from Russia and from other Commonwealth of Independent States). Data for the analysis are gathered from documents and in‐depth interviews with finance managers in the company. The findings of the paper suggest that the company implemented an international cash management system reminiscent of international cash management discussed in the Western literature. For example, techniques such as netting, leading and lagging, re‐invoicing center and cash flow planning are used in the company. Thus, our conclusion is that financial management techniques are likely to be the same in Russia as in the Western world. However, differences are likely to be found in the ways in which these techniques are implemented and used in practice due to differences in environmental conditions. For example, the company did not use any of the sophisticated cash management models discussed in the literature. Our research has implications for understanding financial management practices outside the Western World, especially in Russia.

Textiles as clothing material must fit the human body and senses. This fitting is an important performance of the textiles besides the utility performance of textiles such as fabric strength. For many years, the performance concerning this fitness has been evaluated subjectively by hand judgement. The fabric property judged in such a way is called fabric handle. Instead of the subjective method, the objective evaluation system of fabric handle has been developed. The system is introduced firstly. In this objective method, the handle is evaluated based on the fabric mechanical and surface properties measured by the KESF instrument. The mechanical parameters of fabric measured by the instrument are useful not only for the fabric handle evaluation but also for textile and apparel engineering through the direct use of the parameters. The applications of the objective measurement of fabric handle and properties to textile and apparel engineering are introduced.

In the 1930s, several groups researching aspects of poverty in general and unemployment in particular reported findings concerning reading behaviour. The most ambitious of these groups, and subsequently the most influential, was investigating the thesis that “prolonged unemployment leads to a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them”. The researchers studied the effects of the closure between July 1929 and February 1930, of a large factory dominating the employment and lives of a small Austrian town, Marienthal. With regard to library use, their thesis as regards dwindling use of opportunities at least was dramatically confirmed. The records of the Marienthal Workers' Library showed that from 1929 to 1931 the number of loans dropped by 49% even though a borrowing charge that had been levied before the plant closure had been suspended. Furthermore, even those who continued to borrow books actually borrowed fewer. In 1929 an average of 3.23 books per reader were borrowed and this had dropped to only 1.60 books by 1931. This was not apparently merely because the unemployed had read all the available books since the library obtained the contents of another library just before the closure occurred.

The performance of the British fashion brand Burberry has been determined largely by the adoption of business models which, on occasion, have been detrimental to the company's performance. For the financial year ending 31 March 1998, Burberry saw its annual profits drop from £62m to £25m, leading financial analysts to describe it as “an outdated business with a fashion cachet of almost zero”. However, from 1997, at the instigation of a newly appointed chief executive, Rose Marie Bravo, Burberry has radically re‐aligned its business model and has enjoyed, as a result, significant improvements in its business performance. Drawing from extensive documentation that was published by Burberry in support of their initial public offering (IPO), this paper will provide a review of the history of Burberry; evaluate Burberry's re‐positioning strategy as defined by the firm in their IPO prospectus; and critically delineate Burberry's current business model.

Explores the changing relationship between work and leisure with particular reference to women’s equality in economic and other activities through a review of the history of leisure opportunities since the industrial revolution; indicates the ways in which social and economic changes have had a major impact on women’s leisure needs and activities. Focuses in particular on the provision of workplace fitness facilities, undertaking a survey of more than 200 companies across a number of industry sectors (the rationale for selection is outlined here) to discover the reasons behind such provision and the actual facilities provided; identifies the reasons behind provision as primarily commercial (e.g. being seen as an additional benefit to help recruit high quality employees) and notes that assessment of user group needs was not carried out, with the result that women’s particular needs tended not to be taken into account, for example gyms (favoured by men) being more widely provided than space for aerobic exercise (favoured by women). Concludes that the findings strongly suggest that women remain unequal in their leisure as well as working lives.

THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance which some may have overlooked in their pride and enthusiasm for the public library. But no real librarian of any type will fail to rejoice in the progress to which the celebration is witness. For that has been immense. We are to have a centenary history of the Public Library Movement—that is not its title—from the Library Association. We do not know if it will be available in London this month; we fear it will not. We do know its author, Mr. W. A. Munford, has spent many months in research for it and that he is a writer with a lucid and individual Style. We contemplate his task with a certain nervousness. Could anyone less than a Carlyle impart into the dry bones of municipal library history that Strew these hundred years, the bones by the wayside that mark out the way, the breath of the spirit that will make them live ? For even Edward Edwards, whose name should be much in the minds and perhaps on the lips of library lovers this month, could scarcely have foreseen the contemporary position ; nor perhaps could Carlyle who asked before our genesis why there should not be in every county town a county library as well as a county gaol. How remote the days when such a question was cogent seem to be now! It behoves us, indeed it honours us, to recall the work of Edwards, of Ewart, Brotherton, Thomas Greenwood, Nicholson, Peter Cowell, Crestadoro, Francis Barrett, Thomas Lyster, J. Y. M. MacAlister, James Duff Brown and, in a later day without mentioning the living, John Ballinger, Ernest A. Baker, L. Stanley Jast, and Potter Briscoe—the list is long. All served the movement we celebrate and all faced a community which had to be convinced. It still has, of course, but our people do now allow libraries a place, more or less respected, in the life of the people. Librarians no longer face the corpse‐cold incredulity of the so‐called educated classes, the indifference of the masses and the actively vicious hostility of local legislators. Except the illuminated few that existed. These were the men who had the faith that an informed people was a happier, more efficient one and that books in widest commonalty spread were the best means of producing such a people. These, with a succession of believing, enduring librarians, persisted in their Struggle with cynic and opponent and brought about the system and the technique we use, modified of course and extended to meet a changing world, but essentially the same. Three names we may especially honour this September, Edward Edwards, who was the sower of the seed; MacAlister, who gained us our Royal Charter ; and John Ballinger, who was the person who most influenced the introduction of the liberating Libraries Act of 1919.

In the speech in which he introduced the new Education Bill, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher remarked that it did not deal with a number of special questions, “which must be the matter of another measure.” One of these questions was “libraries,” and we are now definitely face to face with the fact that the Board of Education are of opinion that libraries are within their purview. The report of the speech as it appears in The Times is not conclusive upon the point. “Libiaries,” as an auxiliary of education, may connote in the Minister's mind the mere provision of libraries in schools and teaching institutions generally. If that is so there is no particular reason for alarm, so long as the authorities recognize that even the management of school libraries is a matter for librarians rather than for teachers.

For many years librarians have regarded the collection and preservation of local material as part of their responsibility to their communities. Most public libraries boast a local collection, from the odd shelf or two in the librarian's office to ambitious and elaborate departments. The small collections should not be despised, for the preservation of local material is of itself an important practice, but merely to preserve this material where there exists neither the will nor the means to exploit it, is a meaningless exercise. Those librarians who have amassed considerable and commendable local collections seek also to attract an enthusiastic clientele, usually successfully, because of the very nature of the subject and the curiosity towards its own history which is inbred in a community.