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The Gaines Dog Food plant in Topeka KS is built around self‐managing work teams. It opened in 1971 and has been 20% more productive than similar, traditional plants for two decades. The Procter & Gamble Co.'s Paper Products Division implemented self‐managing teams at the same time; by 1975, it knew that the division was significantly more productive than traditionally organized plants. In the mid‐1980s, AT&T's American Transtech subsidiary cut its prices to customers by 50%, then avoided layoffs, then became even more profitable by moving to more fully self‐managing teams. And tiny Litel Communications (now LCI) used teams to cut time to process a service order from two weeks to one day.

The need to maintain up-to-date technological skills despite an aging workforce makes it imperative that organizations increasingly focus on retraining older employees. This article develops an adult career model based on the acquisition of technological skills and gradual skill obsolescence. The model suggests the importance of retraining and provides practical implications to the development of retraining programs. Suggestions for future research are also offered.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to understand how children expand independence within instructional interactions with their teachers. To do so, the authors re-examine how scaffolding is understood and applied.

Approach – First, the authors consult websites and literature used by teachers and academics to examine how the notion of scaffolding is employed and explained. The authors analyze the roles, the intentions, the means, and the timing of scaffolding as used in popular literature to explain and support instruction. The authors then entertain a conceptual shift: What would the scaffolding process look like if learning were conceived as agentive? With this in mind, the authors interrogate descriptions of the tenets and functions of scaffolding to consider the process in relief.

Findings – The authors track the consequences of the inversion of scaffolding onto the understandings of the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model. Scaffolding is understood as sitting within a GRR model, wherein the learner gradually releases responsibility to a teacher at the point of need. Intersubjectivity remains a basis for the model. A Window for Examining Teaching–Learning Interactions is offered as a frame with which to analyze the theories of both the child and the teacher apparent within scaffolding interactions. An accurate teacher’s theory of the child’s current and changing theories is required for teaching to be honed to invite children to efficiently access personal and contextual resources and to seek assistance when needed within engaging tasks with scope.

Practical Implications – When children are positioned as initiators of their learning, they are able to use their vast repertoire of knowledge of the world, language/s and literacies, and familial, cultural, and community ways of knowing to create, interpret, and engage in tasks. In this agentive view, children are positioned as holding full responsibility at the onset of any task and gradually releasing their responsibility to access support, when needed. Within tasks that are sufficiently wide for engagement at varied entry points, learners are the catalyst of the functions that were formerly initiated by teachers. Teachers invite children to access personal and contextual resources and to seek assistance, as needed, through additional external, contextual resources. This inverted model of scaffolding, that is child-directed rather than teacher-initiated, requires teachers to go beyond theories of teaching and learning and develop a theory of an individual child.

Vinyl Products Ltd., Carshalton, Surrey, has appointed Mr. Joseph Fairless as technical manager, Paint and Building, to head the company's Research and Application work on polymer emulsions for those two industries. Mr. Fairless, who is an ATSC, brings with him a wealth of experience drawn from a working life that began with British Paints, in Newcastle; he then worked at English China Clays Lovering Pochin Ltd. of St. Austell, before transferring to International Trading Corpn., of Baltimore, marketing fillers in Europe and the Far East. Immediately before joining Vinyl Products he was with Air Products Inc., as Technical Service Manager, Europe, and latterly in the central Technical Service Laboratories, Allentown, Pa.

Despite advocacy for greater dialogue between social psychologists and family scholars, there has been little cross-fertilization between the two. One exception is in the area of equity theory. We address how advances in equity theory and in family research each have even greater capacity to enrich the other. We do so by using the 1996 General Social Survey, 1992–1994 National Survey of Family and Households, and 2002 International Social Survey Programme to explore the relationship between emotion and perceived inequity in the family. We summarize key findings as a prelude to future scholarship in the United States and globally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the question of whether modern digital information technologies damage their users' cognitive capacities in some way, and to speculate on how librarians should adapt their services as a consequence of the controversy surrounding this question.

The paper reviews some recent literature on this subject, combined with an examination of the role played by technology, librarians and government in determining the nature of our society's response to problematic aspects of the use of digital, internet‐based applications in education.

The paper finds that highly differentiated and highly polemical attitudes to this subject mean that librarians have to acknowledge the existence of important challenges to the apparent consensus about the way information technologies should be used in education in Western societies. This has important consequences for the approach to collection building (the balance between digital versus print provision), for library building design, and for the value which should be placed on systematic information literacy teaching. The existence of such an important debate should also embolden information professionals to make their own insights into these issues more widely known.

Some of the findings in this paper are amenable to further development through practitioner‐oriented research; however, the bulk of the content used for this paper is derived from the literature on this topic, so there is no original research data presented to back up the assertions made by the author. It is simply an account of a debate which has to be acknowledged by librarians.

The implications of the issues under discussion in the paper are presented in clear practical terms, and the consequences for library management made explicit.

The clash between two different theories of learning and information provision is debated and the links with issues of government policy are explored. The social connections between education and wealth generation are brought into this debate.

The paper provides a useful, up‐to‐date briefing on recent controversial issues in education, information management and socio‐economic policy making.

This study aims to improve our understanding of side selling in farmer cooperatives. Cooperative member side selling, in which farmers divert produce from cooperatives to competitors, threatens coffee cooperatives. This is a problem in Burundi, where many households earn income from coffee and cooperatives serve a collective action function.

Using data from a survey of Burundian coffee farmers, we assess the determinants of two types of cooperative member side-selling behavior: selling to both cooperative and non-cooperative buyers and selling solely to non-cooperative buyers.

Farmers who sell to both cooperative and non-cooperative buyers are more likely to be male household heads, be more invested in coffee and have larger farms than non-side sellers, among other characteristics. Farmers who only sell to non-cooperative buyers are poorer and less invested in coffee than non-side sellers.

Additional research is needed to better understand why side-selling behavior differs between groups and to better understand how household head gender influences side selling. In addition, this study lacks qualitative data supporting quantitative findings. Future research should include qualitative methods to better understand motivations for side-selling behavior.

The study provides important information on what influences cooperative member side selling and focuses on specific types of side-selling behavior that have been largely overlooked. The study focuses on the role of household head gender in side selling, which is important, given the centrality of women to African agriculture.

In our world, nearly nine million people die every year from hunger, losing one person to hunger every few seconds. Ethiopia is among the leading countries in the total number of people facing hunger. Several actions have been taken to achieve food security globally and at the household level. However, the problem of food insecurity is still high in many parts of the world. Why are we failing to achieve food security? And where should we start? This study aims to answer these main questions.

Relevant quantitative and qualitative data were duly used to describe food insecurity and associated climate factors globally and nationally. For this, PRISMA review methodology was used to help the systematic review. More than 90 relevant empirical and theoretical literature in the field were reviewed in an integrated way with practical evidence from Ethiopia. Governmental technical reports, NGOs reviews and other relevant empirical data referring to Ethiopia are thematically analyzed.

The subjectivity, dynamism and complexity of the concept of food security are found to be some of the issues challenging the practice of achieving food security. The unresolved issues in the combination and interaction of the four pillars of food security (food availability, access to food, food utilization and stability) are affecting its measurement. In this study, it is emphasized that food insecurity in rural and urban areas should be treated differently, as food insecurity in rural areas is directly related to food production which depends on rainfall patterns. In rural Ethiopia, rainfall variability was among the main causes of food insecurity. More importantly, it is indicated that rainfall variability does not affect all pillars of food security equally; its effect is more pronounced on food availability and stability aspects. Deconstructing the concept of food security to make it more pragmatic, and understanding the factors behind the rainfall variability should be the starting tasks in achieving food security. Further, even though food aid is preferred to react to transitory food insecurity, focusing on long-lasting preventive measures that address the root causes of the recurring food insecurity in rural areas of Ethiopia would be an effective way of addressing the problem.

Policy makers and other governmental and humanitarian agencies working on food security can make an evidence-based decision, shape policies and programs if they have clear information about the features of food insecurity, the nature of rainfall variability and critiques of the reacting mechanisms to food insecurity. Shortages of food in some place and food price crises in the other places have been both referring to food insecurity. This makes the understanding of food security situations more difficult to explain and communicate.

This study primarily clarifies the conceptual complexity surrounding food security as it currently exists. Further, it provides a comprehensive and quantitative description of the state of global to national food security, along with the associated variability of rainfall patterns that are related to it. It also provides a brief overview of the intervention mechanisms for addressing food security, with a specific focus on Ethiopia. This study has set a clear demarcation to assess food security in rural and urban areas.

This chapter proposes a novel nonnormative approach to evaluating quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of food security.

On the demand side, we consider the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the food security system, whose mechanisms should be evaluated by their impact on the quality of life of an endangered population. On the supply side, the motives of food aid donors and food security providers (directly and via policy mechanisms) are discussed in the context of the deservingness heuristic.

The model illustrates three problems with measuring food security-related quality of life: peoples’ different expectations, the different points at which people stand on their food security trajectory, and the potential for an evolving reference value of peoples’ expectations. The deservingness heuristic is the mechanism behind the domestic and international food security aid that occurs via evolutionary forces, or cultural, institutional, and ideological forces.

Food security is a problem that requires a humanistic approach rooted in the evolutionary process/development of the human race. Food security can be misused by the food aid/welfare recipients for their own purposes. Likewise, food security programs by food aid/welfare donors can be targeted unethically when used to achieve the ideological, institutional, and political goals of the donors. Differentiating between the behavioral causes of providing food security may be helpful in predicting whether aid/welfare will be provided to the needy at all.