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This paper examines the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) spending in the defense industry. It aims to provide models that give the United States Department of Defense (DoD) indications of future M&A activity, informing decision-makers and contributing to ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

The study uses panel data regression models on 40 companies between 1985 and 2021. The company's financial health is assessed using industry-standard financial ratios (i.e. measures of profitability, efficiency, solvency and liquidity) while controlling for economic factors such as national productivity, defense budgets and firm size.

The results show a significant relationship between efficiency and M&A spending, indicating that companies with lower efficiency tend to spend more on M&As. However, there was no significant relationship between M&A spending and a company's profitability or solvency. These results were consistent with previous research and the study's hypotheses for profitability and solvency. However, the effect of liquidity was the opposite of the expected result, possibly due to the defense industry's different view on liquidity compared to previous research.

The paper provides insights into the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its M&A spending, a topic with limited research. The findings can inform policymakers and regulators on the industrial base's future M&A activity, ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

The current study examines developing racial attitudes among a group of African American adolescents. Data for this study include 28 open-ended, qualitative interviews with African American adolescents (64% girls, 36% boys) in Detroit, Michigan, and were drawn from a larger study in which these adolescents and their mothers were interviewed about racial socialization. Data analysis shows adolescents' racial attitudes to be ambivalent and influenced by the dissonance between “color-blind” rhetoric – the idea that “race doesn't matter” – and their everyday experiences, in which race does matter in important ways. Adolescents' reports of racial attitudes and experiences with racism frequently include travel anecdotes, which reveal how place, travel, and negotiating the color line influence their developing ideas about race. The findings suggest that sources beyond parental socialization strongly affect adolescents' developing racial attitudes and identities and that young people's voices should be further utilized in studies examining these issues.

This paper asks the reader to consider future information retrieval services that return multimedia documents containing any combination of text, graphics, still raster images, audio, and motion video in response to user queries. It then argues that the emergence of generally available multimedia information services depends on four things: (1) close to ubiquitous high‐bandwidth networks; (2) inexpensive user appliances capable of handling multimedia; (3) adoption of standards for representation, compression, packaging and transport of multimedia information; and (4) development of a corpus of multimedia information and associated infrastructure for organizing and searching it. After some explanation, it asserts that the first three are already happening and expresses reserved optimism about the fourth.

Looks at organizational relocation and the stages experienced by individuals when an enforced move becomes necessary. Considers, from the company’s viewpoint, links between individuals coping, managing change and the management of group moves. Lists practical consideration which should be considered.

The purpose of the article is to aid the reader in understanding the knowledge claims in different forms of action research and to see what kind of “turn to practice” is required in research on organising, organisational learning, and management.

A conceptual framework extracted from the philosophy of Aristotle is presented for understanding the knowledge claims of action research in relation to other approaches.

Some form of action research should be pursued, but action research is a label covering many different approaches suggesting different ways of relating knowledge and action.

In order to provide valid, practicable knowledge both action research and mainstream research need to reconfigure and sort things better. The call is for doing more organizational research as “praxis research” as part of late modern, socially distributed knowledge production modes.

The required reconfiguration of organizational research also requires systematic organizational learning in work organizations.

Providing a conceptual framework that is able to grasp the different knowledge forms operating under socially distributed “mode 2” conditions, and to point out required implications for both research and practice, is new.

Objective – To examine whether local area pharmacy market structure influences contract terms between prescription drug plans (PDPs) and pharmacies under Part D.

Data – Data were collected and compiled from four sources: a national mail survey to independent pharmacies, National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) Pharmacy database, 2000 U.S. Census data, and 2006 Economic Census data.

Results – Reimbursements varied substantially across pharmacies. Reimbursement for 20mg Lipitor (30 tablets) ranged from $62.40 to $154.80, and for 10mg Lisinopril (30 tablets), it ranged from $1.05 to $18. For brand-name drug Lipitor, local area pharmacy ownership concentration had a consistent positive effect on pharmacy bargaining power across model specifications (estimates between 0.084 and 0.097), while local area per capita income had a consistent negative effect on pharmacy bargaining power across specifications(−0.149 to −0.153). Few statistically significant relationships were found for generic drug Lisinopril.

Conclusion – Significant variation exists in PDP reimbursement and pharmacy bargaining power with PDPs. Pharmacy bargaining power is negatively related to the competition level and the income level in the area. These relationships are stronger for brand name than for generics. As contract offers tend to be non-negotiable, variation in reimbursements and pharmacy bargaining power reflect differences in initial insurer contract offerings. Such observations fit Rubinstein's subgame perfect equilibrium model.

Implication – Our results suggest pharmacies at the most risk of closing due to low reimbursements are in areas with many competing pharmacies. This implies that closures related to Part D changes will have limited effect on Medicare beneficiaries’ access to pharmacies.

Kent Messenger papers go electronic A £350,000 drive to improve its electronic publishing system is nearing completion for the Kent Messenger Group (KM) of newspapers. When complete, the new system will handle the total advertisement and editorial input and sub‐edit, copy make‐up and accounts for all seventeen KM titles. Among them the various publications generate some 1,200 tabloid pages each week — all of which will be individually composed online at each regional office (as soon as the system is complete) and then transmitted to KM's central production plant for typesetting, make up and printing.