Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of Library Lights Out, an annual collaboration between the library and Housing & Residential Life at Eastern Washington University (EWU). This creative outreach program features collaborative educational and recreational activities, is a cost-sharing partnership and serves to further the organizational goals of both the library and Housing & Residential Life.

The John F. Kennedy Library at EWU was initially approached by Housing & Residential Life with the idea for an overnight event in the library, which became Library Lights Out. Student participants in this event spend the night in the library and participate in a variety of educational, team-building and fun programs, such as a library resources scavenger hunt and “capture the flag” in the library stacks. Library Lights Out has become an annual event funded primarily by Housing & Residential Life, facilitated by the library and driven by students.

Library Lights Out has been a successful partnership that benefits the library, students and Housing & Residential Life.

This paper adds to the limited body of literature on academic library outreach to residence halls by highlighting three unique aspects of Library Lights Out. First, it is a cost-sharing partnership which was initiated by Housing & Residential Life and not by the library. Second, it occurs in the library and not in the residence halls, unlike most library outreach to residence halls. Finally, it is an overnight sleepover event with a combination of an educational program and recreational activities and games.

In a recent reference to changes brought about by the local government reorganisation of 1974, we criticised some of the names given to the new areas. Some of these name changes have made difficulties for those who follow from afar the doings of local authorities, as well as raising the ire of local people. Local names, however, are not the only casualty. The creation of new and larger governmental organisations rarely, if ever, results in economy and as anticipated, it was not long before the new local authorities were being directed to embrace financial stringency and all that it incurs. One such other casualty has been the loss of so many of the annual reports of local authority departments, very few now arriving at BFJ offices. In every case, the reason has been the same—severe restrictions on spending. Not that this was not necessary in many fields, but in respect of annual reports, we are convinced it was false economy. For so many of the reports, it was our pleasure to review them in the pages of BFJ. A prominent Labour politician was once heard to refer to them as “hard and dry reports for hard and dry officials”. It all depends probably on what you are looking for in them. Statistics there must be but most enforcement officers and public analysts, endeavour to keep these to the minimum, the general impression being that these are “dry”. If you are looking for trends, for comparison of the year under review with preceding years and then for comparing the results reported in one part of the country with another, where the population, eating habits, consumer reactions may be different, the tables of statistics are highly important.

Juvenile delinquency research has identified two vital (and related) concepts to this area of study: age of onset and escalation. In this investigation, escalation is examined as a function of early drinking. Added to this are the influences of deviant peers and the social control effects of family and church. My analysis shows that consuming alcohol at a young age is correlated with illegal drug use, committing a greater number of illegal acts, committing more serious offences, and being confronted by police for delinquent behavior. Moreover, I show that peer influence has a greater impact on individual behavior than do other social control mechanisms. In conclusion, I offer a critique of current policies aimed at teenage drinking and argue in favor of preventative, rather than prohibitive strategies.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

Group incentive schemes have been shown to be positively associated with firm performance but it remains an open question whether this association can be explained by the motivating characteristics of the group-incentive scheme itself, or if this is due to factors that tend to accompany group-incentive schemes. We use a controlled experiment to directly test if group-incentive schemes can motivate sustained individual effort in the absence of rules, norms, and institutions that are known to mitigate free-riding behavior.

We use a controlled lab experiment that randomly assigns subjects to one of three compensation contracts used to incentivize an onerous effort task. Two of the compensation contracts are group-incentive schemes where subjects have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of their coworkers, and the third (control) is a flat-wage contract.

We find that both group-incentive schemes resulted in sustained, higher performance relative to the flat-wage compensation contract. Further, we do not find evidence of free-riding behavior under the two group-incentive schemes.

Although we do find sustained cooperation/performance over the three work periods of our experiment under the group-incentive schemes, further testing would be required to evaluate whether group-incentive schemes can sustain cooperation over a longer time horizon without complementary norms, policies, or institutions that mitigate free-riding.

By unambiguously showing that group-incentive schemes can, by themselves, motivate workers to provide sustained levels of effort, this suggests that the “1/n problem” may be, in part, an artifact of the rational-actor modeling conventions.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.