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This study aims to provide an exploratory analysis of a broad range of factors that may help to explain the rapid growth of Chinese private owned enterprises (POEs).

The analysis in this study takes advantage of an archival dataset constructed by the third author from proprietary data collected for a practitioner conference in China.

Consistent with research on entrepreneurs in Western economies, the individual characteristics of the Chinese founders showed weak correlations with sales growth, but measures of founder motivation did correlate with sales growth. While the results for company characteristics were also weak, most of the factors related to company governance, strategy, competitive advantage, and stakeholder trust all showed significant correlations with the POE's rates of sales growth.

The motivations of Chinese founders appear to matter more than their traits in explaining their ability to grow sales. Solid structure, strategy, and competitive advantages are important also. Building trust with stakeholders may facilitate growth by helping Chinese POEs bridge the institutional voids that they face.

The rapid growth of the Chinese economy and of Chinese POEs offers a unique content in which to study factors that may affect growth rates. However, obtaining reliable data on Chinese POEs is difficult; this study uses a proprietary dataset to offer a rare glimpse into the factors that may affect the sales growth rates of Chinese POEs.

The teaching of cooking is an important aspect of school-based efforts to promote healthy diets among children, and is frequently done by external agencies. Within a limited evidence base relating to cooking interventions in schools, there are important questions about how interventions are integrated within school settings. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a mobile classroom (Cooking Bus) sought to strengthen connections between schools and cooking, and drawing on the concept of the sociotechnical network, theorise the interactions between the Bus and school contexts.

Methods comprised a postal questionnaire to 76 schools which had received a Bus visit, and case studies of the Bus’ work in five schools, including a range of school sizes and urban/rural locations. Case studies comprised observation of Cooking Bus sessions, and interviews with school staff.

The Cooking Bus forged connections with schools through aligning intervention and schools’ goals, focussing on pupils’ cooking skills, training teachers and contributing to schools’ existing cooking-related activities. The Bus expanded its sociotechnical network through post-visit integration of cooking activities within schools, particularly teachers’ use of intervention cooking kits.

The paper highlights the need for research on the long-term impacts of school cooking interventions, and better understanding of the interaction between interventions and school contexts.

This paper adds to the limited evidence base on school-based cooking interventions by theorising how cooking interventions relate to school settings, and how they may achieve integration.

A relatively recent development in the history of social inequality is the growth of mass media communications. In developed and in underdeveloped nations, in highly stratified and in egalitarian societies, research documents the persistence of major disparities between different socioeconomic groups in their awareness of given topics. Despite the abundance of information available through a diversity of communication channels and information agencies in our nation, evidence points to the inability of major population sub‐groups to gather the appropriate types of information to cope with the most pressing information needs. These differences in information acquisition and in the ability to manage information seem to be related to differences in exposure to the mass media, which in turn appear to be strongly related to, or constrained by, differences in income, education, and other available socio‐economic resources.

The term ‘obsolescence’ occurs frequently in the literature of librarianship and information science. In numerous papers we are told how most published literature becomes obsolete within a measurable time, and that an item receives half the uses it will ever receive (‘half‐life’) in a few years. ‘Obsolescence’ is however very rarely defined, and its validity, interest, and practical value are often assumed rather than explained. Before reviewing studies on ‘obsolescence’, therefore, it is necessary to look at the concept and to identify the reasons why it should be of interest.

Do these reference requests sound familiar? “I need to know what has happened on this day in history. Can you help me?” Or, “I'm doing a paper on Thornton Wilder. He was born on 17 April. Can you tell me who else was born on that day?” Or, “Are any national or regional anniversaries coming up next Friday?” These questions call for a special type of reference work—a book of days. A book of days (or day book) lists important events that have occurred on each day of the year throughout history, and is arranged by month and day. These works often include not only historical, cultural, and literary events, but also the dates of the births and deaths of notable people, commemorative days of saints, and special anniversaries. A book of days, for example, can reveal that historians Will and Ariel Durant were married in New York City Hall on Halloween in 1913, or that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway were born on the same day in 1899 (21 July). This article will review some of the more useful books of days that are often found in reference collections—works that are uniquely suited to answer questions about each day of the year.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a small, exploratory research project focusing on librarian and parent/caregiver opinions of, and reactions to, the use of digital media and technology in public library storytimes for preschool children in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Telephone interviews with librarians and an online survey of parent/caregivers were undertaken.

The research found a mixed response to digital storytimes. Those who had not attended or presented digital storytime sessions were largely opposed to the practice, while those who had participated in a storytime using digital media generally held more positive views. Key concerns were focused on the amount of screentime young children should have and a lack of human interaction. Supporters appreciated the introduction of some basic digital literacy skills and the variety that technology could bring to storytime sessions.

Both samples were small and self-selecting. The use of an online survey meant a bias in the sample toward those with access to appropriate information communication technology as well as a self-selection bias.

The paper suggests some developments in practice and approach if librarians are going to play the role of media mentors in their communities.

This is the first study focusing on the development of digital storytimes in Aotearoa New Zealand and adds to knowledge and understanding of key stakeholder views of the inclusion of digital media and technology in public library programming for young children.

The finance literature has not documented the feeling, the shock and the pain that ordinary people had to go through during the 2008 global financial crisis especially in the United States where it all began. In an effort to shed new light on the global financial crisis, it has become important to present a view of the financial crisis from the lens of those who were affected by the crisis, those who were responsible for the crisis, those who could have prevented the crisis, as well as the views of other observers. The views or quotes in this chapter are concise, useful and thought provoking. They create an opportunity to help reconsider the events of 2008 from a fresh perspective, so that a lot more can be done by everyone, including banks, governments and citizens, to prevent a repeat of those events in the future of finance. Finally, most of the views or quotes reported in this chapter have within them some important lessons and wisdom to guide us on what to do before another future crisis comes.

It is customary these days to denounce our society for its unconscionable neglect of the elderly, while we look back romantically to some indeterminate past when the elderly were respected and well cared for. Contrary to this popular view, old people historically have enjoyed neither respect nor security. As Simone de Beauvoir so effectively demonstrates in The Coming of Age (New York: Putnam, 1972), the elderly have been almost universally ill‐treated by societies throughout the world. Even the Hebrew patriarchs admonished their children to remember them as they grew older: “Cast me not off in time of old age; when my strength fails, forsake me not” (Psalms 71:1). Primitive agrarian cultures, whose very existence depended upon the knowledge gleaned from experience, valued their elders, but even they were often moved by the harsh conditions of subsistence living to eliminate by ritual killing those who were no longer productive members of society. There was a softening of societal attitudes toward the elderly during the period of nineteenth century industrial capitalism, which again valued experience and entrepreneurial skills. Modern technocratic society, however, discredits the idea that knowledge accumulates with age and prefers to think that it grows out‐of‐date. “The vast majority of mankind,” writes de Beauvoir, “look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.” That the United States in the twentieth century is not alone in its poor treatment of the aged does not excuse or explain this neglect. Rather, the pervasiveness of prejudice against the old makes it even more imperative that we now develop programs to end age discrimination and its vicious effects.

Due to the international paucity of empirical evidence, this study aimed to investigate the health metrics and lifestyle behaviours of a staff cohort in a higher education institution (HEI) in Ireland.

Data were collected from 279 (16.4% response rate) HEI staff (academic, management, clerical/support), via a web-based health questionnaire that incorporated validated measures such as the Mental Health Index-5, Energy and Vitality Index, Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale (short form) and the AUDIT-C drinking subscale. A cluster analytical procedure was used to examine the presence of distinct clusters of individuals exhibiting either optimal or sub-optimal health behaviours.

A multitude of concerning patterns were identified including poor anthropometric profiles (64.4% of males overweight/obese), excessive occupational sitting time (67.8% of females sitting for = 4 h per day), hazardous drinking among younger staff (38.2% of 18–34 year olds), sub-optimal sleep duration on weeknights (82.2% less than 8 h), less favourable mean psychometric indices than the general Irish population, and insufficient fruit and vegetable intake (62.1% reporting <5 daily servings). Cluster analysis revealed “Healthy lifestyle” individuals exhibited significantly lower BMI values, lower stress levels and reported fewer days absent from work compared to those with a “Sub-optimal lifestyle”.

In contrast to the abundance of research pertaining to student cohorts, the current study is the first to examine the clustering of health-related variables in a cohort of HEI staff in Ireland. Findings will be used to inform policy at the host institution and will be of broader interest to higher education stakeholders elsewhere. Future longitudinal studies are required to monitor the health challenges experienced by this influential, yet under-researched cohort.