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Examines the social environment experienced by UK food retailers regarding the marketing of genetically modified (GM) foodstuffs. Beck’s notion of risk society provides a critical foundation for analysing retail organisations’ decision making under conditions of “post‐Enlightenment contemporary irrationality”. He advocates “understanding and conceptualisation” of “… insecurities of the contemporary spirit …”, arguing of these that it is “… ideologically cynical to deny and dangerous to yield to uncritically”. The paper also draws upon Habermas, who describes three phenomena that sensitise “new social movements”; reactions to perceptions of “excessive complexity”; the apparent undermining of nature’s “organic foundations”; and a feeling of “overburdening or distortion” in “communicative infrastructures”. These dynamics should all inform any socially sensitive retailer response. The paper is not ethically prescriptive, but seeks to illustrate critically how conceptualisations of risk contribute to the social construction of ethical issues.

The paper focuses on the question of the extent to which individual preference-based values are suitable in guiding environmental policy and damage assessment decisions. Three criteria for “suitableness” are reviewed: conceptual, moral and legal. Their discussion suggests that: (i) the concept of economic value as applied to environmental resources is a meaningful concept based on the notion of trade-off; (ii) the limitations of the moral foundations of cost-benefit analysis do not invalidate its use as a procedure for guiding environmental decision making; (iii) the input of individual preferences into damage assessment is compatible with the basic foundations of tort law; (iv) using individual preference-based methods provides incentives for efficient levels of due care; (v) determining standing is still very contentious for various categories of users as well as for aggregating non-use values. Overall, the discussion suggests that the use of preference-based approaches in both the policy and legal arenas is warranted provided that they are accurately applied, their limitations are openly acknowledged and they assume an information-providing rather than a determinative role.

Richard Quandt has recently noted an increasing tendency on the part of professional economists to introspect their work and activities. Whether this trend derives from some existential angst brought on by a feeling that the marginal social return from the nth journal article does not differ significantly from zero, or whether it results from a desire to formalise sheer bloody‐mindedness (“my two page article in the American Economic Review is better than your 50 page survey in the Journal of Cerebral Economics”) is not our concern. We simply wish to move with the tide by producing our own survey of how British economists rank the “prestige” of the professional journals. Our survey results are reported below and it will be seen that they have been produced in a manner which makes them directly comparable to those produced for America by Hawkins, Ritter and Walter. We also offer some comparisons with the findings of Moore.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of Islamic banks in developing countries from 2007 to 2010 which includes the period of the financial crisis by empirically examining the way in which the macroeconomy affected Islamic banking performance (IBP) in developing countries. The empirical examination involves two approaches of measuring performance: Sharia-based and conventional-based performance measurement.

For this paper, the authors have utilized a Data Stream/Bank Scope database and data from the Bank Negara Malaysia (Malaysian Central Bank) to collect a panel set of annual financial information for Islamic banking from the year 2007-2010. The initial sample covers 34 Islamic banks from developing countries that are listed on the International Islamic Service Board. Furthermore, the authors adopted only those listed Islamic banks to tackle the data availability issue. The authors’ final sample comprised 136 observations with complete data as the numbers of Islamic banks in developing countries are low in comparison to their conventional peers. The financial crisis dummy follows America’s commonly used National Bureau of Economic Research timeline for the financial crisis. The authors also used the method of a generalized least square (GLS) method of pooled panel data analysis regression model. The rationale for employing the GLS technique was made on the basis of the ability of GLS to give less weight to the error term that is closely clustered around the mean, to improve the goodness of fit and to remove autocorrelation compared with normal, random, and fixed effect models.

The authors of this paper found that the macroeconomic factors reflected in gross domestic product, gross domestic product growth, and inflation rate have a significant positive relationship with the return on assets. In addition, a significant negative relationship was found between the financial dummy and IBP in developing countries. On the other hand, it failed to find evidence of a relationship between the macroeconomic factors and performance including the legal system and the financial crisis dummy, when the performance is reflected by the Zakat ratio. The result embedded that the financial crisis had an impact on the performance of Islamic banks in developing countries when viewed from the conventional banking perspective. The financial crisis played a role in reducing the profitability of Islamic banks which is consistent with a previous study by Hasan and Dridi (2011). However, in the view of Sharia, the financial crisis did not have any effect on IBP; even the macro factors did not have any effect on the level of performance.

There are possible explanations for these contradictory coefficient signs. First, the contradictory signs of the coefficient for the same independent variable that was regressed with different dependent variables show that researchers would need to take caution in using the right indicators when measuring IBP. Conventional indicators bring different results in comparison to Islamic indicators (Badreldin, 2009; Mudiarasan. Kuppusamy, 2010; Zahra and Pearce, 1989). Second, Richard et al. (2009), having reviewed performance measurement-related publications in five of the leading management journals (722 articles between 2005 and 2007), suggested that the past studies reveal a multidimensional conceptualization of organizational performance with limited effectiveness of commonly accepted measurement practices. Accordingly, these studies call for more theoretically grounded research and debate for establishing which measures are appropriate in a given research context. Today, there is a general consensus that the old financial measures are still valid and relevant (Yip et al., 2009). However, these need to be balanced with more contemporary, intangible, and externally oriented measures. It has been argued that various researchers working in their own disciplines using functional performance measures (such as market share in marketing, schedule adherence in operations and so on) ought to link their discipline to focused performance measures of overall organizational performance.

Islamic banking has unique characteristics in comparison to conventional banking and this paper examines the differences between the two and also investigates the resilience of Islamic banks during a period of economic turbulence. Furthermore, due to these unique characteristics, a comparison cannot be made by using the conventional performance measures alone. In addition, amid the in-depth studies examining the resilience of Islamic banks during periods of economic crises, there are instances of theoretical disagreement in the extant empirical literature examining finance and economics. In that regard, the majority of the existing literature is either based on advanced markets or countries where the majority of the population practices the faith of Islam, and little is known about the performance of Islamic banking from the pooled emerging markets; particularly in developing countries.

Introducing Zakat as a performance measurement in Islamic banking context relating it to macroeconomic factors enhances the thinking of new research in Islamic theory about bank performance.

The purpose of this article is to make readers aware of the MayDay effort, an annual event, begun in 2006, designed to be the one day each year that emergency preparedness is concentrated on fully, and to encourage participation in MayDay 2007. The article also lists some general resources for disaster planning and preparedness.

This is a viewpoint article discussing the MayDay initiative, and ways to enhance disaster planning and preparedness in cultural institutions.

The article finds that MayDay 2006 launched a new initiative for disaster preparedness and planning. The idea is that this will become an annual time when cultural institutions dedicate the day to emergency preparedness and planning. Selected results of the first MayDay are described and the ideas for MayDay 2007 events are listed.

This article provides information and examples of appropriate MayDay activities by describing MayDay 2006 events and providing pointers to online resources to assist archives and museums identify activities for MayDay 2007.

Since Hurricane Katrina, substantial focus has been placed on disaster planning and preparedness in cultural organizations. This article promotes concrete actions that can be taken to enhance disaster planning and preparedness in cultural institutions and identifies resources on the Internet to help archives and museums in this endeavor.

A television comic announces a satiric Golden Fleece Award for the faux pas of some government official. The San Diego Chicken hams it up in the stands of the baseball park. A Swiss mime troupe advertises the services of a communications corporation. All these may be more familiar to young people today than is a circus clown. These and other entertainers are all in the business of laughter and provide commentaries on current society.