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This paper presents the results and experiences of one school within a unique university/K-12 school district partnership that approached school reform through a framework of peace education. Faced with the challenge of improving academic achievement in a district with a history of five years failing to meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, university faculty collaborated with elementary school teachers to implement principles of peace education that have been successfully applied at Oldwood Integrated Primary School in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As two university faculty involved in the project, we present challenges, theoretical perspectives, and the model that guided our initiative, the process, and results of social change in teaching practice.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of tests for the development of literary trails for domestic visitors and tourists in Brisbane, Queensland, and to situate these findings in the context of recent state government policy changes in relation to culture, community engagement and the environment.

Broadly cultural studies: the article analyses changes in international and national cultural tourism and Queensland‐based issues before presenting the research findings.

A gap in tourist and cultural development models exists for the implementation of a network of sustainable literary trails in Brisbane – this model can be extended to regions around the state to meet the demands of the new tourist.

The paper highlights Queensland weather and Australian distance, which will require a regional approach that networks with transport and community hubs.

The research has produced new software for the use of self‐guided walks; the locations for two specific area trails; and the involvement of the State Library of Queensland as a “hub” for the trails. Substantial support exists for further development in advanced locative media and gaming.

The research demonstrates the importance of developing a sense of place that relates to culture, literary history and community for tourists, as well as the potential for community engagement.

Currently no paper‐based or new media literary trail exists in Brisbane. The proliferation of online delivered, self‐guided trails in other parts of the world reflects a demand for this type of cultural and environmental experience.

Recent research has confirmed that marketing continues to have a low status among small firms in the UK. This paper considers the theory of marketing planning and its relevance to small firms, and reports on the key findings of a qualitative research project which investigated the levels of understanding and utilisation of marketing and marketing planning in small Cambridgeshire firms. The results of this project confirm that marketing is misunderstood and underutilised in most small firms. However, the findings also show that many firms are anxious to improve their marketing activity, but are unsure about where to turn for assistance. A practical framework is proposed which would assist small firms in taking a more disciplined approach to marketing without adopting strategic marketing planning, which is seen by many as daunting and inflexible. The findings of this research project have implications both for small firm owner/managers and for service providers who want to assist small firms to survive and grow in the mid‐1990s and beyond.

The iconic vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returned to cinema screens via Death Wish 2 (Michael Winner) in 1982 and vigilantism would remain a key theme in American urban action films throughout the 1980s. Susan Jeffords subsequently argued that Hollywood's ‘hard bodied’ male action heroes of the period were reflective of the social and political thematics that distinguished Ronald Reagan's tenure as America's President (1994, p. 22). But while Jeffords' arguments are convincing, they overlook contemporaneous films featuring female and ‘soft’ bodied urban action heroes.

The Angel trilogy (Angel, 1984; Avenging Angel, 1985; and Angel III: The Final Chapter, 1988) features three such understudied examples. Indeed, the films' diverse and atypical range of action heroes demand that they are interrogated in terms of their protagonists' gender, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices and age. Featuring narratives about the prostitutes and street folk who frequent Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, the films' key characters are a teenage prostitute and her guardians: a transvestite prostitute, a lesbian hotelier and an elderly cowboy. All three films feature narratives that revolve around acts of vengeance and vigilantism.

This chapter will critically discuss the striking ways in which the films' ‘soft’ bodied and atypical protagonists are presented as convincing action heroes who subvert contemporaneous ‘hard’ bodied norms. It will also consider to what extent their subversive rewriting of typical urban action film narratives and character relations might be understood to critique and deconstruct the themes and concerns that usually characterized such films during the Reagan era.

This study aims to examine the moderating effect of audit firm tenure on the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm value. Prior studies provide mixed results on this association, which may be due to differing theoretical expectations related to CSR and firm value. It is also possible that external stakeholders are unable to differentiate between positive and negative CSR investments, as CSR reports are generally not assured by independent third parties. Thus, the authors propose that audit firm tenure may be used by external stakeholders to evaluate CSR performance.

The authors use an ordinary least squares regression to examine the moderating effect of audit firm tenure on the relation between CSR and firm value after controlling for other determinants of firm value and various internal and external governance mechanisms documented in the literature. The sample consists of 15,707 firm-year observations from US firms during the sample period of 2000 to 2012. The authors measure CSR quality using rating scores from MSCI ESG STATS (formerly the KLD database), audit firm tenure as the number of years the incumbent auditor has served the client and firm value using Tobin’s Q.

The results indicate that CSR is positively associated with firm value when audit firm tenure is long but not when tenure is short. The results are robust to alternative measures of firm value, CSR performance scores, and individual CSR dimensions. The evidence supports the argument against mandatory audit firm rotation in the USA.

Future studies could examine a similar issue in alternative settings and/or look at cross-sectional variations among firms on the association between CSR and firm value by other auditor traits such as auditor industry specialization and big-name reputation. Additionally, as auditor alone is unable to ensure the quality of management disclosures and their accountability, future studies could examine the moderating effect of internal and other external governance mechanisms on the association between CSR and firm value, exploring when the signaling effect of auditor tenure on CSR reporting quality and its effect on firm value is most salient.

The findings are important to regulators and investors. The authors provide evidence that longer audit tenure serves as a signaling device for external investors with regard to the quality of a firm’s CSR performance. Hence, the study facilitates regulators’ cost-benefit analysis related to mandating audit firm rotation. The evidence suggests that mandating a term limit on auditor tenure may have the unintended consequence of eliminating a signaling effect of auditor tenure on the quality of CSR disclosures under information asymmetry. This supports the Public Company Oversight Board’s decision to forgo the requirement of mandatory audit firm rotation in the USA.

Prior literature presents mixed findings on the association between CSR performance and firm value based on a variety of underlying theories (economic, stakeholder and contingency theory). Literature on mandatory auditor rotation has concentrated on the auditor tenure effect on perceived and actual audit quality as reflected in earnings quality. Relying on agency theory, this study posits that auditor tenure serves as a signal for the quality of CSR activities in the absence of CSR assurance reporting as CSR quality can be difficult to evaluate. The authors provide evidence that audit tenure moderates the association between CSR activities and firm value and longer audit tenure makes it more likely that the CSR activities are associated with increased firm value.

This paper aims to investigate how small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) use particular brand communication activities to develop their brands.

As a means to build some understanding about this phenomenon, a “contemporary marketing practices” perspective was used as a theoretical framework to 30 holistic case studies in Mexico. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with brand owner/managers.

Findings suggest four categories of brand communication activities based on interactional, transactional, and e‐marketing approaches, including “close and personal”, “mass‐personalisation”, “mass”, and “e‐communication” activities.

Many more activities were found in interactional marketing as it appeared to be more suited to SMEs and context. Future research may address key activities for further investigation such as word‐of‐mouth as a key role in SME brand communication.

This study confirms the key participatory role of the brand owner with regard to brand communication activities.

This is one of the first articles that attempts to explain how SME brands use marketing communication tools to interact with their stakeholders for brand development.

This paper aims to provide a living tribute to the leading autoethnographer, Alec Grant.

Alec provided Jerome with a list of names of people he might approach to write a tribute on his behalf.

The accounts describe the influence that Alec has had both as an educator and as a trusted colleague for the people approached.

While this is a living tribute, it is about one man and could, therefore, be described as a case study. Some people wonder what can be learned from a single case study. Read on and find out.

Alec has carved out a path for himself. In many senses, he chose “The Road Less Travelled”. He has never shied away from challenging “The System” and defending the rights of the marginalized and socially excluded. It is not a road for the faint-hearted.

For systems to change, radical thinkers need to show the way. “Change keeps us safe” (Stuart Bell).

Alec was a well-known and highly respected cognitive behavioural academic practitioner and the author of key textbooks in the field. He then decided to reinvent himself as an autoethnographer. This has brought him into contact with a much more diverse group of people. It has also brought him home to himself.

There is growing acknowledgement that companies are engaging in both transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing activity. However, apart from a small body of work, little consideration has been paid to the management and implementation challenges involved in conducting both types of marketing concurrently. In particular, there have been few studies that consider, from a holistic organisational perspective, how transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management‐decision making impact on each other in reality and the extent to which organisations are investing appropriate resources in simultaneously implementing the two approaches. This article reports on a longitudinal, in‐depth study of a high‐street retail bank. The findings indicate that, in practice, resource investment in transaction‐ and relationship‐marketing management was unbalanced with an over‐emphasis on some managerial dimensions and an under‐investment in others. In other words the bank under investigation did not engage in effective transaction or relationship planning or implementation but rather the managerial and organisational focus was on sales and promotion.