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Speculates on whether companies are obtaining value for money from technology, as IT spending consumers a considerable portion of both the balance sheet and the annual operating budget. Shows how to figure out whether a company is getting its money’s worth out of its investment in technology, and uses four main items in a list to add value: expense containment; process improvement; customer advantage; and talent leverage. Employs copious use of figures and tables to aid the reader. Concludes it is also possible to generate values for semi‐tangible assets such as people and intangibles.

Building great products can be a reality for any company that takes the time and effort to create and execute the linkages between: winning strategy; the role of products and services; the product building blocks; and, linkages to customer needs. In fact, our research and work with clients suggests that a lack of alignment of these factors is the number one cause for the poor performance of many new products. This article defines for the reader the four winning strategy choices a company has – Product Leader, Distribution Giant, Innovation Superstar and Customer Lover and how each of these models puts a different emphasis on products and services. Once a company has selected a winning strategy, executing that strategy successfully requires adherence to the business model, including aligning product and services, customer imperatives and financial realities to that winning strategy model. Losing focus and drifting away from the chosen strategy or interspersing, for example, the product priorities from one winning strategy with the customer imperatives from another is a recipe for lackluster earnings and poor stock performance. Readers will learn how to outsmart the competition and build products that really win in the marketplace.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

Despite the growing body of literature demonstrating the role of communication in educational settings, there are limited up-to-date studies exploring the use of an instant messaging (IM) tool and its impacts on students’ learning outcomes, especially in the tertiary education in Vietnam. This study approached IM as an out-of-class communication (OCC) approach in computer-mediated communication. The purpose of this paper is to investigate students’ perceived quality of information received and its influence on their perceived performance proficiency as a result of their lecturers’ clarification of their enquiries through an online instant message application, namely Remind (www.remind.com/).

The target groups were first-year business students in an international university in Vietnam. The analysis of the data gathered from the questionnaire was carried out using a measurement model and a structural equation model.

The findings indicate that using OCC technology creates social bonding between students and lecturers by allowing students to clarify the ambiguity of concepts learnt in class and create a sense of connection with their lecturers which leads to better student engagement and hence improved learning outcomes.

The authors highlight the evidence of effective usage of IM tool by university students as a meaningful communication tool and the need to integrate technology into all educational settings.

Building on the resource-based view of the firm and complex systems theory, we argue that the effective utilization of knowledge-intensive teamwork (KITwork) can be a source of sustained competitive advantage for firms that pursue a variety of strategies and compete in a variety of industries. KITwork is a multi-dimensional, multi-level social process that promotes knowledge flows within and between organizations. Through KITwork, the knowledge resources of individual employees are transformed into a capability that contributes to the effectiveness of knowledge-based organizations. After introducing and explaining the concept of KITwork, we explore the challenges that organizations must address in order to design HRM systems that support and facilitate KITwork.

Due to recent Affordable Care Act reforms, prevention of readmissions is a salient issue for hospitals that participate in Medicare, as they are now held accountable for patients who receive post-acute care in facilities over which hospitals have little influence to monitor care. Using resource dependence and transaction cost economics to describe the theoretical advantages of hospital ownership of post-acute care facilities (PACs), we empirically test whether hospitals that own PACs experience reduced readmissions. Our findings indicate partial support for the predicted relationship between PAC ownership and readmission rates. We found that hospital ownership of a skilled-nursing facility (SNF) was related to a lower readmissions rate for some patients, while ownership of other types of PACs did not result in significant findings. Our results offer support for the theoretical advantages of ownership, however, the savings realized by ownership may not merit the ownership investment.

The Epidemiologic Transition can help us understand a fundamental puzzle about aging. The puzzle stems from two seemingly contradictory facts. The first fact is that death rates from noninfectious degenerative maladies – the so-called diseases of aging – increase as people age. It seems to be at odds with the historical fact that for nearly a century in which people were aging more than ever before, the aggregate rates of such diseases have been decreasing. In what sense can both be true? Crucial to resolving the puzzle are the age-profiles of such diseases in cohorts that grew up in the different regimes of the Transition. For each cohort, noninfectious diseases had increased with age, resulting in an upward-sloping age profile, which affirms the first fact. As the regimes were transitioning from the Malthusian to the modern one, however, the profiles of successive cohorts had been shifting downward: death rates from noninfectious diseases were shrinking at each age, signifying the newer cohorts’ greater aging potentials. The shifting profiles had been renewing the cohort mix of the population, shaping the century-long descent of such diseases in aggregate, giving rise to the historical fact. The profiles had shifted early in the cohorts’ adult years, associating closely with the newer epidemiologic conditions in childhood. Those conditions appear to be a circumstance under which aging potentials of cohorts could be misgauged, including in one troubling episode in the first half of the nineteenth century when the potentials had reversed.

Catalogues how Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are meeting, individually, the AIDS epidemic with governmental and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). Uses data from the United Nations and World Bank. Gives background of NGOs in East Africa and their field work. Concludes that the social dimensions of each country are very restrictive in slightly differing ways, with the various religious beliefs also having an effect which is deleterious in nature. States that, even so, there are more similarities than there are differences in the three countries.

The second edition of the Bibliographic Classification of H. E. Bliss (BC2), being prepared under the editorship of Jack Mills, Vanda Broughton and others, is a rich source of structure and terminology for thesauri covering different subject fields. The new edition employs facet analysis and is thesaurus‐compatible. A number of facet‐based thesauri have drawn upon Bliss for terms and relationships. In two of these thesauri the Bliss Classification was the source of both systematic and alphabetical displays. The DHSS‐DATA thesaurus, published by the United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Security, provides controlled terms and Bliss class numbers for indexing and searching the DHSS‐DATA database. The ECOT thesaurus (Educational courses and occupations thesaurus) prepared for the Department of Education and Science, uses the software designed for the British Standards Institution ROOT thesaurus to generate an alphabetical display from the systematic display derived from the Bliss schedules. Problems, benefits, and future prospects of Bliss‐based thesaurus construction are discussed.

The central contribution of the paper aims to provide a new way of thinking and reflecting about using a more critical public policy approach as opposed to the heretofore dysfunctional dichotomist approach common to the immigration policy debate.

Using critical theoretical approaches primarily based on Debord and Agamben, the author compares and contrasts the approaches made by immigration reform policy advocates and opponents to obtain a better understanding of these complex issues and the motivations behind them.

Viewing the policy immigration and border policy discourse from the market spectacle lens allows the author to see the seemingly never-ending conflict to be fully disclosed. Corporate profit-seekers have used effectively the politics of fear surrounding the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the ongoing fear generated against undocumented border crossers along with the property takings of US citizens through the use of the complexities of the dominant market language in the name of the 9-11 and the subsequent War on Terror. The author's primary intention was to expose the motivations of public policy makers and place their policy decisions into a critical context.

In this original paper, the author analyzes events such as the border fence construction – and the corporatist influence behind its development, the push to politically disenfranchise Latinos in Arizona, and the inability of the US Congress to pass legislation for meaningful immigration reform and border security – that have all been subject to the limitations of language, symbols and images portrayed by protagonists and antagonists of market-driven immigration policy. The value of the paper is that the author demonstrates the problems and limitations on public policy.