The Department of Health published statistics in the summer of 2006 forecasting a continuation in the rise in childhood obesity over the next few years, casting serious doubt…
Abstract
The Department of Health published statistics in the summer of 2006 forecasting a continuation in the rise in childhood obesity over the next few years, casting serious doubt about its ability to meet its own target to halt the year‐on‐year rise by 2010. In the same week, in recognition of the dangerous levels of inactivity in the UK, the Government announced a dedicated “Minister of Fitness” in an effort to encourage people to lead healthier and more active lifestyles. In the midst of concerning lifestyle trends that effect us all, as individuals, parents, businesses and politicians alike, the debate over the role of food and soft drink advertising to children continues. The premise that is often portrayed by the press is that the industry is putting profit ahead of consumers’ health. This reflects a misunderstanding of the basic nature of the obesity problem, which is caused by an imbalance between energy consumed and energy expended. As the Secretary of State has intimated, over the last 25 years whilst the levels of calorific intake have been in continual decline, activity levels have declined at a fifty percent faster rate.
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Daniel A. Wren, Regina A. Greenwood, Julia Teahen and Arthur G. Bedeian
This paper aims to highlight myriad accomplishments of C. Bertrand Thompson, who is perhaps most well known as a scientific-management bibliographer and a Taylor disciple, in the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to highlight myriad accomplishments of C. Bertrand Thompson, who is perhaps most well known as a scientific-management bibliographer and a Taylor disciple, in the belief that his contributions as a pioneer management theorist and consultant in Europe deserve to be more widely known and more deeply appreciated.
Design/methodology/approach
Archival, primary and secondary sources were used in the research.
Findings
Thompson was among the first to bring management consulting to Europe. He understood the importance of adapting scientific-management principles to meet the diverse needs of each client for whom he consulted. Thompson’s strong belief and value system remained constant throughout his life.
Practical implications
Understanding the needs of customers or clients and adapting systems to meet those needs is essential in achieving success as a consultant.
Originality/value
By drawing on rarely accessed published and unpublished materials, this paper discusses Thompson’s many contributions to management thought and practice, most of which previously have not been highlighted in the referent literature.
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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are…
Abstract
Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.
The purpose of this paper is to show how the documentation movement associated with the utopian thinkers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine relied on patent offices as well as the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to show how the documentation movement associated with the utopian thinkers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine relied on patent offices as well as the documents most closely associated with this institutional setting – the patents themselves – as central to the formation of the document category. The main argument is that patents not only were subjected to and helped construct, but also in fact engineered the development of technoscientific order during 1895–1937.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual property, document theory and insights from media archeology. Focused on the historical period 1895–1937, this study allows for an analysis that encapsulates and accounts for change in a number of comparative areas, moving from bibliography to documentation and from scientific to technoscientific order. Primary sources include Paul Otlet’s own writings, relevant contemporary sources from the French documentation movement and the Congrès Mondial de la documentation universelle in 1937.
Findings
By understanding patent offices and patents as main drivers behind those processes of sorting and classification that constitute technoscientific order, this explorative paper provides a new analytical framework for the study of intellectual property in relation to the history of information and documentation. It argues that the idea of the document may serve to rethink the role of the patent in technoscience, offering suggestions for new and underexplored venues of research in the nexus of several overlapping research fields, from law to information studies.
Originality/value
Debates over the legitimacy and rationale of intellectual property have raged for many years without signs of abating. Universities, research centers, policy makers, editors and scholars, research funders, governments, libraries and archives all have things to say on the legitimacy of the patent system, its relation to innovation and the appropriate role of intellectual property in research and science, milieus that are of central importance in the knowledge-based economy. The value of this paper lies in proposing a new way to approach patents that could show a way out of the current analytical gridlock of either/or that for many years has earmarked the “openness-enclosure” dichotomy. The combination of intellectual property scholarship and documentation theory provides important new insight into the historical networks and processes by which patents and documents have consolidated and converged during the twentieth century.