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Hybrid benchmarking was developed by HM Customs and Excise. They have used the methodology for three years as part of the drive to deliver continuous improvement at lower cost. After establishing the need and clearly defining the service to be delivered in terms of the outputs, managers empower staff to decide how best to deliver. The service is then benchmarked against similar activities in the public and private sector to test quality and cost. Service delivery and efficiency are monitored through a system of service level agreements. Results are comparable to those achieved through competitive tendering exercises and hybrid benchmarking is now attracting attention in the European Union, and further afield.

How do entrepreneurs in the public sector effect major policy changes? Are the same entrepreneurs likely to be involved from the idea initiation stage through design, adoption, implementation and institutionalnation, or are there different prominent entrepreneurs in each of the policy stages? What does the pattern of entrepreneurial participation mean for the success of the policy? Utilizing a case study of Performance-Based Program Budgeting (PB2 ) in the State of Florida, this paper employs the observations of key Florida policymakers and advocates to describe the strategic and purposive actions of public entrepreneurs in the four stages of the PB2 budget reform policy process. The work supports current research that major policy changes, such as the adoption of PB2 in Florida, require purposive and strategic actions from public entrepreneurs for their fruition. The paper also contributes to the growing implementation and budgeting literature that describes and assesses performance-based budgeting in the states, and provides observations on necessary conditions for institutionalizing PB2 in Florida.

Regional development authorities extol the attractions of a move from congested urban areas to the open spaces of the countryside. Less publicised is the conflict which can ensue from this ‘re‐location’ drive. Report by Mary Jarratt.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary outline of the international presence, commonality and differences between Recovery Colleges.

This study used a short e-mailed survey to create a map of Recovery Colleges internationally and review Recovery Colleges outside the UK. Questions gathered descriptive and qualitative data to gain an overview of the mode of delivery and aspects respondents felt were noteworthy.

This paper identifies Recovery Colleges in 22 countries in five continents (including the UK). Participants described wide variance in their context. Despite adaptations, the operational models and inherent principles of each were closely aligned to those developed in the UK.

This paper provides the first baseline of Recovery Colleges on an international scale. It provides evidence of a high degree of commonality despite variance in setting and highlights the internationally valued transformational power of this model.

Literacy coaches can play a valuable role in the improvement of student learning outcomes. The authors’ purpose is to describe their time use, student learning, and principals’ understanding leading to advocacy for development of literacy coach effectiveness measures.

By analyzing four related studies, the authors use quantitative and qualitative methods to develop five themes and the need for measures of effectiveness. Areas of role and use of time, principals’ understanding, and need for empirical, rather than perceptual research are explored.

Findings on the relationship of use of time and student reading outcomes, and perceptions of impediments and enhancements to impact on effectiveness are discussed and lead to the identification of the need for effectiveness measures.

Limitations include the singular US region where the four studies were conducted and the small samples. The four studies did not use precisely the same methods so this is an additional limitation. Further research in various regions and with larger samples are needed to draw definitive conclusions.

Greater understanding of the context of literacy coaches, including understanding by principals, may lead to measurement. This measurement will inform principals and school directors on literacy coaches’ roles which may increase fidelity of the implementation of the position with the original intent. There has not been an accountability system for literacy coaches related to improved student learning, making this concept important to professionalization of literacy coach position.

Given that available research on the value of literacy coach positions is perceptual, rather than based on student outcome data, the need for development of effectiveness measures may result in greater fidelity of implementation of the position. Resulting role clarification and the extent to which implementation of literacy coaches can be expected to improve student achievement is a contribution.

The television series The Americans succeeds as a family drama, crime drama, and political drama. Criminal law offers a useful perspective for interpreting the series. By examining the post-finale criminal liability of two key characters, daughter Paige Jennings and FBI agent Stan Beeman, this chapter provides some novel insights into the characters, their motivations, and the events in the last season of the series. The legal analysis also uncovers some ironies. Most notably, Paige’s legal vulnerability will put her in a moral dilemma because her best way of avoiding a lengthy prison term is to provide evidence against Stan, punishing him for letting her and her parents go.

This piece argues that television families’ shift away from the traditional nuclear family form is crucial to understand the relatively rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage in mainstream politics. Released in the early 2010s, The Americans focusses on a KGB-created family composed of two Soviet spies, total strangers who ultimately have two children to further their cover as an innocent American family running a DuPont Circle travel agency and living in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. Rather than being idealised or sought after, The Americans reveals that the nuclear family is legally, socially, and politically constructed, and, in the end, doomed to failure. Sex and love and even children are instrumentally manipulated on a regular basis to further political goals, transforming basic assumptions about how marriage and family life really work beyond the façade of suburban America. This opens space for consideration and acceptance of alternative family forms, including same-sex marriage.

Existing brand literature on assemblage practices has focused on providing a map or geography of brand assemblages, suggesting that an artist brand’s ability to evolve and achieve brand longevity remains constant. Using geology of assemblage, this study aims to explore the types and mechanisms of change in brand evolutions to address the problem of identifying when and how a brand can transform in an evolving marketplace.

The authors apply an interpretive process data approach using secondary archival data and in-depth interviews with 31 self-identified fans to explore the artist brand David Bowie over his 50-year career.

As an artist brand, Bowie’s ability to evolve his brand was constrained by his assemblage. Despite efforts to defy ageing and retain a youth audience appeal, both the media and his fans interpreted and judged Bowie’s current efforts from a historical perspective and continuously reevaluated his brand limiting his ability to change to remain relevant.

Brand managers, particularly artist brands and human brands, may find that their ability to change is constrained by meanings in past strata over time. Withdrawal from the marketplace and the use of silence as a communicative practice enabling brand transformations.

The geology of assemblage perspective offers a more nuanced understanding of brand changes over time beyond the possibilities of incremental or disruptive change. We identify the mechanisms of change that result in minor sedimentation, moderate cracks and major ruptures in a brand’s evolution.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

As the demand for online auctions increases, the process of monitoring multiple auction houses, deciding which auction to participate in and making the right bids, become challenging tasks for consumers. Hence, knowing the closing price of a given auction would be an advantage, since this information will ensure a win in a given auction. However, predicting a closing price for an auction is not easy, since it is dependent on many factors. The purpose of this paper is to report on a predictor agent that utilises grey system theory to predict the closing price for a given auction.

The focus of the research is on grey system agent. This paper reports on the development of a predictor agent that attempts to predict the online auction closing price in order to maximise the bidder's profit. The performance of this predictor agent is compared with two well‐known techniques, the Simple Exponential Function and the Time Series, in a simulated auction environment and in the eBay auction.

The grey theory agent gives a better result when less input data are made, while the Time Series Agent can be used with the availability of a lot of information. Although the Simple Exponential Function Agent is able to predict well with less input data, it is not an appropriate method to be applied in the prediction model since its formula is not realistic and applicable in predicting the online auction closing price. The experimental results also showed that using moving historical data produces a higher accuracy rate than using fixed historical data for all three agents.

Grey system theory prediction model, GM(1, 1) has not been applied in online auction prediction. In this paper the authors have applied grey theory into an agent to predict the closing price of an online auction, in order to increase the profit of bidders in the bidding stage. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the grey prediction model is more then 90 per cent, with less then eight historical data inputs.