Monster mines,dugouts, and abandoned villages: a composite narrative of Burra’s heritage

In a bid to join recent efforts to develop innovative approaches to heritage, this article argues that adopting a collaborative mode of inquiry is a useful way of coming to terms with the plurality of ways heritage landscapes are enlivened by their visitors. It also points to some of the advantages of incorporating researchers’ personal experiences into academic research. With a focus on the Burra Heritage Trail in South Australia (geared around the Burra Heritage Passport), the article brings together four sets of research experiences, each informed by different (though cognisant) disciplinary backgrounds: art history, anthropology, heritage studies, and tourism planning. The result is a form of experimental autoethnographic writing in which four voices reflect upon their embodied, sensuous, and mobile experiences as ‘tourist’ moving through the same places, thereby offering multiple ways of knowing and telling about a single setting.     

Bringing Home the Bacon: The Relationships among Breadwinner Role,Performance, and Pay

We evaluate the relationships among breadwinner role, performance, and pay. Differences in pay are present despite limited differences in performance. We find a pay premium for primary‐breadwinner employees across gender, yet a pay penalty for secondary‐breadwinners employees only for women, suggesting an asymmetric relationship among breadwinner role, gender, and pay.     

Engineering economy as a vibrant and relevant course in the engineering programs of today and tomorrow

Abstract

Engineering economy has been studied by the majority of engineering students for many years, yet its place in engineering education is often misunderstood. Logic suggests that the engineering economy course would be highly valued since it is the only course many engineering students will take related to financial matters, but instead there is evidence that the subject is being marginalized. While pressures to reduce program credit hours and changes to the Fundamentals of Engineering exam may play a role in this, perhaps engineering economy has not sufficiently evolved to meet the needs of students or the realities of the contemporary workplace. What can be done to ensure that engineering economy fulfills its potential as an important part of engineering education? There may be few clear-cut answers, but we believe that engineering economy should shift toward a future characterized by rigorous coursework grounded in engineering design principles and applications of risk and uncertainty. This has been our goal in teaching engineering economy at Western Michigan University for many years. The purpose of this paper is to communicate the essential elements of a strategy that has helped to make the course a vibrant component of several engineering programs.     

PCA oversedation: application of Healthcare Failure Mode Effect (HFMEA) Analysis

Hospital systems utilize many varied problem-solving processes to address system improvements and ensure patient safety. The Healthcare Failure Mode Effect Analysis (HFMEA) model is one of these tools and uses a multidisciplinary team to look at processes, diagramming the steps involved to identify potential failure points. The application of the HFMEA model allowed one large health care system to address a complex process by prioritizing proactive change improvements in order to prevent postoperative patient-controlled anesthesia oversedation events. The changes implemented identified 16 failure points with a hazard score of 16 or greater. One year later, the established system HFMEA goal was met: oversedation events were reduced by 50%.     

Hostile Territory: High-Tension Religion and the Jewish Peddler

A bstract .   Scholars have long explored the role that reputation plays in the facilitation of exchange. Some attention has also been paid to the way in which religions serve as a proxy for reputation or as a mechanism for enforcement of exchange agreements. These reputation and enforcement mechanisms enhance the ability of the members of certain religious groups to perform economic roles where such secular-based mechanisms fail or are absent. In this article, I explore the ways in which hostility toward members of high-tension religions makes them uniquely well suited to the economic role of middlemen. As illustration, I explore the particular case of the 19^th-century German Jewish peddler in the young United States.     

Store brands and retail differentiation: the influence of store image and store brand attitude on store own brand perceptions

Store's own brands can provide important opportunities for retail differentiation if they are considered by consumers to be uniquely associated with store image. A survey of shoppers measured attitudes toward individual stores’ images and store brand perceptions, as well as general attitudes toward store brands. A regression analysis demonstrates a positive relationship between consumers’ perceptions of individual store own brands and their associated store's image dimensions and attitudes toward store brands in general.     

Motivators of Mobilization

Using data on shareholder-initiated class action lawsuits in the US, I investigate the corporate scandals of US-listed foreign firms. The shareholders of scandal firms suffer considerable loss in both the short term and the long term. I document that firms domiciled in countries with weak institutions are more likely to be embroiled in corporate scandals, but such a relation can be moderated by the presence of Big 4 auditors. Investors automatically adjust for undiscovered misconduct when valuing the stocks of non-scandal firms (i.e., the spillover effect). Investors rely on the audit quality to form their expectations about the severity of undiscovered misconduct, and thus impose less negative spillovers on firms with Big 4 auditors, especially when the firms are from countries with weak institutions. Taken together, my results suggest that listing on US exchanges does not fully compensate for weak local institutions; voluntarily bonding to a more stringent audit process has an incremental effect on protecting shareholder interests and enhances the confidence of investors in firms’ financial integrity.     

Earnings Progression and the Workforce Investment Act: Evidence from Washington State

This research measures earnings progression among participants in federally funded Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs in the state of Washington during the period 2001 through 2008, using state administrative data and propensity score‐weighted regressions. Unlike previous evaluations that have emphasized earnings levels, this study addresses both earnings progression and levels to assess whether workers are on a path to reaching economic self‐sufficiency within a short time after participation. The analysis finds that participants in WIA Adult services had similar earnings progression as people receiving only less‐intensive Labor Exchange services.