Image consultancy in the United Kingdom: recipe knowledge and recreational employment

A person's image incorporates three principal elements: how you look, sound and present yourself. Alterations in the world of work have increased the importance of image in the work place and have created a demand for a new form of recipe knowledge – impression management. This has encouraged the formation of specialist image consultancy companies, as well as the development of new techniques of image construction and management. This article provides an analysis of the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. It explores the geography of the industry, motivations for establishing an image consultancy firm, the networks consultants develop and the methods of client acquisition. The results of a postal survey of image consultants are reported.     

Financial Services Industry PAC Contributions and Senate Committee Membership

This paper explores the relationship between relevant senate committee membership and campaign contributions from financial services industry political action committees (PACs) from 1998 to 2002. Since this was a period of significant legislative activity affecting the industry, it provides a fruitful time period to investigate the relationship between contributions and committee membership. It is found that membership on the Senate Banking Committee is consistently related to contributions from financial services PACs. Membership on the Senate Finance Committee is related to PAC contributions from some sectors of the industry for some time periods. It is also found that contributions are significantly higher for those senators facing re-election in the particular election cycle. The importance of relevant committee membershipto PAC contributions in the senate is consistent with previous work dealing with the House.     

Agriculture and proximity to roads: How should farmers and retailers adapt? Examples from the Ile-de-France region

The present study was carried out in the Ile-de-France region surrounding Paris, which is both the biggest conurbation in France and a large agricultural area. In areas such as these, airborne pollutants from road traffic may adversely affect the quality of the food produced by farms close by. This raises questions about the spatial compatibility of farming and road networks, although there is currently no scientific consensus concerning potential health risks for producers and consumers. Some actors in agricultural supply chains have tried to limit potential risks by producing technical guidelines, including isolation distances between major roads and fields farmed under contract. This paper analyses these “isolation distances”, using approaches from the agricultural and social sciences: surveys on stakeholders in agribusiness and on farmers, and a cartographic simulation submitted to the surveyed farmers for discussion. The results show that isolation distances serve to create market opportunities in a context of market segmentation, or are applied as a precautionary principle. Though not a widespread practice, safety distances could have considerable impacts on farms in terms of both technical management and total farm area, thus calling for further scientific research on this issue.     

Monitoring Intensity and Stakeholders’ Orientation: How Does Governance Affect Social and Environmental Disclosure?

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effects of the corporate governance model on social and environmental disclosure (SED). We analyze the disclosures of the 100 U.S. Best Corporate Citizens in the period 2005–2007, and we posit a series of simultaneous relationships between different attributes of the governance system and a multidimensional construct of corporate social performance (CSP). We consider both the extent and the quality of SED, with the purpose of identifying increasing levels of corporate commitment to stakeholders and shedding some light on whether SED is used as a signal or rather as a legitimacy tool. Our empirical evidence shows that the stakeholders’ orientation of corporate governance is positively associated with CSP and SED. On the other hand, we do not find support for the monitoring intensity of corporate governance being negatively associated with social performance. We also find that CSP in the “product” dimension is positively associated with the extent and quality of SED whilst CSP in the “people” dimension is negatively associated with the extent and quality of SED. At a time when shareholders and stakeholders share more common aspects in their relationships with firms, this is a significant area to explore and this research fills an important lacuna in this respect.     

Falling Wage Shares in Europe and the United States: How Important is Aggregation Bias?

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The application of a fixed-weight aggregation method changes the profile of the observed wage share in a significant way: in particular there is no longer sign of an overshooting of the wage share levels of the early-1970s. Error-correction wage equations based on the adjusted wage shares generally have a better regression fit and show long-run elasticities of real wages to unemployment that vary less across countries and are substantially lower than those obtained with observed shares.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the costs and benefits of food additives and their presence in different foods

A questionnaire concerning the use of additives in foods was completed by 572 high school students aged 12-15 years. Participants recorded how often they ate each of 16 common foods, and rated the relative levels of colourings, flavourings, preservatives and traces of pesticides that each of these foods contained. They also rated the relative importance of eight reasons (e.g. taste, health) in their own food choices, and provided comparative evaluations of the concepts 'food with additives' and 'food without additives' in terms of these same eight attributes. Participants discriminated between the 16 foods in terms of the chemicals they believed they contained, but these estimates were unaffected by age or sex. When these estimates were weighted by participants' own reports of consumption, girls scored lower than boys on a measure of the assumed additive content of their own diet. Own additive consumption was significantly associated with ratings of reasons for food choice and comparisons of food with/without additives. However, the form of this association did not support standard expectancy-value formulations of attitude-behaviour relationships. Food with additives was seen overall as preferable in terms of ease of preparation and duration of freshness, but more problematic in terms of health and safety.     

A Survey of Ten Money and Banking Textbooks

This note formalizes an argument in Freeman's Labor Economics, integrating diagrammatically the individual's labor supply and time-intensity of consumption decisions.