Articles de revues sur le sujet « Student Loan Marketing Association »

Across three studies, the authors investigate the effect of student loan debt on spending. Evidence from consumer finance data and experimental scenarios reveals that borrowers with moderate student loan debt are less likely to spend than people with low (or no) debt. However, borrowers with high debt are more likely to spend relative to those with moderate debt. The latter effect is consistent with goal disengagement, as paying off high student loan debt seems difficult. Importantly, the spending propensity associated with high student loan debt is attenuated by presenting the debt in a monthly payment (vs. lump-sum) format, which reduces perceived payoff difficulty. From a public policy perspective, the authors recommend that estimated monthly payments be included in all student loan disclosures.

Purpose – The reviewed literature emphasized that the student loan debt issues have a lot of connections to the economy. This conclusion is in support with broader evidence that high student debt levels are a drag on economic growth. Additionally, disadvantaged and other vulnerable groups, including students, are more likely to be excluded from the formal, regulated financial sector and not be able to take advantage of mainstream financial service providers (e.g. lack access to credit, insurance, and other formal financial services). Among the primary reasons cited for this financial exclusion has to do with a lack of understanding or familiarity with traditional financial services. The aim of this paper is to look at alternate approaches in promoting financial literacy to manage the huge private debt burden facing this important segment of the population. The purpose of this paper is to advance a model of college students’ financial capabilities enhancement to partially alleviate some of the problems related to deficits in financial knowledge among this population. The integrative model provides a framework to be operationalized by institutional decision-makers and policymakers at all levels. The model can be adapted to fit unique institutional circumstances and culture. Successful implementation of the model has the potential to enhance the quality of financial health among college students and young adults. Design/methodology/approach – The manuscript’s aim is to advance a model of college students’ financial capabilities in an effort to prevent their financial exclusion. The proposed model provides a framework to be operationalized by institutional decision-making processes. The model offers six distinct, but inter-related components – antecedent variables, program design and implementation, delivery modalities, program content, behavioral outcomes, and measurement and assessment. Findings – The underlying raison d’etre for the model is to offer a comprehensive, inclusive, across-the-board roadmap to guide universities, and other organizations in conceptualizing, planning, organizing, implementing, and assessing financial education-related systems and processes designed to enhance the long-term financial choices and behaviors of students. Through careful consideration of each of the phases of the model, decision-makers at all levels and all types of organizations should have a stronger grasp of the depth and breadth of actions required to effect the desired changes in students’ financial behavior. Research limitations/implications – As with any paper there are limitations. The paper is conceptual and lacks data to test some of the linkages. Future research efforts should posit specific propositions to be tested based on the linkages offered in the model. Given the nature of the research theme, there is considerable benefit from taking a case-based approach to future research to offer more in-depth analyses of student financial literacy deficits across different situations and types, student markets, and educational institutions. The current research could also benefit from a stronger cross-cultural focus. While huge college student debt is probably more burdensome in the USA, it is helpful to get input from students in countries that lack a tradition of heavy borrowing to pay for college costs. Researching debt management trends across cultures should provide useful micro- and macro-economic data for policymakers and others. Practical implications – The paper introduces a model of college students’ financial capabilities enhancement and financial exclusion’s prevention that offers one avenue to partially remedy the direct and indirect ills perpetrated and perpetuated by insufficient financial knowledge among young adults, especially the college segment (i.e. to promote financial inclusion and financial exclusion’s prevention). The model provides a comprehensive and integrative path for college administrators and others to consider when designing programs to enhance the overall financial knowledge acumen and savvy of college students. Specifically, the model discusses antecedent variables, program design and implementation, delivery modalities, program content, behavioral outcomes, and measure and evaluation options. Social implications – There is considerable concern among students, parents, marketers, and public policymakers regarding deficiencies in financial knowledge and capabilities among the young adult population. Students have massive student loan debt, collectively, and there is a multifaceted clarion call to develop integrative solutions to this daunting scenario. The paper discusses the gravity and consequences of financial literacy deficits among college students and some associated solutions. Originality/value – The model offers six distinct, but inter-related components – antecedent variables, program design and implementation, delivery modalities, program content, behavioral outcomes, and measurement and assessment. The model is posited as an “intervention strategy” capable of strengthening the capacity of young college adults to make informed financial decisions, thus impacting their quality of life over the long run. In particular the model offers a form of empowerment to this consumer segment. As stated, the underlying raison d’etre for the model is to offer a comprehensive, inclusive, across-the-board roadmap to guide universities and other organizations in conceptualizing, planning, organizing, implementing, and assessing financial education-related systems and processes designed to enhance the long-term financial choices and behaviors of students. Through careful consideration of each of the phases of the model, decision-makers at all levels and all types of organizations should have a stronger grasp of the depth and breadth of actions required to effect the desired changes in students’ financial behavior.

In this period of computerization, schooling has additionally remodeled itself and is not restrained to old lecture technique. The everyday quest is on to discover better approaches to make it more successful and productive for students. These days, masses of data are gathered in educational databases, however it stays unutilized. To be able to get required advantages from such major information, effective tools are required. Data mining is a developing capable tool for examination and expectation. It is effectively applied in the field of fraud detection, marketing, promoting, forecast and loan assessment. However, it is in incipient stage in the area of education. In this paper, data mining techniques have been applied to construct a classification model to predict the performance of students.

Student-managed business projects offer students the opportunity to garner valuable real world experience while businesses can fulfill corporate responsibilities utilizing relatively inexpensive manpower. This paper describes an event marketing/social media marketing project completed in conjunction with Jackson-Dawson Communications, representing the Ford Motor Company, and a Midwestern University chapter of the American Marketing Association. Through the successful implementation of the AIDA-IMC promotion model, a committed AMA Chapter, and a number of very cooperative business partnerships, a host of corporate and academic objectives were accomplished while participants gained valuable insight into event marketing principles.

Purpose Unlike point of purchase behavior, not much is known about how payment method impacts post-purchase behavior, especially for durable goods where user experience can last over long periods. The purpose of this paper is to link two strands of literature for the first time by uncovering systematic linkages between the payment method (upfront cash vs loan) used for purchase of durable goods and the replacement timings for the same. Design/methodology/approach The authors predict that cash purchases are more likely to have shorter replacement horizons compared to loan purchases and propose a psychological mechanism that accounts for the same. Their arguments are based on how the strength of coupling, which is the degree of psychological association between payment and consumption, depends on the payment method and differentially influences the consumption experience and consequently leads to different replacement horizons. They conduct a field study to test their predictions and find support for their model. Findings The authors find that individuals who financed their durable goods purchases using loan, expressed their intentions to replace the goods after longer period than those who financed their durable goods with cash down payment. As loan installments remind people of painful thoughts of payment, they tend to reduce the dissonance by positively evaluating both retrospective and anticipated usage experiences. This dissonance reduction mechanism eventually leads to reduced willingness to let go of the durable. Practical implications Marketers are faced with a tradeoff between increasing purchase likelihood versus ensuring long-term post-purchase satisfaction. In this paper, the authors uncover the psychological mechanisms that can explain how payment method chosen to pay for a durable can have direct effect on post-purchase consumption experiences and subsequently in the replacement intentions. This finding is crucial for marketers who are interested in planning the product line launches and other post-purchase engagement strategies such as buy-back scheme and upgrades. Social implications Understanding the psychological mechanisms that explain individual’s likelihood to replace their durable goods allows policymakers to design appropriate interventions to induce more sustainable and efficient use of durable goods in the market. While on one hand, marketers might be interested in increasing sales of their product line by inducing faster replacement of older product versions, environmentalists nudge towards the opposite. This paper provides a possible way to achieve the dual objectives. Originality/value While past research on downstream effects of payment methods on behavioral outcomes focused only on consumables, the authors focus on durable goods. Further, they identify the effect of payment method on both psychological and behavioral outcomes.

This study examined factors associated with financial satisfaction and found that financial behaviors/attitudes provide the strongest explanation for the total variance in financial satisfaction. While overspending had a strong negative association with financial satisfaction, having a higher risk tolerance, no difficulty with monthly bill payments, and savings in an emergency fund, were all positively associated with financial satisfaction. Households with student loan debts and homeowners with mortgage loans were also less likely to be satisfied with their overall financial situation. The findings underscore the important role of positive savings and spending behavior on overall financial satisfaction and the opportunity for financial counselors, educators, and coaches to focus on motivating clients to save and plan ahead.

Athlete agents use various means to recruit prospective clients. Controversial yet common methods include offering loans and marketing guarantees to prospective clients. In each transaction, the agent provides his client with money, in some cases amounting to millions of dollars. The agent typically expects repayment of the loan whereas the marketing guarantee is an advance on future marketing income that the agent will arrange for the athlete. While both National Football League Players Association (“NFLPA”) agent regulations and state athlete agent laws prohibit agents from offering inducements to prospective clients, neither authority considers loans or marketing guarantees illicit or prohibits them. This Article details the use of loans and marketing guarantees in the football agent recruiting process. The Article also explores both NFLPA and state athlete agent law, which is based on the Uniform Athlete Agents Act or its revised version’s prohibitions on athlete agents providing inducements to prospective clients. It describes the fiduciary relationship between athlete agents and their clients and the duties that result under agency law. Next, the Article applies agency law to the provision of loans and marketing guarantees by athlete agents to their clients, determining that agency law seeks to prohibit such transactions. The Article then discusses the application of attorney ethics regulations to attorneys who serve as athlete agents and provide loans and marketing guarantees, finding that attorney-agents who engage in this activity violate ethics regulations. The Article concludes by explaining why both athlete agents and athletes should be leery of these dealings and by urging the NFLPA and individual states to expressly prohibit them.

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION In New Zealand (NZ), there are shortages of health professionals in rural areas and in primary care. AIM This study aims to examine the association of student debt levels of medical, nursing, pharmacy and optometry students with: (1) preferred geographical location of practice, specifically preference to work in urban vs. rural areas; and (2) preferred career specialties, specifically interest in primary health care. METHODS Medical, nursing, pharmacy and optometry students completed a questionnaire at graduation that included questions about levels of New Zealand Government Student Loan debt and preferences regarding location of practice and career specialty. In an additional survey, medical students were asked to self-rate the effect of financial factors on their career choices. RESULTS Debt patterns varied across programmes. Medical and pharmacy students with high debt were significantly more likely than students with low debt to prefer rural over urban practice (P = 0.003). There was no difference in level of interest in a primary care specialty by debt level for any programme. Medical students reported little influence of debt on career choice, although students with high debt levels were less concerned over career financial prospects than students with lower levels of debt. DISCUSSION Current levels of student debt do not deter students from planning a career in rural or primary care settings. Somewhat surprisingly, higher levels of debt are associated with greater rural practice intentions for medical and pharmacy students, although the underlying reasons are uncertain.

This study examines farm risk and management strategies adopted by arable crop farmers in Ogun State, Nigeria. A two-stage sampling procedure was employed to select 120 respondents for the study with the aid of questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Likert scale and logit regression model. Results revealed that erratic rainfall, pest and diseases were the major production risks faced by the farmers. Ill-health (69.2%) and low produce price (92.5%) were the major personal risk and marketing risk experienced by the farmers respectively. The major financial risks were insurance (86.7%) and lack of access to loan (83.3%) while the major institutional risk was lack of agricultural loan and subsidies (100%) from government. The major preventive strategy adopted by the arable crop farmers were use of agrochemicals and selling at reduced price. The most employed mitigation strategies were diversification (82.5%), on-farm sales (78.3%), esusu (77.5%), cooperative society membership (71.7%) and self-medication (70%). The prominent coping strategies employed were hired labour (77.5%), off-farm activities (73.3%) and borrowing (60%). The significant factors influencing the attitude of arable crop farmers to risk were sex, educational level of the farmers, household size, farming experience, membership of cooperative association, access to bank loan, farming system and off farm income The study concluded that the arable crop farmers were risk averse and recommended that efforts should be geared towards training the farmers on the appropriate management strategies with emphasis on the need for the farmers to adopt innovations that will enhance improved farm practices in the study area.Keywords: Arable crop, farm risk, management strategies, logit

The study assessed stakeholder participation in the West African Agricultural Productivity Programme in aquaculture value chain of the Kainji Lake Basin, Nigeria. A two stage sampling procedure was used to select 294 value chain actors across 20 communities. Also, Pie charts, logistic regression analysis, 3 point Likert-type scale rating technique and strategic decision matrix were used to analyse primary data. The determinants of participation in the programme were marital status, extension visits, membership of an association and experience. Furthermore, there were moderate financial requirements (need for loan and equipment) in feed milling ( x̄ =2.23), fish processing ( x̄ =2.30) and wholesale marketing ( x̄ ==2.2), while the financial requirement in table-size fish farming was high ( x̄ =2.59). There were moderate development potentials (impacts on income, employment, poverty reduction and food security) in feed milling ( x̄ =2.33), fish processing ( x̄ =2.32) and wholesale marketing ( x̄ =1.99), while the development potential of table-size fish farming was high ( x̄ =2.55). Future interventions in the value chain should make necessary provisions for the financial needs of each value chain with the adoption of backwardforward integration of women and youths in the value chain. Keywords: WAAPP, aquaculture, feed milling, fish processing, wholesale marketing

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine if university students understood the differences between first responders and emergency management as awareness of the differences informs the individual’s decision-making processes.Design: Convenience sampling, mixed methods data collection with descriptive analysis and means testing.Setting: US, Southeastern Conference University, during summer semester.Participants: 500 convenience sampled student volunteers.Intervention: Convenience sampled, mixed-mode survey administered May to July 2017.Main outcome measures: Population sampling of a minimum of n = 372 (actual n = 500 obtained) surveys to achieve a 95 percent confidence level of p ≤ 0.05 ± 4.29 percent.Results: 19.6 percent of the participants were able to associate response and recovery with emergency management. Word association with “Emergency Management” as the trigger word produced a 35.8 percent association with disasters and emergencies. 70.4 percent of the participants attended a university sponsored emergency preparedness course, but only 44.2 percent indicated they had received emergency preparedness training.Conclusions: There was a derivation of three issues: A lack of understanding in the differences between first responders and emergency management, a non-association of emergencies and disasters with emergency management, and a lack of understanding in what emergency preparedness training is. Results point to a need for further education on the duties and responsibilities of the emergency management profession. A form of information transfer that may be productive would be to administer an awareness campaign via social marketing. Further study is indicated, using a more rigorous sampling and analysis methodology.

In this era of educational marketing, education has become a commodity to be purchased by a consumer in order to build a skill set to be used in the market place and no more is it only recognized as the assets of skills, attitudes and values required for citizenship and effective participation in today’s society. Moreover, with the globalization phenomenon, which was always reflected in the education sector especially in India from olden times, has lead to the mobility of the students to the foreign countries either for quality or affordable education. Educational marketing can be defined as a planned and systematic two-way process of communication between an educational institution and its stakeholders designed to build morale, goodwill, understanding and support for that organization. The outcomes are usually goodwill, positive attitudes, respect, understanding and basic support. A developing country like India can use educational marketing as per its requirements. Therefore, this paper deals with two aspects in higher education in India. It tries to build a case for the need of decreasing outward student mobility and for more foreign students to be attracted to Indian higher education. To meet this purpose, the present study focuses light on the scenario of the higher education system worldwide and how economic globalization of higher education is shaping new horizons in the education sector. The present study details the statistics of student mobility world-wide and in India. The present study will also compare the composition and trends of exports of higher educational services by selected universities in Delhi, the capital and one of the metrocities of India. The present study is based upon the data collected from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of HRD, WTO publications, University Annual Reports and various journals and books published by the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) and the University Grants Commission (UGC).The three universities under study are the University of Delhi (DU), Jamia MiliaI slamia (JMI) and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). These universities are involved in globalization by admitting foreign students. DU and JMI offer regular and distance education courses in India, therefore foreign students come to these universities and take admission and study, whereas IGNOU has a different modus operandi. It has the partner institutions (PIs) all over the world in different countries. Students from those countries get enrolled through the PIs and pursue courses from IGNOU as it offers only distance courses. These universities in New Delhi have been chosen as Delhi is the capital of India and has two functional universities acclaimed worldwide and one open university of international repute, in order to understand how the various modes attract the foreign students; and these being publicly funded universities, how much impetus has been put on internationalization of higher education despite all required infrastructure being available with them for conducting the courses effectively and efficiently.

ABSTRACT Background Medical students attending schools with policies limiting industry/student interactions report fewer relationships with pharmaceutical representatives. Objective To investigate whether associations between students' medical school policies and their more limited industry interaction behaviors persist into residency. Methods We randomly sampled 1800 third-year residents who graduated from 120 allopathic US-based medical schools, using the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile. We surveyed them in 2011 to determine self-reported behavior and preferences for brand-name prescriptions, and we calculated the strength of their medical schools' industry interaction policies using the 2008 American Medical Student Association and Institute on Medicine as a Profession databases. We used logistic regression to estimate the association between strength of school policies and residents' behaviors with adjustments for class size, postresidency career plan, and concern about medical school debt. Results We achieved a 44% survey response rate (n = 739). Residents who graduated from schools with restrictive policies were no more or less likely to accept industry gifts or industry-sponsored meals, speak with marketing representative about drug products, attend industry-sponsored lectures, or prefer brand-name medications than residents who graduated from schools with less restrictive policies. Residents who correctly answered evidence-based prescription questions were about 30% less likely to have attended industry-sponsored lectures (OR = 0.72, 95% CI 0.56–0.98). Conclusions Any effect that medical school industry interaction policies had on insulating students from pharmaceutical marketing did not persist in the behavior of residents in our sample. This suggests that residency training environments are important in influencing behavior.

Purpose – This research aims to examine the buffering effect of a firm's religious association on customer reactions to a service failure. Design/methodology/approach – Two scenario-driven studies containing religious and non-religious reasons for a store closing were conducted. Findings – The results from Study 1 suggest that a religious affiliation safeguards against negative reactions to failures related to store policies (see Hoffman et al., 2003). Customers are more likely to forgive transgressing firms when service failures are associated with religion, regardless of attitudes toward the religious group. A follow up study supports the first, even when no specific religion was identified in the scenario, the service failure involved a firm that closed weekly, and a non-student sample was used. Research limitations/implications – While the results provide support for the buffering effects of a religious affiliation against a particular type of service failure – temporary service interruptions due to the observance of religious holidays and celebrations, future research should test the robustness of this effect on technology failures and rude treatment by employees. Originality/value – This paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to test the effect of a firm's religious affiliation on customer perceptions of frontline service encounters in general and service failures in particular.

Mark Aaron Polger is the First Year Outreach Librarian at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY), where his responsibilities include promoting library services and resources as well as providing instruction to first year students. Polger is also an Information Literacy Instructor at ASA College. His research interests include library marketing, outreach, and user experience design. He is active in LLAMA as the chair of the PR XChange Committee as well as the co-chair of the Annual PR XChange Awards Competition. Regionally, he is an active executive board member of ACRL/NY (Association of College and Research Libraries, Greater Metropolitan New York Area), where he serves on the planning committee of the annual symposium and co-chairs the User Experience Discussion Group. Locally, he co-chairs meetings in New York City for ACRL National’s Library Marketing and Outreach Interest Group. He is also a member of the planning committee of the annual Library Marketing and Communications Conference (LMCC). He is co-chair of the LACUNY (Library Association of the CUNY) Library Marketing and Outreach Roundtable Discussion Group.Currently, Polger is the founder and editor-in-chief of the new open-access, peer-reviewed Marketing Libraries Journal, which was launched in fall 2017.Originally from Montreal, Canada, Polger holds a BA in Sociology from Concordia University (1999), an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario (2000), an MA in Sociology from University of Waterloo (2004), and a BEd in Adult Education from Brock University (2009). He is currently a third-year PhD student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning Program at SUNY University at Buffalo. He moved to New York City in 2008.The first issue of Marketing Libraries Journal was published in fall 2017. We wanted to ask Mark about his inspiration to create this new publication.—Editors

Catalogues are the media that companies use to promote their products or services. Since catalogue is one of marketing media, the first essential step before designing product catalogue is determining the market target. Besides, it is also important to put some information that appeal to the target market, such as discount or promos by analysing customer pattern preferences in using services or buying product. This study conduct two data mining technique. The first is clustering analysis to segment customer and the second one is association rule mining to discover an interesting pattern about the services that commonly used by the customer at the same service time. Thus, the results will be used as a recommendation to make an attractive marketing strategy to be put in the service catalogue promo for a laundry in Sleman Yogyakarta. The clustering result showed that the biggest customer segment is university student who come 3 until 5 times in a month on weekends, while the association rule result showed that clothes, shoes, and bed sheet have strong relationship. The catalogue design is presented in the end of the paper.

Inspired by the United Nation’s Sustainability Development goals for responsible consumption and production, this final year two-student team thesis was conducted across six convenience sampled textiles and apparels companies in Karachi, Pakistan, as exploratory research. Interviews of purposively sampled personnel from these companies were assessed on their awareness on sustainability and the initiatives taken to develop infrastructures in alignment with green value chain standards and sustainable product. The instrument used is an unstructured questionnaire developed by the student researchers from adopted aspects of the Global Reporting Initiative standards. The use of thematic analysis and Greening Goliaths vs Emerging Davids Sustainability Matrix was further essential in this study’s potential in proposing green marketing strategy (GMS) to the Ministry of Textile Industry, and the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association. The study brought to light the detriments to market penetration of sustainable textiles and apparels in Pakistan, namely the economy, and consumer behavior. Conclusively, the student researchers found that the textiles industry in Pakistan was well developed along global sustainable goals but demand for sustainable apparel stemmed from developed nations owing to their consumer’s awareness on the implications of inorganic derived apparels on the environment.

Abstract “Challenge Cup” business plan competition of Chinese college students is held jointly by Central Committee of Chinese Communist Youth League, China Association for Science and Technology, Ministry of Education and All-China Students Federation. It is held every two years and is universally acknowledged as the “Scientific and Technological Olympics” of Chinese college students. It is important to make a business plan after the student chooses a subject of business plan, builds a business creation team, and does a wide & deep marketing investigation. However, tens of year’s practices of business plan competition have seen that business plan’s theory is not closely related to the practice, its practicality is not strong and the attractiveness & persuasiveness need to improve. Thus, it’s necessary to do a summarization through analyzing cases.

The challenges of developing Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in Cugenang Subdistrict, Cianjur Regency are very diverse. One of the toughest challenges is the existence of internal competition that arises between SME entrepreneurs in the Cugenang District itself. It is occured because there is no clear communication network to manage the distribution of MSMEs in Cugenang District. It impacted internal competition between MSME, product quality problems, the competence of MSME entrepreneurs, and uneven product distribution. The student group that became the initiator of Prasetiya Mulya Community Development as community service activities identified problems through interviews, direct discussions, and 1-month observations. One of the positive results obtained is the desire of MSME entrepreneurs to cooperate and network in marketing their products. Unfortunately, this desire does not yet have a clear framework for the activities. Therefore, a group of students with MSME entrepreneurs took the initiative to gather these entrepreneurs in a simple forum which later became the pilot of the Cugenang Entrepreneurs Association (APC) organization. APC was officially established on February 2, 2019 and is currently able to reach the minimum target to become a communication forum for MSME entrepreneurs Cugenang in marketing its products out of the Cugenang Sub-District area and improving the quality of local MSME products.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a customer relationship mining system (CRMS) to analyze the data collected from franchisees and formulates a marketing strategy based on customer demand and behavior. Design/methodology/approach – The system makes use of cloud technology to collect and manage data among the franchisees. An integrated approach of association rule mining and the neural network technique is adopted to investigate customer behavioral patterns and to forecast sales demand, respectively. Findings – The significance and contribution of this paper are demonstrated by adopting the CRMS in the education industry in Hong Kong. The findings led to the identification of student learning intentions such as course preferences, and the forecasting of enrolment demand in terms of demand forecast. It is believed that better resources allocation can be achieved and an increase in customer satisfaction is foreseeable. Research limitations/implications – The proposed CRMS could be applied to various franchising industries for effective marketing strategy formulation. However, since the data in this study are extracted from a specific industry, modifications may be required before the CRMS can be applied to other franchising industries. Originality/value – This study presents a new application to convert data into useful knowledge, and provides useful insights for delivering strategic promotional plans under a franchising business model. Through the pilot study conducted in a franchising education center, the results demonstrate that the proposed CRMS is valuable in providing effective promotion to attract more customers, better preparation in resources allocation and more standardized methods to formulate marketing strategies in the franchising industry.

In Vietnam, since 2015, the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam has decided to abolish university entrance exams and advocates the use of high school graduation exam results of candidates for admission to go to universities. The 2015 and 2016 exam questions for the Math exam are the essay questions. From 2017 up to now, the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam has applied the form of multiple-choice exams for Mathematics in the high school graduation exam. There are many mixed opinions about the impact of this form of examination and admission on the quality of university students. In particular, the switch from the form of essay examination to multiple-choice exams led the entire Vietnam Mathematical Association at that time to send recommendations on continuing to maintain the form of essay examination for mathematics. The purposes of this article are analysis and evaluation the effects of relevant factors on the academic performance of advanced math students of university students, and offer solutions to optimize university entrance exam. The data set was provided by Training Management Department and Training Quality Control and Testing Laboratory of the University of Finance – Marketing. This dataset includes information about math high school graduation test scores, learning process scores (scores assessed by direct instructors), and advanced math course end test scores of 2834 students in courses from 2015 to 2019. Linear and non-linear regression machine learning models were used to solve the tasks given in this article. An analysis of the data was conducted to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of the change in university enrollment of the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training. Tools from the Python libraries have been supported and used effectively in the process of solving problems. Through building and surveying the model, there are suggestions and solutions to problems in enrollment and input quality assurance. Specifically, in the preparation of entrance exams, the entrance exam questions should not exceed 61-66 % of multiple choice questions.

Purpose This paper presents a comprehensive review of the poster session “Library orientation in blackboard: supporting online and distance learners” presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 2017 conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Design/methodology/approach Development of AU Library Student Orientation in Blackboard is discussed from the initial course proposal up to its completion of first year use. Orientation modules are reviewed and include purpose, organization and technology resources utilized to deliver content. Findings Complete library orientation information including project timeline, marketing, learning management systems (LMS) usage data, survey and assessment outcomes, video viewing statistics and plans for moving forward are provided. Practical implications This paper details steps taken and resources used to develop an online library orientation suitable for any LMS. Project design, orientation module structure and select orientation resources are provided. Originality/value This paper addresses the need for academic library orientation to support online and distant learners by delivering a practical library introduction in Blackboard.

The present study accentuated a hybrid approach to evaluate the impact, association and discrepancies of demographic characteristics on a student’s job placement. The present study extracted several significant academic features that determine the Master of Business Administration (MBA) student placement and confirm the placed gender. This paper recommended a novel futuristic roadmap for students, parents, guardians, institutions, and companies to benefit at a certain level. Out of seven experiments, the first five experiments were conducted with deep statistical computations, and the last two experiments were performed with supervised machine learning approaches. On the one hand, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) outperformed others with the uppermost accuracy of 90% to predict the employment status. On the other hand, the Random Forest (RF) attained a maximum accuracy of 88% to recognize the gender of placed students. Further, several significant features are also recommended to identify the placement of gender and placement status. A statistical t-test at 0.05 significance level proved that the student’s gender did not influence their offered salary during job placement and MBA specializations Marketing and Finance (Mkt&Fin) and Marketing and Human Resource (Mkt&HR) (p > 0.05). Additionally, the result of the t-test also showed that gender did not affect student’s placement test percentage scores (p > 0.05) and degree streams such as Science and Technology (Sci&Tech), Commerce and Management (Comm&Mgmt). Others did not affect the offered salary (p > 0.05). Further, the χ2 test revealed a significant association between a student’s course specialization and student’s placement status (p < 0.05). It also proved that there is no significant association between a student’s degree and placement status (p > 0.05). The current study recommended automatic placement prediction with demographic impact identification for the higher educational universities and institutions that will help human communities (students, teachers, parents, institutions) to prepare for the future accordingly.

Abstract Cues in the environment can prime consumer identities, increasing adoption of behaviors consistent with the primed identity and avoidance of behaviors consistent with alternate (nonprimed) identities. Although alternate-identity avoidance is common, three studies show that priming an identity (e.g., student) can also encourage consumers to approach alternate identities (e.g., friend). When two identities are relatively easy to balance (e.g., sufficient time for both student- and friend-related activities), participants approach alternate identities that are associated with the primed identity following a cognitive process of spreading activation. However, when identities are difficult to balance, participants approach alternate identities that are dissociated from the primed identity. We argue that this reversal occurs owing to a switch from a cognitive process to a motivational process akin to that seen in multiple-goal management. Under the motivational process, priming a focal identity inhibits (activates) associated (dissociated) identities because the two are seen as (non-)substitutable with each other. The motivational process under high balance difficulty relaxes when participants can self-affirm, causing response to instead mimic the cognitive process. The resulting integrative framework introduces identity-balance difficulty and its interaction with association into identity research, uniquely highlighting the importance of multiple-identity management with implications for research and practice.

[Bahasa]: Eks-buruh migran di Wonosobo memiliki asosiasi yang beranggotakan 30 orang. Hampir 80% anggota asosiasi memiliki unit bisnis di berbagai bidang seperti kerajinan kain batik, vas bunga, produk olahan pangan lokal, koperasi, jasa simpan pinjam, dan toko kelontong. Sekitar 90% anggota asosiasi tidak memiliki kemampuan untuk memanfaatkan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi dalam mempromosikan dan memasarkan produk dan jasa yang mereka miliki. Adanya era Revolusi Industri 4.0 dan wabah Covid-19 menyebabkan omzet usaha anggota mengalami penurunan hingga 40%. Oleh karena itu, tujuan pengabdian kepada masyarakat ini adalah meningkatkan kemampuan mitra dalam memasarkan produk mereka melalui teknologi informasi dan komunikasi. Metode yang dilakukan dalam kegiatan ini adalah pelatihan dan pendampingan mitra oleh akademisi Universitas Jenderal Soedirman. Materi pelatihan meliputi pengelolaan administrasi berbasis sistem informasi, perencanaan keuangan berbasis digital, pengunaan aplikasi akuntansi digital, pengelolaan risiko keuangan, dan pembuatan desain kontrol mutu produk inovasi. Setelah kegiatan pelatihan para buruh migran telah mampu membuat desain kemasan produk dengan Canva, membuat laporan keuangan dengan aplikasi catatan keuangan, dan mempromosikan produk usaha melalui media sosial. Pendampingan intensif selama satu bulan dilakukan untuk memastikan bahwa mitra mampu mengaplikasikan materi pelatihan secara berkelanjutan. Peningkatan kemampuan digitalisasi pemasaran produk untuk eks-buruh migran melalui kegiatan pengabdian ini mampu meningkatkan omzet penjualan rata-rata sebesar 22%. Kata Kunci: digitalisasi, promosi, migran, Wonosobo [English]: The ex-migrant workers association in Wonosobo has 30 members. Nearly 80% of the members have business units in various fields such as batik cloth, flower vases, locally processed food products, cooperatives, savings and loan services, and grocery stores. About 90% of the members do not have the ability to use information and communication technology (ICT) to promote and market their products and services. The era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the Covid-19 outbreak caused the members’ business profit decrease by 40%. Therefore, the purpose of this community service is to improve the ability of partners in marketing their products through ICT. The method used in this program is training and mentoring by academics from Universitas Jenderal Soedirman. The training materials include information system-based administrative management, digital-based financial planning, the use of digital accounting applications, financial risk management, and quality control designs for innovative products. After the training, the participants are able able to design product packaging with Canva, make financial reports using financial records applications, and promote business products through social media. A month-intensive mentoring was carried out to ensure that partners were able to apply training materials continuously. In conclusion, this program develops the participants’ ability to digitize product marketing and increase their sales turnover around 22%. Keywords: digitization, promotion, migrants, Wonosobo

Purpose This paper aims to explore a study that examines the role of academic librarians who teach visual literacy within their information literacy curricula. Design/methodology/approach The author developed a survey that was distributed to five listservs during a three-week period, generating 118 responses from academic libraries. The author subsequently interviewed 16 participants. Findings The findings reveal that visual literacy is important across all disciplines. However, a majority of academic librarians who replied to the survey stated that they do not teach visual literacy. Only 37.3 per cent of the respondents indicated that they or their institutions include a visual literacy component in their sessions. Practical implications The paper identifies the most relevant visual literacy trends, and it includes examples of visual literacy skills and concepts being taught in academic libraries. It provides ideas to develop marketing strategies to increase student enrollment in library workshops. Originality/value This study has expanded librarians’ awareness of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. In addition, it explores the teaching of multiliteracies such as visual literacy within the information literacy framework in the academic library. The survey data demonstrate that academic librarians are slowly embracing visual literacy and including it in their information literacy instruction across all disciplines. The study recommends that librarians work on their professional development to become multiliterate to remain relevant within their academic communities.

Purpose With the expansion of globalization, the increased competitive environment has led to the diffusion of brands across borders and cultures. Furthermore, young consumers represent an optimal segment for the proliferation of global consumer culture (GCC). This paper aims to examine the relationship between acculturation to global consumer culture (AGCC), perceived brand equity, attitudes toward the brand and brand resonance in the global sportswear brands context among young consumers in the USA. Design/methodology/approach A total of 394 undergraduate student participants ranging in age from 18 years to 24 years completed a multisectional structured survey. Model construct validity was tested using a confirmatory factor analysis. A structure equation model was used to test hypotheses and relationships. Findings Results showed that while cosmopolitan and self-identification with GCC dimensions of ACGG had a positive association with perceived brand equity, exposure to marketing activities of MNCs and global mass media exposure dimensions of AGCC had a negative association with perceived brand equity. Perceived brand equity also revealed a positive association with attitudes toward the brand, which in turn, affected brand resonance. Research limitations/implications The research used a sample of 18-24-year-old youth consumers. Future research could be extended to include younger (15-17-year old) sample to provide a broader sample of the youth market. In addition, future replication of findings should seek through cross-cultural investigation of multiple youth segments. Practical implications Findings suggest support multiple dimensions of the AGCC scale as holding significant influence on young consumers’ brand equity consisting of brand image and brand awareness. Managerially, the findings provide support on the youth consumer’s affinity toward self-identification with a GCC and cosmopolitan openness to foreign cultures as being positively related to the adoptions and retention of apparel brands. Social implications Theoretically, the results provide empirical evidence for the debate on the interrelationship between brand equity and attitudes toward brands. The theoretical model guiding the current study reflects the notion of an emerging acculturation process among a segment of the world’s population to a set of global consumer preferences and ideals that are increasingly being embodied in global brands. Originality/value This is among one of the first studies attempting to explore the applicability of Cleveland and Laroche’s (2007) AGCC concepts in predicting young consumers’ attitudes and behavioral responses toward global brands.

In the United States, about 36% of all community colleges offer international student programs, of which, about 13% also offer education abroad programs (Malveaux & Raby, 2019). Documentation on community college international education has existed since the 1950s. Advocacy for community college international education is also not new and is found in numerous American Association of Community Colleges publications, association reports, and addresses given by multiple generations of community college leaders who view internationalization as an important way to serve the community college missions of open access, to support gainful employment goals, and to support student success initiatives (American Association of Community Colleges, 2018; Boggs & Irwin, 2007; Gleazer, 1975). In celebration of the Journal of International Students 10th year anniversary, this essay outlines the advances made in community college mobility programs over the past decade. Mobility here refers to both inbound (international student programs) and outbound (education abroad programs). Community colleges play a critical role in training adults to gain skills needed for participation in a global economy where required job skills change rapidly. This global economy is a context in which international and cross-cultural skills are in high demand. This demand is being addressed by community colleges adding international learning in their academic and in career training curricula and programs. It is also addressed by fostering access to international programs and activities for all students. In 1996, Raby and Tarrow discussed how “with the current recession, the fate of international education is in jeopardy” (p. 20). In 2012, another recession became the backdrop against severe budget cuts that severely impacted periphery programs such as international education (Raby, 2012). Today, the economic context of COVID will once again redefine the number of students who can afford to travel, the ease of travel, and how much infrastructure support will be given by institutions to support international programs. Yet, in learning from the past, it is evident that …when the global economy stabilized so did internationalization efforts. Even more importantly is that after each crisis period, a new generation of individuals emerged as international advocates and who continually seek to implement changes in the college. Herein lays the promise of the future. (Raby, 2019, p. 16) The promise of the future rests on research previously conducted on community college internationalization as this research embeds advocacy and best practices so that patterns that work do not need to be reinvented. The community college mission does not have a singular focus as it was designed to serve multiple purposes. Internationalization is one of these missions (Ayers, 2015; Gleazer, 1975; Raby, 2019). This works in harmony with a local mandate to prepare graduates to gain local jobs, even those jobs that are located outside the geographic boundary of the college (Ayers, 2015). Internationalization is included in missions (Whatley & Raby, 2020) and in strategic planning policies (Copeland, 2016). Open access is a guiding principle that allows enrollment opportunities for all who want to learn. Open access supports current equity agendas. However, equity in international education while encouraging wide-spread enrollment also has limitations. For international students, there are minimum qualifications, including international testing scores and English language proficiencies. Other limitations occur when international students are labeled as a privileged group, which skews the services that they receive (Viggiano et al., 2017). For education abroad, minimum qualifications include grade point average requirements, code of conduct, financial ability, and deficit narratives that stereotype non-traditional students (Whatley & Raby, 2020). Today, there are dedicated offices and dedicated mid- and senior-level leadership positions that oversee internationalization. This includes partnerships with senior administration (Brennen & Dellow, 2013), with academic departments and campus services (Smith, 2019), and with campus assessment practices (Wood, 2019). There are also known areas for augmentation of support services. For international students, this includes office policies (Lau et al., 2019), student advising practices (Zhang, 2016), addressing marginalization resulting from prejudice and discrimination (Hansen et al., 2018), and understanding the heterogeneity of international students (Bennani, 2018). For education abroad, this includes creative financing (Giammarella, 2012), addressing deficit student labels (Raby, 2019; Robertson, 2019; Whatley, 2019), re-examining entry requirements, including planning time (Amani & Kim, 2017), and understanding when curriculum limits and when it expands free time (McKee, 2019). Decreased state and federal funding for community colleges complicates the financing of international education offices and accentuates marketing to increase the number of students who enroll in programs, which in turn, directly impacts the larger college budget. Research explains why the college needs to recruit international students (Bohman, 2014), why students want to study in community colleges (Zhang & Hagedorn, 2013), and why myths can negatively impact student success (Budd et al., 2016; Viggiano et al., 2018). Research also shows that international programs positively influence student success that lead to increased persistence, transfer, and completion. This is true for students who study abroad (Raby et al., 2014; Whatley, 2019) and for international students (Benneni, 2018; Slantcheva-Durst & Knaggs, 2017) whose high academic aspirations help them to overcoming personal challenges (Friedman, 2018). Since the 1980s, national associations, practitioners, and researchers used advocacy and research to develop and implement best practices. As a result, community college student mobility programs expanded in number and in scope. Today, it is common for colleges to include “international” or “global” in their mission, vision, and annual priorities. There is an increase in full-time dedicated positions for those leading international education, increased access for students to participate in various international programs, expanded use of technologies that further broaden access, and collaborations that extend beyond the campus. Most importantly, students choose to attend community colleges to better themselves, and they make sound decisions to engage in college programs to expand their knowledge, which includes international mobility programs. In the post-COVID period, it is likely that severe state funding challenges, lower overall and international student enrollments, and high turnover of senior administrators will once again challenge community college international education. I propose that the significant research about community college internationalization has taught five points that will be important drivers in moving international education forward. First, advocacy needs to reinforce that local is not the opposite of global and that international education is indeed one of the community colleges’ missions as it encapsulates an academic shift that promotes international literacy as a critical employability and educational skill. Second, avoid haphazard implementation of services that reinforce hegemonic patterns in which some students are given access to life-altering experiences while others are denied those experiences. Third, eliminate student stereotypes that feed into a negative narrative. Fourth, use caution when designating students as a desirable source of revenue. Finally, understand that the limits of student success are connected to a lack of supportive institutional practices rather than to a lack of student interest. Above all, “Change is a choice needed to be made by visionary leaders who must prioritize and then lead these reform efforts that are sustainable and not impacted by the shifting of time and institutional circumstances (Raby, 2019, p. 17).

To improve online learning pedagogy within the field of paralegal education, this study investigated how paralegal students and paralegal instructors perceived the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. This study intended to inform paralegal instructors and course developers how to better design, deliver, and evaluate effective online course instruction in the field of paralegal studies.Survey results were analyzed using independent samples t-test and correlational analysis, and indicated that overall, paralegal students and paralegal instructors positively perceived synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. Paralegal instructors reported statistically significant higher perceptions than paralegal students: (1) of instructional design and course content in synchronous online paralegal courses; and (2) of technical assistance, communication, and course content in asynchronous online paralegal courses. Instructors also reported higher perceptions of the effectiveness of universal design, online instructional design, and course content in synchronous online paralegal courses than in asynchronous online paralegal courses. Paralegal students reported higher perceptions of asynchronous online paralegal course effectiveness regarding universal design than paralegal instructors. No statistically significant differences existed between paralegal students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. A strong, negative relationship existed between paralegal students’ age and their perceptions of effective synchronous paralegal courses, which were statistically and practically significant. Lastly, this study provided practical applicability and opportunities for future research. Akyol, Z., & Garrison, D. R. (2008). 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Background Novel methods to boost interest in scientific research careers among minority youth are largely unexplored. Social media offers a unique avenue toward influencing teen behavior and attitudes, and can therefore be utilized to stimulate interest in clinical research. Objective The aim of this study was to engage high-achieving minority youth enrolled in a science pipeline program to develop a targeted social media marketing campaign for boosting interest in clinical research careers among their peers. Methods Students enrolled in the Training Early Achievers for Careers in Health program conducted focus groups in their communities to inform themes that best promote clinical research. They then scripted, storyboarded, and filmed a short video to share on social media with a campaign hashtag. Additionally, each student enrolled peers from their social circle to be subjects of the study. Subjects were sent a Career Orientation Survey at baseline to assess preliminary interest in clinical research careers and again after the campaign to assess how they saw the video, their perceptions of the video, and interest in clinical research careers after watching the video. Subjects who did not see the video through the online campaign were invited to watch the video via a link on the postsurvey. Interest change scores were calculated using differences in Likert-scale responses to the question “how interested are you in a career in clinical research?” An ordinal logistic regression model was used to test the association between watching a peer-shared video, perception of entertainment, and interest change score controlling for underrepresented minorities in medicine status (Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander), gender, and baseline interest in medical or clinical research careers. Results From 2014 to 2017, 325 subjects were enrolled as part of 4 distinct campaigns: #WhereScienceMeetsReality, #RedefiningResearch, #DoYourResearch, and #LifeWithoutResearch. Over half (n=180) of the subjects watched the video via the campaign, 227/295 (76.9%) found the video entertaining, and 92/325 (28.3%) demonstrated baseline interest in clinical research. The ordinal logistic regression model showed that subjects who viewed the video from a peer (odds ratio [OR] 1.56, 95% CI 1.00-2.44, P=.05) or found the video entertaining (OR 1.36, 95% CI 1.01-1.82, P=.04) had greater odds of increasing interest in a clinical research career. Subjects with a higher baseline interest in medicine (OR 1.55, 95% CI 1.28-1.87, P<.001) also had greater odds of increasing their interest in clinical research. Conclusions The spread of authentic and relevant peer-created messages via social media can increase interest in clinical research careers among diverse teens. Peer-driven social media campaigns should be explored as a way to effectively recruit minority youth into scientific research careers.

Modern society has features such as rapidly changing conditions and a large amount of information. In this regard, each person should be able to realize and formulate a problem in a short time, study new information, determine the purpose of the activity and the necessary actions to achieve it, evaluate the result and, if necessary, return to the intended actions and make adjustments. The formation of these skills does not occur spontaneously. In this regard, the federal state educational standard of general education includes a new group of educational results – meta-subject [1, 2]. Therefore, each educational institution should ensure a phased, purposeful development of the declared groups of skills (regulatory, communicative and cognitive) at each level of education. The above skills are included in the group of design skills and are fixed in the program for the development of universal educational activities. In the approximate main educational program of basic general education, it is determined that the protection of an individual project is considered as the main procedure for diagnosing the metomaterial outcomes being sluggish. Therefore, of particular importance when working with students are design forms and methods of work [3]. There are many scientific works devoted to the use of the project method in education, in which various approaches to the definition of the educational project, types of projects, and stages of their implementation are considered. However, not enough attention was paid to the problem of the systemic formation of project skills, in this regard, based on an analysis of the interdisciplinary programs “Fundamentals of Project and Research Activities”, psychological and pedagogical literature, we came to the conclusion that it is necessary to highlight the necessary stages of the formation of project skills. During the study, three necessary stages of the formation of design skills were distinguished, which differ not only in the depth of development of the corresponding skills, but also in the expediency of using certain means due to the age characteristics of students. So for students in grades 5-7 it is recommended to use design tasks, which are considered as a prototype of design activity. Students of grades 7-8 are offered group projects, and in the ninth grade, it is necessary to switch to individual projects. Based on the age characteristics of schoolchildren for fifth graders, it is advisable to continue the elementary school line – solving project tasks, but not offering students an ordered system of tasks, but an unordered set when children have to build their own “strategy” for solving the problem [12, 15]. Therefore, at the first stage in a primary school in grades 5-6, it is advisable to leave the project task as a means of developing project skills. In the sixth grade, there should be a transition to tasks in which tasks are not explicitly identified, their establishment in the general context of the project task rests with the students themselves. This form of the design task is closest to the design activity. During the study, the design task “Travel Company ″Everest″ was developed and tested for students in grades 6-7. It consisted of three main objects: a quasial situation with a problem situation. “In the travel company Everest, consumer activity has decreased over the past year. It was decided that in order to attract tourists it is necessary to change the previously developed tours to demonstrate to customers”; an unordered set of tasks necessary to resolve a problem situation; final task – a project that solves the problem fixed in the situation. Monitoring the activities of sixth grade students in the course of solving this project task showed that students easily distribute roles among themselves, find different sources of information, including using search engines; correctly fill out tables, build charts. However, adolescents had difficulty when it was necessary to draw up an action plan to solve the project task, also when determining the main and secondary information in the loan agreement. At the stage of reflection, schoolchildren were not always able to evaluate their activities and argue the reasons for the achievement or absence of the planned result. In the course of solving the system of design tasks, students in grades 5-6 develop the following skills: Reflect (see the problem, difficulties, errors; perform an analysis — why it turned out or failed) under the guidance of a teacher; set and hold goals; plan (draw up a plan of their activities); to model (work and make diagrams, tables) under the guidance of a teacher; communicate (interact in solving the problem, defend their position). The second stage is the main one (the end of the 6th grade to the middle of the 8th grade), at which students of the main school continue to solve design problems. For this adolescence, a manifestation of a “sense of adulthood” is characteristic, in connection with this it is necessary to create a variety of educational environments where students can express themselves by taking on new roles. The present project activity takes its leading place in the basic school, starting from the 7th grade. By the end of this stage, control and evaluation actions, as well as actions for the distribution of roles and retention of goals, are reaching an independent level; actions to search and process information; we can talk about the formation of the ability to work with text. The third stage is the final one, at which there is a transition from group projects of different ages to individual ones. For students in grades 8-9, communication is of particular importance, it is noted that a teenager needs communication as an independent sphere of life. At this stage, the student is more willing to independently carry out project activities. The nature of the projects should be related to pre-profile preparation, i.e. with such areas as science, art, journalism, marketing, advertising, etc. Thus, the formation of design skills in students of the primary school will be successful if the following conditions are met: — continuity of forms and techniques in the organization of project activities, namely the project task — group projects — individual projects; — in the program for the formation of universal educational actions, the levels of formation of design skills for students of the 4th, 6th, 8th and 9th grades are fixed; — educators have a common understanding of the basics of design activities, design tasks, training projects and methods for their organization; — the educational institution monitors meta-subject results of the development of the main educational program, including corrective measures.

Objectives: (1) To examine trends in level of student loan indebtedness for groups of pharmacists that were first licensed between 1980 and 2006; (2) To examine if demographic variables are associated with level of student loan indebtedness; (3) To examine the association between student loan debt and choice of practice setting while controlling for demographic variables. Methods: Data for this study were collected from a national random sample of 3,000 pharmacists using a self administered survey. Descriptive statistics were used to examine trends in level of indebtedness. The relationships between level of indebtedness, demographic variables and practice setting choice were examined using Chi-square statistics. Multinomial logistic regression was used to determine the independent association of student loan debt and choice of practice setting while controlling for demographic variables. Results: The proportion of licensed pharmacists reporting student loan debt after graduation, and the mean amount of debt incurred increased between 1980 and 2006. Non-white pharmacists incurred debt at a higher proportion compared to white, and they also incurred significantly higher levels of debt. A lower level of indebtedness was associated with choosing independent practice over chain practice. Conclusions: Student loan indebtedness has been increasing over time, especially for non-white pharmacy students. Future research should be done to examine other factors that might influence student debt load, work contributions and choice of practice settings. The affordability of pharmacy education for students of color and how salaries may or may not help off-set these costs also should be examined closely. Type: Original Research

BackgroundThere is good quality evidence linking socioeconomic background and the likelihood of a surgical career. Additionally, training in surgery is more expensive than in other specialties. Our aim was to assess the awareness and perceptions of trainees and medical students of the relative costs of surgical training and to determine whether perceptions of cost deter potential surgical trainees.MethodsMedical students, foundation doctors and core trainees in England were surveyed over a 2-week period. χ2 tests of independence were used to assess statistically significant associations between measured variablesMain findingsA total of 284 responses were received. More than half of respondents (54%) were not previously aware of the high costs of surgical training. More than a quarter of respondents (27%) did not take out a student loan. There was a significant association (p=0.003) between familial income and being less likely to consider a surgical career due to the costs. Respondents who reported receipt of a student loan were also significantly less likely to consider a surgical career due to the costs (p=0.033).ConclusionOur study demonstrates an important relationship between perceived costs of surgical training and future career aspirations. This suggests that access to surgical training may still be difficult for many. This study also highlights a general lack of awareness of high surgical training costs. It is important that surgical training is accessible. Financial status should not be a significant disincentive and widening access to surgical training can only serve to enrich and advance the specialty.

Student loans defer the cost of college until after graduation, allowing many students access to higher lifetime earnings and colleges and universities they otherwise could not afford. Even with student loans, however, the authors find that students psychologically realize the financial costs of a college education long before their loan repayments begin. This early cost realization frames financial decisions between most pairs of colleges as an intertemporal trade-off. Students choose between investments with (1) smaller short-term costs but smaller long-term returns (a lower-cost, lower-return [LC-LR] college) and (2) larger short-term costs but larger long-term returns (a higher-cost, higher-return [HC-HR] college). The authors find that early cost realization increases preferences for LC-LR colleges—preferences that could reduce lifetime earnings—in both simulations and experiments. Preferences for LC-LR colleges are pronounced among financially impatient students and in choice pairs of LC-LR and HC-HR colleges where the equilibrium is set at a low-discount-rate threshold. A return-on-investment strategy, future uncertainty, and debt aversion cannot explain these results. A decision aid synchronizing the psychological realization of costs and benefits reduced preferences for LC-LR colleges, illustrating that the preference is constructed and receptive to interventions.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the factor persuading the acceptance of Islamic pawn broking (Ar-Rahnu) among Islamic bank customers. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected the data using a self-administered questionnaire design and analysed using SPSS Statistics and smart partial least square. The study is restricted to only respondents who are based in the area of Klang Valley (Selangor and Kuala Lumpur), as these two areas have a larger number of Islamic banks and a decent number of Islamic banks’ clients. A total of 381 respondents’ responses are used for this study, and the constructs involved for analysis purpose are affect, social factor, facilitating conditions, perceived financial benefits and perceived risk constructs. Findings The finding suggests a significant positive association for social factor and perceived risk, while negative association learnt for affect on acceptance of Ar-Rahnu financing. On the same note, the facilitating condition and perceived financial benefit are found insignificantly related. Practical implications The findings generated from this study are expected to enrich the literature on the body of knowledge, as it has served to broaden the understanding of the Ar-Rahnu acceptance level in Malaysia. As mentioned, there is limited literature available using this type of financing. Existing studies focus too much on conventional financing products such as personal financing, credit card, short-term loan and many others. Less attention is given to Ar-Rahnu financing. Thus, this study expected to add value to the literature available in the context of Islamic pawn broking business. Moreover, the findings of this study will be very helpful for the Islamic financial institutions to find the best way to retain Ar-Rahnu clients and encourage more client to choose Ar-Rahnu as a mode of financing. Originality/value This study owns greater potential to assist Islamic financial institutions to discover the best techniques to retain and encourage the grander number of clients for Ar-Rahnu as a mode of financing.

College students represent an important target market for intercollegiate athletic marketers; however, re-cent years have seen a nationwide trend of declining student attendance at high-profile sporting events (Cohen, 2014; Rowland, 2019). The current study examined this issue by studying the influence of constraints on student attendance. Data were collected in partnership with the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators (NACMA). In total, more than 23,000 respondents from 60 NCAA Di-vision I institutions participated in the study. Conjoint analysis was utilized to assess student attendance preferences across a set of attributes to determine the relative importance of each constraint tested. Separate analyses were conducted for both football and men’s basketball samples as well as NCAA conference tier (Power Five, Group of Five, FCS). Results indicated constraint importance varied by market segment. Of note, as passion levels among student respondents increased, importance shifted from ticket price to seat location and game day atmosphere.

PurposeWhile there has been a significant amount of work involving marketing education, it is unclear how faculty members can increase the engagement and achievement of non-subject specialists. Accordingly, guided by Bloom's Taxonomy, this current study examines the ways that academics can teach marketing to non-marketing undergraduate majors, with a focus on enhancing their engagement and academic performance.Design/methodology/approachSurvey responses (and related archival information) were collected from 181 non-marketing majors in the United Kingdom (studying marketing modules as part of their undergraduate degrees). Such data passed a series of key robustness checks. The hypothesized and control paths were tested via covariance-based structural equation modeling. In addition, 20 semi-structured interviews were used to explore the underlying issues behind the statistical results.FindingsTwo variables were positive drivers of engaging non-marketing students, namely, discussion-oriented interactions and relating marketing to non-marketing subjects. However, integrating theory with practice produced a negative, but non-significant relationship with engaging non-marketing students. In turn, engaging non-marketing students yielded a positive and significant association with academic performance. The follow-up interviews suggested that to best-engage non-marketing majors, educators should consider hosting guest speakers (e.g. owner-managers) to demonstrate how their university-level studies are applicable to “real-world” subject contexts, like sports management and engineering when they graduate.Originality/valueThis current article strengthens the extant literature by identifying some actionable tools that can be employed to enhance the engagement and academic performance of non-subject specialists. This is important, since faculty members are under increased pressure to become effective teachers and facilitate student satisfaction (alongside their other duties, including research and administration). Hence, this paper assists such individuals to cope with the rapidly changing landscape of the higher education sector. In fact, Bloom's Taxonomy was a relevant pedagogical theory for unpacking how educators can teach marketing to non-marketing majors.

Orientation: To understand entrepreneurial behaviour, it is important to understand the image or perceptions associated with entrepreneurship.Research purpose: To identify the image or perceptions that students have of an entrepreneur.Motivation for study: By establishing the image or perceptions that students have of an entrepreneur, insights could be provided into the factors influencing them to become entrepreneurs or not.Research approach, design and method: A qualitative projective technique, namely continuous word association, was adopted. Convenience sampling was used and 163 students participated. The words generated were coded into categories by searching for themes and words of a similar nature. The total words generated, the frequencies of recurring words, the number of different types of words, first words recalled and the average number of words recalled were established.Main findings: The students participating in the study have a good understanding of the general nature of an entrepreneur and entrepreneurship; an entrepreneur is perceived as someone who is a creative and innovative risk-taker, who owns a business involved in the selling of goods and services.Practical/managerial implications: Future entrepreneurs need to be aware that, in addition to several innate attributes, successful entrepreneurs have learned skills and competencies. It is also important that educators of entrepreneurship create a realistic image of what it is like to be an entrepreneur, and that both positive and negative aspects are highlighted.Contribution/value-add: By identifying the image or perceptions of an entrepreneur held by students, the marketing of entrepreneurship as a desirable career choice can be enhanced.

BackgroundAssociations between retail tobacco availability and tobacco use have been mixed. This study examined associations between school-based retail environment exposures and current use of cigarettes, cigar products and e-cigarettes among middle school youth in Cleveland, OH.MethodsRetailers selling tobacco products were identified using the 2015 Cleveland Food Retail Database (n=639 stores). Youth survey data were drawn from the 2016 Cleveland Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to all 7th/8th graders across the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (n=3778, response rate=83.0%). Past 30-day cigarette, cigar product and e-cigarette use were assessed. Student demographics, number of days walking to/from school each week and number of times youth stopped at a retailer to/from school each week were included. For each school (n=63), tobacco retail density (TRD) and proximity (TRP) to nearest retailer were calculated for each product. Multiple regression analysis assessed associations between retail exposures and youth tobacco use.ResultsAcross all schools, 3.9%, 10.2% and 8.6% of students currently use cigarettes, cigar products and e-cigarettes, respectively, and 15.2% currently use at least one tobacco product. TRD and TRP were not associated with current use; frequency of walking to school and stopping at retailers were strongly associated with current use.ConclusionsAlthough TRD and TRP were not significantly associated with tobacco product use, youth who reported regularly walking to/from school or who reported stopping at a retail store before/after school were significantly more likely to be a current tobacco product user. This may be due to increased exposure to exterior and point-of-sale marketing.

IntroductionThis article is about the transformation of coffee, from having no place in the everyday lives of the people of Bangladesh, to a new position as a harbinger of liberal values and Western culture. The context is a group of Australian photojournalism students who embarked on a month-long residency in Bangladesh; the content is a Nescafé advertisement encouraging the young, middle-class Bangladesh audience to consume coffee, in a marketing campaign that promotes “my first cup.” For the Australian students, the marketing positioning of this advertising campaign transformed instant coffee into a strange and unfamiliar commodity. At the same time, the historic association between Bangladesh and tea prompted one of the photographers to undertake her own journey to explore the hidden side of that other Western staple. This paper explores the tradition of tea culture in Bangladesh and the marketing campaign for instant coffee within this culture, combining the authors’ experiences and perspectives. The outline of the Photomedia unit in the Bachelor of Creative Industries degree that the students were working towards at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia states that:students will engage with practices, issues and practicalities of working as a photojournalist in an international, cross cultural context. Students will work in collaboration with students of Pathshala: South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka Bangladesh in the research, production and presentation of stories related to Bangladeshi society and culture for distribution to international audiences (ECU). The sixteen students from Perth, living and working in Bangladesh between 5 January and 7 February 2012, exhibited a diverse range of cultures, contexts, and motivations. Young Australians, along with a number of ECU’s international students, including some from Norway, China and Sweden, were required to learn first-hand about life in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Danielle Fusco and ECU lecturer Duncan Barnes collaborated with staff and students of Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute (Pathshala). Their recollections and observations on tea production and the location are central to this article but it is the questions asked by the group about the marketing of instant coffee into this culture that provides its tensions. Fusco completed a week-long induction and then travelled in Bangladesh for a fortnight to research and photograph individual stories on rural and urban life. Barnes here sets the scene for the project, describing the expectations and what actually happened: When we travel to countries that are vastly different to our own it is often to seek out that difference; to go in search of the romanticised ideals that have been portrayed as paradise in films, books and photographs. “The West” has long been fascinated with “The East” (Said) and for the past half century, since the hippie treks to Marrakesh and Afghanistan, people have journeyed overland to the Indian sub-continent, both from Europe and from Australia, yearning for a cultural experience they cannot find at home. Living in Perth, Western Australia, sometimes called the most isolated capital city in the world, that pull to something “different” is like a magnet. Upon arrival in Dhaka, you find yourself deliciously overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, the crowded markets, the spicy foods and the milky lassie drinks. It only takes a few stomach upsets to make your Western appetite start kicking in and you begin craving things you have at home but that are hard to find in Bangladesh. Take coffee for example. I recently completed a month-long visit to Bangladesh, which, like India, is a nation of tea drinkers. Getting any kind of good coffee requires that you be in what expatriates call “the Golden Triangle” of Dhaka city—within the area contained by Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara. Here you find the embassies and a sizeable expatriate community that constitutes a Western bubble unrepresentative of Bangladesh beyond these districts. Coffee World is an example of a Western-style café chain that, as the name suggests, serves coffee beverages. It has trouble making a quality flat white. The baristas are poorly trained, the service is painfully slow, yet the prices are comparable to those in the West. Even with these disadvantages, it is frequented by Westerners who also make use of the free WiFi. In contrast, tea is available at every road junction for around 5 cents Australian. It’s ready in seconds: the kettle is always hot due to a constant turnover of local customers. It was the history of tea growing in Bangladesh, and a desire to know more about a commodity that people in the West take for granted, that most attracted Fusco’s interest. She chose to focus on Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden (plantation) Sylhet, which has been in production since 1857 (Tea Board). As is the case with many tea farms in the Indian sub-continent, the workers at Sylhet are part of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Fusco left Dhaka and travelled into the rural areas to investigate tea production: Venturing into these estates from the city is like entering an entirely different world. They are isolated places, and although they are close in distance, they are completely separate from the main city. Spending time in the Khadim tea estate amongst the plantations and the workers’ compounds made me very aware of the strong relationship that exists between them. The Hindu teaching of Samsara refers to the continuous cycle of repeated birth, life, death and rebirth [Hinduism], which became a metaphor for me, for this relationship I was experiencing. It is clear that neither farm [where the tea is grown] nor village [which houses the people] could live without each other. The success and maintenance of the tea farm relies on the workers just as much as the workers rely on the tea gardens for their livelihood and sustenance. Their life cycles are intertwined and in synch. There are many problems in the compounds. The people are extremely poor. Their education opportunities are limited, and they work incredibly hard for very little money for their entire lives. They are bound to stay and work here and as those generations before them, were born, worked and died here, living their whole lives in the community of the tea farm. By documenting the lives of the people, I realised I was documenting the process of the lives of the tea trees at the same time. This is how I met Lolita.Figure 1. Bangladeshi tea worker, Lolita, stands in a small section of the Khadim tea plantation in the early morning. Sylhet, Bangladesh (Danielle Fusco, Jan. 2012). This woman emulated everything I was seeing and feeling about the village and the garden. She spoke about the reliance on the trees, especially because of the money and, therefore, the food, they provide for her and her husband. I became aware of the injustice of this system because the workers are paid so little while this industry is booming. It was obvious that life here is far from perfect, but as Lolita explains, they make do. She has worked on the tea estate for decades. As her husband is no longer working, she is the primary income earner. They are able, however, to live in relative comfort now their children have all married and left and it is just the two of them. Lolita describes that money lies within these trees. Money for her means that she can eat that day. Money for the managers means industrial success. Either way, whether it is in the eyes of the individual or the industry, tea always comes down to Taka [the currency of Bangladesh]. Marketing Coffee in a Culture of Tea and Betel Nut With such a strong culture of tea production and consumption and a coffee culture just existing on the fringe, a campaign by Nescafé to encourage Bangladeshi consumers to have “my first cup” of Nescafé instant coffee at the time of this study captured the imagination of the students. How effective can the marketing of Nescafé instant coffee be in a society that is historically a producer and consumer of tea, and which also still embraces the generations-old use of the betel nut as an everyday stimulant? Although it only employs some 150,000 (Islam et al.) in a nation of 150 million people, tea makes an important contribution to the Bangladesh economy. Shortly after the 1971 civil war, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) became independent from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), the then-Chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Board, writing in World Development, commented:In the highly competitive marketing environment of today it is extremely necessary for the tea industry of Bangladesh to increase production by raising the per acre yield, improve quality by adoption of finer plucking standards and modernization of factories and reduce per unit cost of production so as to be able to sell more of our teas to foreign markets and thereby earn higher amounts of much needed foreign exchange for the country as well as generate additional resources within the industry for ploughing back for further development (Ali 55). In Bangladesh, tea is a cash crop that, even in the 1970s following vicious conflicts, is more than capable of meeting local demand and producing an export dividend. Coffee is imported commodity that, historically, has had little place in Bangladeshi life or culture. However important tea is, it is not the traditional Bangladesh stimulant. Instead, over the years, when people in the West would have had a cup of tea or coffee and/or a cigarette, most Bangladeshis have turned to the betel nut. A 2005 study of 100 citizens from Araihazar, Bangladesh, conducted by researchers from Columbia University, found that coffee consumption is “very low in this population” (Hafeman et al. 567). The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of betel quids (the wad of masticated nut) and the chewing of betel nuts, upon tremor. For this reason, it was important to record the consumption of stimulants in the 98 participants who progressed to the next stage of the study and took a freehand spiral-drawing test. While “26 (27%) participants had chewed betel quids, 23 (23%) had smoked one or more cigarettes, [and] 14 (14%) drank tea; on that day, only 1 (1%) drank caffeinated soda, and none (0%) drank coffee” (Hafeman et al. 568). Given its addictive and carcinogenic properties (Sharma), the people who chewed betel quids were more likely to exhibit tremor in their spiral drawings than the people who did not. As this (albeit small) study suggests, the preferred Bangladeshi stimulant is more likely to be betel or tobacco rather than a beverage. Insofar as hot drinks are consumed, Bangladesh citizens drink tea. This poses a significant challenge for multinational advertisers who seek to promote the consumption of instant coffee as a means of growing the global market for Nescafé. Marketing Nescafé to Bangladesh In Dhaka, in January 2012, the television campaign slogan for Nescafé is “My first cup”, with the tagline, “Time you started.” This Nescafé television commercial (NTC) impressed itself upon the Australian visitors, both in terms of its frequency of broadcast and in its referencing of Western culture and values. (The advertisement can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8mFX43oAM). The NTC’s three stars, Vir Das, Purab Kohli, and leading Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, are highly-recognisable to young Bangladeshi audiences and the storyline is part of a developing series of advertisements which together form a mini-soap opera, like that used so successfully to advertise the Nescafé Gold Blend brand of instant coffee in the West in the 1980s to 1990s (O’Donohoe 242; Beale). The action takes place in Kohli’s affluent, Western-style apartment. The drama starts with Das challenging Kohli regarding whether he has successfully developed a relationship with his attractive neighbour, Padukone. Using a combination of local language with English words and sub-titles, the first sequence is captioned: “Any progress with Deepika, or are you still mixing coffee?” Suggesting incredulity, and that he could do better, Das asks Kohli, according to the next subtitle, “What are you doing dude?” The use of the word “dude” clearly refers to American youth culture, familiar in such movies as Dude, where’s my car? This is underlined by the immediate transition to the English words of “bikes … biceps … chest … explosion.” Of these four words only “chest” is pronounced in the local tongue, although all four words are included as captions in English. Kohli appears less and less impressed as Das becomes increasingly insistent, with Das going on to express frustration with Kohli through the exclamation “u don’t even have a plan.” The use of the text-speak English “u” here can be constructed as another way of persuading young Bangladeshi viewers that this advertisement is directed at them: the “u” in place of “you” is likely to annoy their English-speaking elders. Das continues speaking in his mother tongue, with the subtitle “Deepika padukone [sic] is your neighbour and you are only drinking coffee,” with the subsequent subtitle emphasising: “Deepika and only coffee.” At this point, Padukone enters the apartment through the open door without knocking and confidently says “Hi.” Kohli explains the situation by responding (in English, and subtitled) “my school friend, Das”. Padukone, in turn, responds in a friendly way to both men (in English, and subtitled) “You guys want to have coffee?” Instead of responding directly to this invitation, Das models to Kohli what it is to take the initiative in this situation: what it is to have a plan. “Hello” (he says, in English and subtitled) “I don’t have coffee but I have a plan. You and me, my bike, right now, hit the town, party!” Kohli looks down at the floor, embarrassed, while Padukone looks quizzically at him over Das’s shoulder. Kohli smiles, and points to himself and Padukone, clearly excluding Das: “I will have coffee” (in English, and subtitle). “Better plan”, exclaims Padukone, “You and me, my place, right now, coffee.” She looks challengingly at Das: “Right?,” a statement rather than a request, and exits, with Kohli following and Das left behind in the apartment. Cue voice-over (not a subtitle, but in-screen speech bubble) “[It’s] time you started” (spoken) “the new Nescafé” (shot change) “My first cup” (with an in-screen price promotion). This commercial associates coffee drinking with Western values of social and personal autonomy. For young women in the traditional Muslim culture of Bangladesh, it suggests a world in which they are at liberty to spend time with the suitors they choose, ignoring those whom they find pushy or inappropriate, and free to invite a man back to “my place, right now” for coffee. The scene setting in this advertisement and the use of English in both the spoken and written text suggests its target is the educated middle class, and indicates that sophisticated, affluent, trend-setters drink coffee as a part of getting to know their neighbours. In line with this, the still which ends the commercial promotes the Facebook page “Know your neighbours.” The flirtatious nature of the actors in the advertisement, the emphasis on each of the male characters spending time alone with the female character, and the female character having both power and choice in this situation is likely to be highly unacceptable to traditional Bangladeshi parental values and, therefore, proportionately more exciting to the target audience. The underlying suggestion of “my first cup” and “time you started” is that the social consumption of that first cup of coffee is the “first step” to becoming more Western. The statement also has overtones of sexual initiation. The advertisement aligns itself with the world portrayed in the Western media consumed in Bangladesh, and the implication is that—even if Western liberal values are not currently a possible choice for all—it is at least feasible to start on the journey towards these values through drinking that first cup of coffee. Unbeknownst to the Bangladesh audience, this Nescafé marketing strategy echoes, in almost all material particulars, the same approach that was so successful in persuading Australians to embrace instant coffee. Khamis, in her essay on Australia and the convenience of instant coffee, argues that, while in 1928 Australia had the highest per capita consumption of tea in the world, this had begun to change by the 1950s. The transformation in the market positioning of coffee was partly achieved through an association between tea and old-fashioned ‘Britishness’ and coffee and the United States: this discovery [of coffee] spoke to changes in Australia’s lifestyle options: the tea habit was tied to Australia’s development as a far-flung colonial outpost, a daily reminder that many still looked to London as the nation’s cultural capital: the growing appeal of instant coffee reflected a widening and more nuanced cultural palate. This was not just ‘another’ example of the United States postwar juggernaut; it marks the transitional phase in Australia’s history, as its cultural identity was informed less by the staid conservativism of Britain than the heady flux of New World glamour (219). Coffee was associated with the USA not simply through advertising but also through cultural exposure. By 1943, notes Khamis, there were 120,000 American service personnel stationed in Australia and she quotes Symons (168) as saying that “when an American got on a friendly footing with an Australian family he was usually found in the kitchen, teaching the Mrs how to make coffee, or washing the dishes” (168, cited in Khamis 220). The chances were that “the Mrs”—the Australian housewife—felt she needed the tuition: an Australian survey conducted by Gallup in March 1950 indicated that 55 per cent of respondents at that time had never tried coffee, while a further 24 per cent said they “seldom” consumed it (Walker and Roberts 133, cited in Khamis 222). In a newspaper article titled, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”, Munro describes the impact of exposure to the first American troops based in Australia during this time, with a then seven year old recalling: “They were foreign, quite a different culture from us. They spoke more loudly than us. They had strange accents, cute expressions, they were really very exotic.” The American troops caused consternation for Australian fathers and boyfriends. Dulcie Wood was 18 when she was dating an American serviceman: They had more money to spend (than Australian troops). They seemed to have plenty of supplies, they were always bringing you presents—stockings and cartons of cigarettes […] Their uniforms were better. They took you to more places. They were quite good dancers, some of them. They always brought you flowers. They were more polite to women. They charmed the mums because they were very polite. Some dads were a bit more sceptical of them. They weren’t sure if all that charm was genuine (quoted in Munro). Darian-Smith argues that, at that time, Australian understanding of Americans was based on Hollywood films, which led to an impression of American technological superiority and cultural sophistication (215-16, 232). “Against the American-style combination of smart advertising, consumerism, self-expression and popular democracy, the British class system and its buttoned-up royals appeared dull and dour” writes Khamis (226, citing Grant 15)—almost as dull and dour as 1950s tea compared with the postwar sophistication of Nescafé instant coffee. Conclusion The approach Nestlé is using in Bangladesh to market instant coffee is tried and tested: coffee is associated with the new, radical cultural influence while tea and other traditional stimulants are relegated to the choice of an older, more staid generation. Younger consumers are targeted with a romantic story about the love of coffee, reflected in a mini-soap opera about two people becoming a couple over a cup of Nescafé. Hopefully, the Pathshala-Edith Cowan University collaboration is at least as strong. Some of the overseas visitors return to Bangladesh on a regular basis—the student presentations in 2012 were, for instance, attended by two visiting graduates from the 2008 program who were working in Bangladesh. For the Australian participants, the association with Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and Drik Photo Agency brings recognition, credibility and opportunity. It also offers a totally new perspective on what to order in the coffee queue once they are home again in Australia. Postscript The final week of the residency in Bangladesh was taken up with presentations and a public exhibition of the students’ work at Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, 3–7 February 2012. Danielle Fusco’s photographs can be accessed at: http://public-files.apps.ecu.edu.au/SCA_Marketing/coffee/coffee.html References Ali, M. “Commodity Round-up: Problems and Prospects of Bangladesh Tea”, World Development 1.1–2 (1973): 55. Beale, Claire. “Should the Gold Blend Couple Get Back Together?” The Independent 29 Apr 2010. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/should-the-gold-blend-couple-get-back-together-1957196.html›. Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2009. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. Edith Cowan University (ECU). “Photomedia Summer School Bangladesh 2012.” 1 May 2012 .Grant, Bruce. The Australian Dilemma: A New Kind of Western Society. Sydney: Macdonald Futura, 1983. Hafeman, D., H. Ashan, T. Islam, and E. Louis. “Betel-quid: Its Tremor-producing Effects in Residents of Araihazar, Bangladesh.” Movement Disorders 21.4 (2006): 567-71. 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Abstract Background Alcohol use leads to about 3 million deaths globally. The alcohol industry employs marketing strategies to establish their brands in the lives of young people at a time when addictive behaviors are initiated and reinforced. We conducted a survey among adolescent boys and young men (ABYM) to estimate the prevalence of alcohol use and associated factors using the Health Belief Model as the guiding framework. Methods The study was conducted among ABYM in- or out-of-school aged 10–24 years in Kampala, Uganda. We used questions adopted from the Global School-based Student Health Survey and the WHO STEPwise approach to Surveillance questionnaire to collect data. The outcome of interest was alcohol use within 30 days before the interview. We also asked about characteristics such as alcohol use by siblings, parents/ guardians, school status among others. We used odds ratios obtained via a logistic regression model as the measure of association. Results A total of 2500 ABYM participated, of which 262 (10.5 %, 95 %CI 9.3–11.7) had consumed alcohol within 30 days before the interview. Out-of-school ABYM had higher odds of consuming alcohol compared with their in-school counterparts AOR 1.55 (95 %CI 1.09–2.20). Compared with ABYM whose parents/ guardians did not drink alcohol, ABYM whose both parents consumed alcohol had higher odds of consuming alcohol AOR 2.24 (95 %CI 1.38–3.64) as were those with only a mother or female guardian who consumed alcohol AOR 1.95 (95 %CI 1.11–3.41). ABYM with siblings that drink alcohol had higher odds of consuming alcohol AOR 2.25 (95 %CI 1.80–3.52). ABYM who possessed items with an alcohol brand logo had higher odds of consuming alcohol AOR 2.00 (95 %CI 1.33–3.01). Conclusions There are significant levels of alcohol consumption among ABYM which calls for evidence-based measures targeting this age group to reduce consumption and recognizing the role of the family, school and community in prevention and promotion of use. There is need to regulate alcohol marketing and ensuring availability of alcohol dependence treatment services that build confidence among youth.

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menguji dan menganalisa pengaruh konflik peran dan ambiguitas terhadap kinerja melalui kepuasan kerja pada tenaga fungsional RSUD Sekadau. Metode penelitian yang digunakan merupakan jenis penelitian non-eksperimental dengan pendekatan kuantitatif, deskriptif korelasi dan desain cross-sectional. Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah seluruh tenaga fungsional RSUD Sekadau yang berjumlah 181 orang dengan sampel yang diambil adalah 123 orang tenaga fungsional RSUD Sekadau. Alat analisis yang digunakan adalah analisis jalur (path analysis) dengan metode SEM (structural equation modelling) menggunakan WarpPLS versi 6.0. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan terdapat pengaruh positif signifikan konflik peran terhadap kinerja, terdapat pengaruh negatif signifikan ambiguitas terhadap kinerja, terdapat pengaruh negatif signifikan antara konflik peran dan ambiguitas terhadap kepuasan kerja, terdapat pengaruh negatif signifikan kepuasan kerja terhadap kinerja, terdapat pengaruh positif signifikan antara konflik peran dan ambiguitas terhadap kinerja melalui kepuasan kerja. Nilai profesionalisme menjadi penting untuk variabel konflik peran, tanggung jawab menjadi faktor penting untuk variabel ambiguitas, hubungan yang baik dengan profesi lain di Rumah Sakit menjadi penting untuk variabel kepuasan kerja dan karyawan memahami harapan pekerjaan dan tetap melaksanakannya sesuai dengan tanggung jawab merupakan nilai penting untuk variabel kinerja. Kata kunci : Konflik Peran, Ambiguitas, Kepuasan Kerja, KinerjaDAFTAR PUSTAKAAhmed, S., Manaf, N.H.A., & Islam, R. (2017). 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On May 18, 2003, the Australian Minister for Education, Brendon Nelson, appeared on the Channel Nine Sunday programme. The Yoda of political journalism, Laurie Oakes, attacked him personally and professionally. He disclosed to viewers that the Minister for Education, Science and Training had suffered a false start in his education, enrolling in one semester of an economics degree that was never completed. The following year, he commenced a medical qualification and went on to become a practicing doctor. He did not pay fees for any of his University courses. When reminded of these events, Dr Nelson became agitated, and revealed information not included in the public presentation of the budget of that year, including a ‘cap’ on HECS-funded places of five years for each student. He justified such a decision with the cliché that Australia’s taxpayers do not want “professional students completing degree after degree.” The Minister confirmed that the primary – and perhaps the only – task for university academics was to ‘train’ young people for the workforce. The fact that nearly 50% of students in some Australian Universities are over the age of twenty five has not entered his vision. He wanted young people to complete a rapid degree and enter the workforce, to commence paying taxes and the debt or loan required to fund a full fee-paying place. Now – nearly two years after this interview and with the Howard government blessed with a new mandate – it is time to ask how this administration will order education and value teaching and learning. The curbing of the time available to complete undergraduate courses during their last term in office makes plain the Australian Liberal Government’s stance on formal, publicly-funded lifelong learning. The notion that a student/worker can attain all required competencies, skills, attributes, motivations and ambitions from a single degree is an assumption of the new funding model. It is also significant to note that while attention is placed on the changing sources of income for universities, there have also been major shifts in the pattern of expenditure within universities, focusing on branding, marketing, recruitment, ‘regional’ campuses and off-shore courses. Similarly, the short-term funding goals of university research agendas encourage projects required by industry, rather than socially inflected concerns. There is little inevitable about teaching, research and education in Australia, except that the Federal Government will not create a fully-funded model for lifelong learning. The task for those of us involved in – and committed to – education in this environment is to probe the form and rationale for a (post) publicly funded University. This short paper for the ‘order’ issue of M/C explores learning and teaching within our current political and economic order. Particularly, I place attention on the synergies to such an order via phrases like the knowledge economy and the creative industries. To move beyond the empty promises of just-in-time learning, on-the-job training, graduate attributes and generic skills, we must reorder our assumptions and ask difficult questions of those who frame the context in which education takes place. For the term of your natural life Learning is a big business. Whether discussing the University of the Third Age, personal development courses, self help bestsellers or hard-edged vocational qualifications, definitions of learning – let alone education – are expanding. Concurrent with this growth, governments are reducing centralized funding and promoting alternative revenue streams. The diversity of student interests – or to use the language of the time, client’s learning goals – is transforming higher education into more than the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The expansion of the student body beyond the 18-25 age group and the desire to ‘service industry’ has reordered the form and purpose of formal education. The number of potential students has expanded extraordinarily. As Lee Bash realized Today, some estimates suggest that as many as 47 percent of all students enrolled in higher education are over 25 years old. In the future, as lifelong learning becomes more integrated into the fabric of our culture, the proportion of adult students is expected to increase. And while we may not yet realize it, the academy is already being transformed as a result. (35) Lifelong learning is the major phrase and trope that initiates and justifies these changes. Such expansive economic opportunities trigger the entrepreneurial directives within universities. If lifelong learning is taken seriously, then the goals, entry standards, curriculum, information management policies and assessments need to be challenged and changed. Attention must be placed on words and phrases like ‘access’ and ‘alternative entry.’ Even more consideration must be placed on ‘outcomes’ and ‘accountability.’ Lifelong learning is a catchphrase for a change in purpose and agenda. Courses are developed from a wide range of education providers so that citizens can function in, or at least survive, the agitation of the post-work world. Both neo-liberal and third way models of capitalism require the labeling and development of an aspirational class, a group who desires to move ‘above’ their current context. Such an ambiguous economic and social goal always involves more than the vocational education and training sector or universities, with the aim being to seamlessly slot education into a ‘lifestyle.’ The difficulties with this discourse are two-fold. Firstly, how effectively can these aspirational notions be applied and translated into a real family and a real workplace? Secondly, does this scheme increase the information divide between rich and poor? There are many characteristics of an effective lifelong learner including great personal motivation, self esteem, confidence and intellectual curiosity. In a double shifting, change-fatigued population, the enthusiasm for perpetual learning may be difficult to summon. With the casualization of the post-Fordist workplace, it is no surprise that policy makers and employers are placing the economic and personal responsibility for retraining on individual workers. Instead of funding a training scheme in the workplace, there has been a devolving of skill acquisition and personal development. Through the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945, education was the track to social mobility. The difficulty now – with degree inflation and the loss of stable, secure, long-term employment – is that new modes of exclusion and disempowerment are being perpetuated through the education system. Field recognized that “the new adult education has been embraced most enthusiastically by those who are already relatively well qualified.” (105) This is a significant realization. Motivation, meta-learning skills and curiosity are increasingly being rewarded when found in the already credentialed, empowered workforce. Those already in work undertake lifelong learning. Adult education operates well for members of the middle class who are doing well and wish to do better. If success is individualized, then failure is also cast on the self, not the social system or policy. The disempowered are blamed for their own conditions and ‘failures.’ The concern, through the internationalization of the workforce, technological change and privatization of national assets, is that failure in formal education results in social exclusion and immobility. Besides being forced into classrooms, there are few options for those who do not wish to learn, in a learning society. Those who ‘choose’ not be a part of the national project of individual improvement, increased market share, company competitiveness and international standards are not relevant to the economy. But there is a personal benefit – that may have long term political consequences – from being ‘outside’ society. Perhaps the best theorist of the excluded is not sourced from a University, but from the realm of fictional writing. Irvine Welsh, author of the landmark Trainspotting, has stated that What we really need is freedom from choice … People who are in work have no time for anything else but work. They have no mental space to accommodate anything else but work. Whereas people who are outside the system will always find ways of amusing themselves. Even if they are materially disadvantaged they’ll still find ways of coping, getting by and making their own entertainment. (145-6) A blurring of work and learning, and work and leisure, may seem to create a borderless education, a learning framework uninhibited by curriculum, assessment or power structures. But lifelong learning aims to place as many (national) citizens as possible in ‘the system,’ striving for success or at least a pay increase which will facilitate the purchase of more consumer goods. Through any discussion of work-place training and vocationalism, it is important to remember those who choose not to choose life, who choose something else, who will not follow orders. Everybody wants to work The great imponderable for complex economic systems is how to manage fluctuations in labour and the market. The unstable relationship between need and supply necessitates flexibility in staffing solutions, and short-term supplementary labour options. When productivity and profit are the primary variables through which to judge successful management, then the alignments of education and employment are viewed and skewed through specific ideological imperatives. The library profession is an obvious occupation that has confronted these contradictions. It is ironic that the occupation that orders knowledge is experiencing a volatile and disordered workplace. In the past, it had been assumed that librarians hold a degree while technicians do not, and that technicians would not be asked to perform – unsupervised – the same duties as librarians. Obviously, such distinctions are increasingly redundant. Training packages, structured through competency-based training principles, have ensured technicians and librarians share knowledge systems which are taught through incremental stages. Mary Carroll recognized the primary questions raised through this change. If it is now the case that these distinctions have disappeared do we need to continue to draw them between professional and para-professional education? Does this mean that all sectors of the education community are in fact learning/teaching the same skills but at different levels so that no unique set of skills exist? (122) With education reduced to skills, thereby discrediting generalist degrees, the needs of industry have corroded the professional standards and stature of librarians. Certainly, the abilities of library technicians are finally being valued, but it is too convenient that one of the few professions dominated by women has suffered a demeaning of knowledge into competency. Lifelong learning, in this context, has collapsed high level abilities in information management into bite sized chunks of ‘skills.’ The ideology of lifelong learning – which is rarely discussed – is that it serves to devalue prior abilities and knowledges into an ever-expanding imperative for ‘new’ skills and software competencies. For example, ponder the consequences of Hitendra Pillay and Robert Elliott’s words: The expectations inherent in new roles, confounded by uncertainty of the environment and the explosion of information technology, now challenge us to reconceptualise human cognition and develop education and training in a way that resonates with current knowledge and skills. (95) Neophilliacal urges jut from their prose. The stress on ‘new roles,’ and ‘uncertain environments,’ the ‘explosion of information technology,’ ‘challenges,’ ‘reconceptualisations,’ and ‘current knowledge’ all affirms the present, the contemporary, and the now. Knowledge and expertise that have taken years to develop, nurture and apply are not validated through this educational brief. The demands of family, work, leisure, lifestyle, class and sexuality stretch the skin taut over economic and social contradictions. To ease these paradoxes, lifelong learning should stress pedagogy rather than applications, and context rather than content. Put another way, instead of stressing the link between (gee wizz) technological change and (inevitable) workplace restructuring and redundancies, emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between professional development and verifiable technological outcomes, rather than spruiks and promises. Short term vocationalism in educational policy speaks to the ordering of our public culture, requiring immediate profits and a tight dialogue between education and work. Furthering this logic, if education ‘creates’ employment, then it also ‘creates’ unemployment. Ironically, in an environment that focuses on the multiple identities and roles of citizens, students are reduced to one label – ‘future workers.’ Obviously education has always been marinated in the political directives of the day. The industrial revolution introduced a range of technical complexities to the workforce. Fordism necessitated that a worker complete a task with precision and speed, requiring a high tolerance of stress and boredom. Now, more skills are ‘assumed’ by employers at the time that workplaces are off-loading their training expectations to the post-compulsory education sector. Therefore ‘lifelong learning’ is a political mask to empower the already empowered and create a low-level skill base for low paid workers, with the promise of competency-based training. Such ideologies never need to be stated overtly. A celebration of ‘the new’ masks this task. Not surprisingly therefore, lifelong learning has a rich new life in ordering creative industries strategies and frameworks. Codifying the creative The last twenty years have witnessed an expanding jurisdiction and justification of the market. As part of Tony Blair’s third way, the creative industries and the knowledge economy became catchwords to demonstrate that cultural concerns are not only economically viable but a necessity in the digital, post-Fordist, information age. Concerns with intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, and ownership of creative productions predominate in such a discourse. Described by Charles Leadbeater as Living on Thin Air, this new economy is “driven by new actors of production and sources of competitive advantage – innovation, design, branding, know-how – which are at work on all industries.” (10) Such market imperatives offer both challenges and opportunity for educationalists and students. Lifelong learning is a necessary accoutrement to the creative industries project. Learning cities and communities are the foundations for design, music, architecture and journalism. In British policy, and increasingly in Queensland, attention is placed on industry-based research funding to address this changing environment. In 2000, Stuart Cunningham and others listed the eight trends that order education, teaching and learning in this new environment. The Changes to the Provision of Education Globalization The arrival of new information and communication technologies The development of a knowledge economy, shortening the time between the development of new ideas and their application. The formation of learning organizations User-pays education The distribution of knowledge through interactive communication technologies (ICT) Increasing demand for education and training Scarcity of an experienced and trained workforce Source: S. Cunningham, Y. Ryan, L. Stedman, S. Tapsall, K. Bagdon, T. Flew and P. Coaldrake. The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra: DETYA Evaluation and Investigations Program [EIP], 2000. This table reverberates with the current challenges confronting education. Mobilizing such changes requires the lubrication of lifelong learning tropes in university mission statements and the promotion of a learning culture, while also acknowledging the limited financial conditions in which the educational sector is placed. For university scholars facilitating the creative industries approach, education is “supplying high value-added inputs to other enterprises,” (Hartley and Cunningham 5) rather than having value or purpose beyond the immediately and applicably economic. The assumption behind this table is that the areas of expansion in the workforce are the creative and service industries. In fact, the creative industries are the new service sector. This new economy makes specific demands of education. Education in the ‘old economy’ and the ‘new economy’ Old Economy New Economy Four-year degree Forty-year degree Training as a cost Training as a source of competitive advantage Learner mobility Content mobility Distance education Distributed learning Correspondence materials with video Multimedia centre Fordist training – one size fits all Tailored programmes Geographically fixed institutions Brand named universities and celebrity professors Just-in-case Just-in-time Isolated learners Virtual learning communities Source: T. Flew. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 20. There are myriad assumptions lurking in Flew’s fascinating table. The imperative is short courses on the web, servicing the needs of industry. He described the product of this system as a “learner-earner.” (50) This ‘forty year degree’ is based on lifelong learning ideologies. However Flew’s ideas are undermined by the current government higher education agenda, through the capping – through time – of courses. The effect on the ‘learner-earner’ in having to earn more to privately fund a continuance of learning – to ensure that they keep on earning – needs to be addressed. There will be consequences to the housing market, family structures and leisure time. The costs of education will impact on other sectors of the economy and private lives. Also, there is little attention to the groups who are outside this taken-for-granted commitment to learning. Flew noted that barriers to greater participation in education and training at all levels, which is a fundamental requirement of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy, arise in part out of the lack of provision of quality technology-mediated learning, and also from inequalities of access to ICTs, or the ‘digital divide.’ (51) In such a statement, there is a misreading of teaching and learning. Such confusion is fuelled by the untheorised gap between ‘student’ and ‘consumer.’ The notion that technology (which in this context too often means computer-mediated platforms) is a barrier to education does not explain why conventional distance education courses, utilizing paper, ink and postage, were also unable to welcome or encourage groups disengaged from formal learning. Flew and others do not confront the issue of motivation, or the reason why citizens choose to add or remove the label of ‘student’ from their bag of identity labels. The stress on technology as both a panacea and problem for lifelong learning may justify theories of convergence and the integration of financial, retail, community, health and education provision into a services sector, but does not explain why students desire to learn, beyond economic necessity and employer expectations. Based on these assumptions of expanding creative industries and lifelong learning, the shape of education is warping. An ageing population requires educational expenditure to be reallocated from primary and secondary schooling and towards post-compulsory learning and training. This cost will also be privatized. When coupled with immigration flows, technological changes and alterations to market and labour structures, lifelong learning presents a profound and personal cost. An instrument for economic and social progress has been individualized, customized and privatized. The consequence of the ageing population in many nations including Australia is that there will be fewer young people in schools or employment. Such a shift will have consequences for the workplace and the taxation system. Similarly, those young workers who remain will be far more entrepreneurial and less loyal to their employers. Public education is now publically-assisted education. Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin realized the impact of this change. The 1980s ideological shift in economic and social policy thinking towards policies and programmes inspired by neo-liberalism provoked serious social strains, especially income polarization and persistent poverty. An increasing reliance on market forces and the family for generating life-chances, a discourse of ‘responsibility,’ an enthusiasm for off-loading to the voluntary sector and other altered visions of the welfare architecture inspired by neo-liberalism have prompted a reaction. There has been a wide-ranging conversation in the 1990s and the first years of the new century in policy communities in Europe as in Canada, among policy makers who fear the high political, social and economic costs of failing to tend to social cohesion. (78) There are dense social reorderings initiated by neo-liberalism and changing the notions of learning, teaching and education. There are yet to be tracked costs to citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is that all organizations must behave like businesses. In such an environment, there are problems establishing social cohesion, let alone social justice. To stress the product – and not the process – of education contradicts the point of lifelong learning. Compliance and complicity replace critique. (Post) learning The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. Most countries believe both in markets and in a necessary role for Government. There will be thunderous debates inside nations about the balance, but the struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone. What preoccupies decision-makers now is a different danger. It is extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. Tony Blair (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) Tony Blair, summoning his best Francis Fukuyama impersonation, signaled the triumph of liberal democracy over other political and economic systems. His third way is unrecognizable from the Labour party ideals of Clement Attlee. Probably his policies need to be. Yet in his second term, he is not focused on probing the specificities of the market-orientation of education, health and social welfare. Instead, decision makers are preoccupied with a war on terror. Such a conflict seemingly justifies large defense budgets which must be at the expense of social programmes. There is no recognition by Prime Ministers Blair or Howard that ‘high-tech’ armory and warfare is generally impotent to the terrorist’s weaponry of cars, bodies and bombs. This obvious lesson is present for them to see. After the rapid and successful ‘shock and awe’ tactics of Iraq War II, terrorism was neither annihilated nor slowed by the Coalition’s victory. Instead, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel snuck have through defenses, requiring little more than a car and explosives. More Americans have been killed since the war ended than during the conflict. Wars are useful when establishing a political order. They sort out good and evil, the just and the unjust. Education policy will never provide the ‘big win’ or the visible success of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. The victories of retraining, literacy, competency and knowledge can never succeed on this scale. As Blair offered, “these are new times. New threats need new measures.” (ht tp://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) These new measures include – by default – a user pays education system. In such an environment, lifelong learning cannot succeed. It requires a dense financial commitment in the long term. A learning society requires a new sort of war, using ideas not bullets. References Bash, Lee. “What Serving Adult Learners Can Teach Us: The Entrepreneurial Response.” Change January/February 2003: 32-7. Blair, Tony. “Full Text of the Prime Minister’s Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.” November 12, 2002. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp. Carroll, Mary. “The Well-Worn Path.” The Australian Library Journal May 2002: 117-22. Field, J. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flew, Terry. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 47-60. Hartley, John, and Cunningham, Stuart. “Creative Industries – from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes.” Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia (2002). Jenson, Jane, and Saint-Martin, Denis. “New Routes to Social Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.1 (2003): 77-99. Leadbeater, Charles. Living on Thin Air. London: Viking, 1999. Pillay, Hitendra, and Elliott, Robert. “Distributed Learning: Understanding the Emerging Workplace Knowledge.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 13.1-2 (2002): 93-107. Welsh, Irvine, from Redhead, Steve. “Post-Punk Junk.” Repetitive Beat Generation. Glasgow: Rebel Inc, 2000: 138-50. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara. "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T. (Jan. 2005) "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>.

The scan is both the quick glance and the measured study, it is a survey of the exterior and an interrogation of hidden interiors. Practices of scanning are a response to the increased number of things to consider and the reduced amount of time to consider them. Scanning demarcates that which is seen as relevant, interesting and important into ever increasing ‘to do’ lists, at the same time dismissing that which is not. These questions of importance or relevance are often decided through cursory glances and greater consideration is regularly left for ‘later’. Scanning engages questions about surveillance, about the way in which we surveil our self and our surrounds, and about the way we submit our self and our surrounds to surveillance by others. In many ways scanning has an impact on the way in which authority is practiced, in creative practice, scholarship and daily life. Our feature article in this issue is by Lelia Green who discusses the way in which scanning radio frequencies, and particularly the shared environment created by the Royal Flying Doctor’s Service radio service, drew together a community of remote West Australians. “Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia” reflects upon the way scanning shared communication signals provided virtual connections at times lost by the introduction of technologies that provided more direct communication modes, such as the telephone. Lelia’s article demonstrates the scan as a reading practice often enabled by, or employed to negotiate, communication technologies. This is one theme that runs throughout this edition of M/C Journal. Simultaneously, “Scanning the Satellite” highlights the everyday nature of scanning, locating it within a history of communication developments that emphasise the ordinary status of scanning as a reading practice for engaging with the world around. This is the second theme that connects the articles in this edition. The scan is in itself nothing new; both the quick glance and the measured study are common practices. The articles gathered in this edition of M/C Journal consider scanning as a principal mode of engaging with the world. A quick glance at the morning weather, a hurried reading of a passing crowd, the habitual assessment of ourselves and our surroundings, an observation to ensure that everything is in its place. These are the practices of the scan that inform our everyday choices. They may be quick, habitual and disengaged, or, equally, measured, considered interrogations. The scan often evokes questions of surveillance, as Alexis Harley explores in “Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds.” Examining the power relationship imposed by surveillance, Harley compares three observed states: the Bible’s Eden, Thomas More’s Utopia and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Angelika Melchior also explores scanning as a mode of surveillance in “Tag and Trace Marketing”. Considering the Radio Frequency Identification tag (RFID), Melchior explores both the privacy concerns raised, and new business opportunities offered, by a technology that allows items to be continually scanned post-sale. In each of these texts surveillance is an intrusive practice that produces self-consciousness in the participants of both utopian and dystopian societies. Yet the self-consciousness that is so forcefully evoked through the practices of surveillance is provocatively abstracted by the commonplace practices of the scan. Here, the power relationships that are so familiar to discourses of surveillance are played out not by the ‘all-seeing powerful eye’ but by the practices that constitute the scan. They are the methods we apply when we scan our selves, our natural environments, our social environments, and, increasingly, our communications environments. The scan is a learnt short hand for accessing that which we consider important or interesting, alongside that which is in need of greater consideration. Our attention is particularly directed towards the ways in which we scan our communications environments. The broad range of communications content, platforms and technologies has produced an enormous communications environment to scan. There are channels to surf, sites to visit, stations to tune in to, pages to scroll, inboxes to clear, list-servs to read, blogs to catch up on; and all before lunch! Scanning our communications environments allows us to designate and relegate information that we consider to be not-for-us, for later consumption, of great newsworthiness or interest, or for immediate consumption. The cover image for this edition of M/C Journal, Julia Hennock’s “Future Perfect”, presents a speculative technological device so amenable to the scan: it shows a lens capable of producing perfect vision in all conditions. Her image is a reminder that scanning is very much a technological practice, and as changes to our media and communication environments encourage new scans, new tools will emerge to assist us in our response. Considering the scan as a technological practice is an element explored also in Yonatan Vinitsky’s film PANDEMONIUM. Vinitsky uses a flat bed scanner to capture 40 images of a man’s face, editing these together into a work that challenges the purposes of a domestic scanner. Jolting and at times erratic, Vinitsky encourages viewers to scan the film itself, glimpsing the still images as they pass. Robin Rimbaud’s “Scan and Deliver” also considers the constructive properties of the scan. Finding that the scan inevitably uncovers much superfluous information, Rimbaud constructed soundscapes from the excess data, discerning useful patterns from what is otherwise ostensibly random noise. Each of these creative texts considers the scan as a productive practice. This theme is also present in Charlene Elliot’s “Colour™: Law and the Sensory Scan”. Elliot positions the scan as the fundamental experience of the brand, where the emotive identity of a product or business is ideally conjured through a glimpse of colour. Colour trademarks attempt to compress a broad range of information, emotion and association into a form that can be scanned. These trademarks rely on the act of the scan to cut through cluttered advertising environs; colours draw attention, take no time to absorb and cut across cultural boundaries, they’re ideal for the scan. Michelle Kelly’s “Eminent Library Figures: A Reader” similarly considers the way the scan can deal with excesses of information. Discussing the function of the Cutter-Sanborn library classification system, Kelly considers the implications for authorship of the reduction of information into a scannable code – the author numbers written on the spine of a book. These numbers offer the potential of two types of scanning activity. Reducing author detail to a short string of characters, Cutter-Sanborn numbers allow the books in a collection to be quickly surveyed, individual copies to be located and their position amidst a collection specified. Representing a broader dataset, however, these numbers invite what Kelly refers to as an “analytical scan”, deeper investigation and further extrapolation of their meaning. Recognising the scan as a legitimate form of reading practice is a theme present in many of the articles in this edition of M/C Journal. Elizabeth Delaney’s “Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment” examines the newspaper coverage of the Schapelle Corby case by looking at the front pages of Australian tabloid papers. As with Elliot’s piece, the scan is revealed here as an everyday activity, an ordinary practice used to trace a path through a saturated information environment. As a reading practice, the scan allows this material to be accessed quickly, it allows people to fit the consumption of information into their daily lives. Studying the way newspapers capitalise on the scan reveals the implications of editorial decisions that facilitate this reading practice. These methods go beyond the use of ‘screaming headlines’ to sell their message, using the ‘naturalised’ habits of the scanning reader to purposefully present their position. Henk Huijser turns to consider the implications for tertiary education of the ordinariness and prevalence of this reading practice. “Are Scanning Minds Dangerous Minds, or Merely Suspicious Minds? Harnessing the Net Generation’s Ability to Scan” considers the shifts in tertiary education delivery and assessment modes needed to respond to a student body more familiar with the scan than the deep read. After all, if scanning is a practice that can be learnt, it is a useful pedagogical tool and process that should be taught. In many regards scanning seems a poor response to what is often rich and valuable information. But it does allow for the filtering of information. Stephanie Dickison’s “So Many Books, So Little Time” playfully addresses the baneful outcome experienced by the reader adept at the scan: the every growing, personalised “to do list.” Dickison shows how scanning provides readers with some simple choices – to accept or reject, to classify as urgent or non-urgent – in the creation of a list for planned future consumption. Here, the scan is the quick glance for the later considered study. And with so much scannable information available why should we not, we argue, scan a lot rather than read a little? As we are constantly scanning, we are, after all, constantly reading and ultimately negotiating with, interacting with, learning from, and understanding about a whole range of environments. Positioning the scan as a legitimate and worthwhile reading practice shows that literacy (in terms of reading, writing and pedagogical practices) is perhaps equally a matter of breadth as it is of depth. Acknowledgments We thank Laura Marshall and Louise Firth for their work in copyediting the articles for this issue. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Joshua, and Adam Swift. "Scan." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Green, J., and A. Swift. (Aug. 2005) "Scan," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/00-editorial.php>.

Since the first days of the World Wide Web, artists like myself have been exploring the new possibilities of network interactivity. Some good tools and languages have been developed and made available free for the public to use. This has empowered individuals to participate in the media in ways that are quite remarkable. Nonetheless, the future of independent media is clouded by legal, regulatory, and organisational challenges that need to be addressed. It is not clear to what extent independent content producers will be able to build upon the successes of the 90s – it is yet to be seen whether their efforts will be largely nullified by the anticyclones of a hostile media market. Not so long ago, American news magazines were covering the Browser War. Several real wars later, the terms of surrender are becoming clearer. Now both of the major Internet browsers are owned by huge media corporations, and most of the states (and Reagan-appointed judges) that were demanding the break-up of Microsoft have given up. A curious about-face occurred in U.S. Justice Department policy when John Ashcroft decided to drop the federal case. Maybe Microsoft's value as a partner in covert activity appealed to Ashcroft more than free competition. Regardless, Microsoft is now turning its wrath on new competitors, people who are doing something very, very bad: sharing the products of their own labour. This practice of sharing source code and building free software infrastructure is epitomised by the continuing development of Linux. Everything in the Linux kernel is free, publicly accessible information. As a rule, the people building this "open source" operating system software believe that maintaining transparency is important. But U.S. courts are not doing much to help. In a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against Eric Corley, a federal district court blocked the distribution of source code that enables these systems to play DVDs. In addition to censoring Corley's journal, the court ruled that any programmer who writes a program that plays a DVD must comply with a host of license restrictions. In short, an established and popular media format (the DVD) cannot be used under open source operating systems without sacrificing the principle that software source code should remain in the public domain. Should the contents of operating systems be tightly guarded secrets, or subject to public review? If there are capable programmers willing to create good, free operating systems, should the law stand in their way? The question concerning what type of software infrastructure will dominate personal computers in the future is being answered as much by disappointing legal decisions as it is by consumer choice. Rather than ensuring the necessary conditions for innovation and cooperation, the courts permit a monopoly to continue. Rather than endorsing transparency, secrecy prevails. Rather than aiming to preserve a balance between the commercial economy and the gift-economy, sharing is being undermined by the law. Part of the mystery of the Internet for a lot of newcomers must be that it seems to disprove the old adage that you can't get something for nothing. Free games, free music, free pornography, free art. Media corporations are doing their best to change this situation. The FBI and trade groups have blitzed the American news media with alarmist reports about how children don't understand that sharing digital information is a crime. Teacher Gail Chmura, the star of one such media campaign, says of her students, "It's always been interesting that they don't see a connection between the two. They just don't get it" (Hopper). Perhaps the confusion arises because the kids do understand that digital duplication lets two people have the same thing. Theft is at best a metaphor for the copying of data, because the original is not stolen in the same sense as a material object. In the effort to liken all copying to theft, legal provisions for the fair use of intellectual property are neglected. Teachers could just as easily emphasise the importance of sharing and the development of an electronic commons that is free for all to use. The values advanced by the trade groups are not beyond question and are not historical constants. According to Donald Krueckeberg, Rutgers University Professor of Urban Planning, native Americans tied the concept of property not to ownership but to use. "One used it, one moved on, and use was shared with others" (qtd. in Batt). Perhaps it is necessary for individuals to have dominion over some private data. But who owns the land, wind, sun, and sky of the Internet – the infrastructure? Given that publicly-funded research and free software have been as important to the development of the Internet as have business and commercial software, it is not surprising that some ambiguity remains about the property status of the dataverse. For many the Internet is as much a medium for expression and the interplay of languages as it is a framework for monetary transaction. In the case involving DVD software mentioned previously, there emerged a grass-roots campaign in opposition to censorship. Dozens of philosophical programmers and computer scientists asserted the expressive and linguistic bases of software by creating variations on the algorithm needed to play DVDs. The forbidden lines of symbols were printed on T-shirts, translated into different computer languages, translated into legal rhetoric, and even embedded into DNA and pictures of MPAA president Jack Valenti (see e.g. Touretzky). These efforts were inspired by a shared conviction that important liberties were at stake. Supporting the MPAA's position would do more than protect movies from piracy. The use of the algorithm was not clearly linked to an intent to pirate movies. Many felt that outlawing the DVD algorithm, which had been experimentally developed by a Norwegian teenager, represented a suppression of gumption and ingenuity. The court's decision rejected established principles of fair use, denied the established legality of reverse engineering software to achieve compatibility, and asserted that journalists and scientists had no right to publish a bit of code if it might be misused. In a similar case in April 2000, a U.S. court of appeals found that First Amendment protections did apply to software (Junger). Noting that source code has both an expressive feature and a functional feature, this court held that First Amendment protection is not reserved only for purely expressive communication. Yet in the DVD case, the court opposed this view and enforced the inflexible demands of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Notwithstanding Ted Nelson's characterisation of computers as literary machines, the decision meant that the linguistic and expressive aspects of software would be subordinated to other concerns. A simple series of symbols were thereby cast under a veil of legal secrecy. Although they were easy to discover, and capable of being committed to memory or translated to other languages, fair use and other intuitive freedoms were deemed expendable. These sorts of legal obstacles are serious challenges to the continued viability of free software like Linux. The central value proposition of Linux-based operating systems – free, open source code – is threatening to commercial competitors. Some corporations are intent on stifling further development of free alternatives. Patents offer another vulnerability. The writing of free software has become a minefield of potential patent lawsuits. Corporations have repeatedly chosen to pursue patent litigation years after the alleged infringements have been incorporated into widely used free software. For example, although it was designed to avoid patent problems by an array of international experts, the image file format known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has recently been dogged by patent infringement charges. Despite good intentions, low-budget initiatives and ad hoc organisations are ill equipped to fight profiteering patent lawsuits. One wonders whether software innovation is directed more by lawyers or computer scientists. The present copyright and patent regimes may serve the needs of the larger corporations, but it is doubtful that they are the best means of fostering software innovation and quality. Orwell wrote in his Homage to Catalonia, There was a new rule that censored portions of the newspaper must not be left blank but filled up with other matter; as a result it was often impossible to tell when something had been cut out. The development of the Internet has a similar character: new diversions spring up to replace what might have been so that the lost potential is hardly felt. The process of retrofitting Internet software to suit ideological and commercial agendas is already well underway. For example, Microsoft has announced recently that it will discontinue support for the Java language in 2004. The problem with Java, from Microsoft's perspective, is that it provides portable programming tools that work under all operating systems, not just Windows. With Java, programmers can develop software for the large number of Windows users, while simultaneously offering software to users of other operating systems. Java is an important piece of the software infrastructure for Internet content developers. Yet, in the interest of coercing people to use only their operating systems, Microsoft is willing to undermine thousands of existing Java-language projects. Their marketing hype calls this progress. The software industry relies on sales to survive, so if it means laying waste to good products and millions of hours of work in order to sell something new, well, that's business. The consequent infrastructure instability keeps software developers, and other creative people, on a treadmill. From Progressive Load by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/progload As an Internet content producer, one does not appeal directly to the hearts and minds of the public; one appeals through the medium of software and hardware. Since most people are understandably reluctant to modify the software running on their computers, the software installed initially is a critical determinant of what is possible. Unconventional, independent, and artistic uses of the Internet are diminished when the media infrastructure is effectively established by decree. Unaccountable corporate control over infrastructure software tilts the playing field against smaller content producers who have neither the advance warning of industrial machinations, nor the employees and resources necessary to keep up with a regime of strategic, cyclical obsolescence. It seems that independent content producers must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity. It is no secret that highly diversified media corporations can leverage their assets to favour their own media offerings and confound their competitors. Yet when media giants AOL and Time-Warner announced their plans to merge in 2000, the claim of CEOs Steve Case and Gerald Levin that the merged companies would "operate in the public interest" was hardly challenged by American journalists. Time-Warner has since fought to end all ownership limits in the cable industry; and Case, who formerly championed third-party access to cable broadband markets, changed his tune abruptly after the merger. Now that Case has been ousted, it is unclear whether he still favours oligopoly. According to Levin, global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant business of the 21st century ... more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits. We're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service, and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than bureaucratic governments. Corporate dominance is going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is instantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way (Levin). It doesn't require a lot of insight to understand that this "redefinition," this slight of hand, does not protect the public from abuses of power: the dissolution of the "old-fashioned regulatory system" does not serve the public interest. From Lexicon by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/lexicon) As an artist who has adopted telecommunications networks and software as his medium, it disappoints me that a mercenary vision of electronic media's future seems to be the prevailing blueprint. The giantism of media corporations, and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content – whether produced by artists or journalists – crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger reminds us that the media tyrannies that affect us are social products. The media industry relies on thousands of people to make the compromises necessary to maintain its course. The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise to a key position in modern society, has profoundly changed the role of the intellectual. He finds himself confronted with new threats and new opportunities. Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, he has become the accomplice of a huge industrial complex which depends for its survival on him, as he depends on it for his own. He must try, at any cost, to use it for his own purposes, which are incompatible with the purposes of the mind machine. What it upholds he must subvert. He may play it crooked or straight, he may win or lose the game; but he would do well to remember that there is more at stake than his own fortune (Enzensberger 18). Some cultural leaders have recognised the important role that free software already plays in the infrastructure of the Internet. Among intellectuals there is undoubtedly a genuine concern about the emerging contours of corporate, global media. But more effective solidarity is needed. Interest in open source has tended to remain superficial, leading to trendy, cosmetic, and symbolic uses of terms like "open source" rather than to a deeper commitment to an open, public information infrastructure. Too much attention is focussed on what's "cool" and not enough on the road ahead. Various media specialists – designers, programmers, artists, and technical directors – make important decisions that affect the continuing development of electronic media. Many developers have failed to recognise (or care) that their decisions regarding media formats can have long reaching consequences. Web sites that use media formats which are unworkable for open source operating systems should be actively discouraged. Comparable technologies are usually available to solve compatibility problems. Going with the market flow is not really giving people what they want: it often opposes the work of thousands of activists who are trying to develop open source alternatives (see e.g. Greene). Average Internet users can contribute to a more innovative, free, open, and independent media – and being conscientious is not always difficult or unpleasant. One project worthy of support is the Internet browser Mozilla. Currently, many content developers create their Websites so that they will look good only in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. While somewhat understandable given the market dominance of Internet Explorer, this disregard for interoperability undercuts attempts to popularise standards-compliant alternatives. Mozilla, written by a loose-knit group of activists and programmers (some of whom are paid by AOL/Time-Warner), can be used as an alternative to Microsoft's browser. If more people use Mozilla, it will be harder for content providers to ignore the way their Web pages appear in standards-compliant browsers. The Mozilla browser, which is an open source initiative, can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/. While there are many people working to create real and lasting alternatives to the monopolistic and technocratic dynamics that are emerging, it takes a great deal of cooperation to resist the media titans, the FCC, and the courts. Oddly enough, corporate interests sometimes overlap with those of the public. Some industrial players, such as IBM, now support open source software. For them it is mostly a business decision. Frustrated by the coercive control of Microsoft, they support efforts to develop another operating system platform. For others, including this writer, the open source movement is interesting for the potential it holds to foster a more heterogeneous and less authoritarian communications infrastructure. Many people can find common cause in this resistance to globalised uniformity and consolidated media ownership. The biggest challenge may be to get people to believe that their choices really matter, that by endorsing certain products and operating systems and not others, they can actually make a difference. But it's unlikely that this idea will flourish if artists and intellectuals don't view their own actions as consequential. There is a troubling tendency for people to see themselves as powerless in the face of the market. This paralysing habit of mind must be abandoned before the media will be free. Works Cited Ahrens, Frank. "Policy Watch." Washington Post (23 June 2002): H03. 30 March 2003 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?la... ...nguage=printer>. Batt, William. "How Our Towns Got That Way." 7 Oct. 1996. 31 March 2003 <http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm>. Chester, Jeff. "Gerald Levin's Negative Legacy." Alternet.org 6 Dec. 2001. 5 March 2003 <http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.php>. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "The Industrialisation of the Mind." Raids and Reconstructions. London: Pluto Press, 1975. 18. Greene, Thomas C. "MS to Eradicate GPL, Hence Linux." 25 June 2002. 5 March 2003 <http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.php>. Hopper, D. Ian. "FBI Pushes for Cyber Ethics Education." Associated Press 10 Oct. 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.php>. Junger v. Daley. U.S. Court of Appeals for 6th Circuit. 00a0117p.06. 2000. 31 March 2003 <http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0... ...117p.06>. Levin, Gerald. "Millennium 2000 Special." CNN 2 Jan. 2000. Touretzky, D. S. "Gallery of CSS Descramblers." 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery>. Links http://artcontext.org/lexicon/ http://artcontext.org/progload http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0117p.06 http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.html http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm http://www.mozilla.org/ http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?language=printer Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Deck, Andy. "Treadmill Culture " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>. APA Style Deck, A. (2003, Apr 23). Treadmill Culture . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>

Al Gore brought climate change into … our living rooms. … The 2008 oil price hikes [and the global financial crisis] awakened the world to potential economic hardship in a rapidly urbanising world where the petrol-driven automobile is still king. (Mouritz 47) Six hundred million cars (Urry, “Climate Change” 265) traverse the world’s roads, or sit idly in garages and clogging city streets. The West’s economic progress has been built in part around the success of the automotive industry, where the private car rules the spaces and rhythms of daily life. The problem of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy) is often cited as one of the biggest challenges facing countries attempting to combat anthropogenic climate change. Sociologist John Urry has claimed that automobility is an “entire culture” that has re-defined movement in the contemporary world (Urry Mobilities 133). As such, it is the single most significant environmental challenge “because of the intensity of resource use, the production of pollutants and the dominant culture which sustains the major discourses of what constitutes the good life” (Urry Sociology 57-8). Climate change has forced a re-thinking of not only how we produce and dispose of cars, but also how we use them. What might a society not dominated by the private, petrol-driven car look like? Some of the pre-eminent writers on climate change futures, such as Gwynne Dyer, James Lovelock and John Urry, discuss one possibility that might emerge when oil becomes scarce: societies will descend into civil chaos, “a Hobbesian war of all against all” where “regional warlordism” and the most brutish, barbaric aspects of human nature come to the fore (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Discussing a post-car society, John Urry also proffers another scenario in his “sociologies of the future:” an Orwellian “digital panopticon” in which other modes of transport, far more suited to a networked society, might emerge on a large scale and, in the long run, “might tip the system” into post-car one before it is too late (Urry, “Climate Change” 261). Amongst the many options he discusses is car sharing. Since its introduction in Germany more than 30 years ago, most of the critical literature has been devoted to the planning, environmental and business innovation aspects of car sharing; however very little has been written on its cultural dimensions. This paper analyses this small but developing trend in many Western countries, but more specifically its emergence in Sydney. The convergence of climate change discourse with that of the global financial crisis has resulted in a focus in the mainstream media, over the last few months, on technologies and practices that might save us money and also help the environment. For instance, a Channel 10 News story in May 2009 focused on the boom in car sharing in Sydney (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EPTT8vYVXro). Car sharing is an adaptive technology that doesn’t do away with the car altogether, but rather transforms the ways in which cars are used, thought about and promoted. I argue that car sharing provides a challenge to the dominant consumerist model of the privately owned car that has sustained capitalist structures for at least the last 50 years. In addition, through looking at some marketing and promotion tactics of car sharing in Australia, I examine some emerging car sharing subjectivities that both extend and subvert the long-established discourses of the automobile’s flexibility and autonomy to tempt monogamous car buyers into becoming philandering car sharers. Much literature has emerged over the last decade devoted to the ubiquitous phenomenon of automobility. “The car is the literal ‘iron cage’ of modernity, motorised, moving and domestic,” claims Urry (“Connections” 28). Over the course of twentieth century, automobility became “the dominant form of daily movement over much of the planet (dominating even those who do not move by cars)” (Paterson 132). Underpinning Urry’s prolific production of literature is his concept of automobility. This he defines as a complex system of “intersecting assemblages” that is not only about driving cars but the nexus between “production, consumption, machinic complexes, mobility, culture and environmental resource use” (Urry, “Connections” 28). In addition, Matthew Paterson, in his Automobile Politics, asserts that “automobility” should be viewed as everything that makes driving around in a car possible: highways, parking structures and traffic rules (87). While the private car seems an inevitable outcome of a capitalistic, individualistic modern society, much work has gone into the process of naturalising a dominant notion of automobility on drivers’ horizons. Through art, literature, popular music and brand advertising, the car has long been associated with seductive forms of identity, and societies have been built around a hegemonic culture of car ownership and driving as the pre-eminent, modern mode of self-expression. And more than 50 years of a popular Hollywood film genre—road movies—has been devoted to glorifying the car as total freedom, or in its more nihilistic version, “freedom on the road to nowhere” (Corrigan). As Paterson claims, “autonomous mobility of car driving is socially produced … by a range of interventions that have made it possible” (18). One of the main reasons automobility has been so successful, he claims, is through its ability to reproduce capitalist society. It provided a commodity around which a whole set of symbols, images and discourses could be constructed which served to effectively legitimise capitalist society. (30) Once the process is locked-in, it then becomes difficult to reverse as billions of agents have adapted to it and built their lives around “automobility’s strange mixture of co-ercion and flexibility” (Urry, “Climate Change” 266). The Decline of the Car Globally, the greatest recent rupture in the automobile’s meta-narrative of success came about in October 2008 when three CEOs from the major US car firms (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) begged the United States Senate for emergency loan funds to avoid going bankrupt. To put the economic significance of this into context, Emma Rothschild notes “when the listing of the ‘Fortune 500’ began in 1955, General Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007” (Rothschilds, “Can we transform”). Curiously, instead of focusing on the death of the car (industry), as we know it, that this scenario might inevitably herald, much of the media attention focused on the hypocrisy and environmental hubris of the fact that all the CEOs had flown in private luxury jets to Washington. “Couldn’t they have at least jet-pooled?” complained one Democrat Senator (Wutkowski). In their next visit to Washington, most of them drove up in experimental vehicles still in pre-production, including plug-in hybrids. Up until that point no other manufacturing industry had been bailed out in the current financial crisis. Of course it’s not the first time the automobile industries have been given government assistance. The Australian automotive industry has received on-going government subsidies since the 1980s. Most recently, PM Kevin Rudd granted a 6.2 billion dollar ‘green car’ package to Australian automotive manufacturers. His justification to the growing chorus of doubts about the economic legitimacy of such a move was: “Some might say it's not worth trying to have a car industry, that is not my view, it is not the view of the Australian government and it never will be the view of any government which I lead” (The Australian). Amongst the many reasons for the government support of these industries must include the extraordinary interweaving of discourses of nationhood and progress with the success of the car industry. As the last few months reveal, evidently the mantra still prevails of “what’s good for the country is good for GM and vice versa”, as the former CEO of General Motors, Charles “Engine” Wilson, argued back in 1952 (Hirsch). In post-industrial societies like Australia it’s not only the economic aspects of the automotive industries that are criticised. Cars seem to be slowly losing their grip on identity-formation that they managed to maintain throughout “the century of the car” (Gilroy). They are no longer unproblematically associated with progress, freedom, youthfulness and absolute autonomy. The decline and eventual death of the automobile as we know it will be long, arduous and drawn-out. But there are some signs of a post-automobile society emerging, perhaps where cars will still be used but they will not dominate our society, urban space and culture in quite the same way that they have over the last 50 years. Urry discusses six transformations that might ‘tip’ the hegemonic system of automobility into a post-car one. He mentions new fuel systems, new materials for car construction, the de-privatisation of cars, development of communications technologies and integration of networked public transport through smart card technology and systems (Urry, Mobilities 281-284). As Paterson and others have argued, computers and mobile phones have somehow become “more genuine symbols of mobility and in turn progress” than the car (157). As a result, much automobile advertising now intertwines communications technologies with brand to valorise mobility. Car sharing goes some way in not only de-privatising cars but also using smart card technology and networked systems enabling an association with mobility futures. In Automobile Politics Paterson asks, “Is the car fundamentally unsustainable? Can it be greened? Has the car been so naturalised on our mobile horizons that we can’t imagine a society without it?” (27). From a sustainability perspective, one of the biggest problems with cars is still the amount of space devoted to them; highways, garages, car parks. About one-quarter of the land in London and nearly one-half of that in Los Angeles is devoted to car-only environments (Urry, “Connections” 29). In Sydney, it is more like a quarter. We have to reduce the numbers of cars on our roads to make our societies livable (Newman and Kenworthy). Car sharing provokes a re-thinking of urban space. If one quarter of Sydney’s population car shared and we converted this space into green use or local market gardens, then we’d have a radically transformed city. Car sharing, not to be confused with ‘ride sharing’ or ‘car pooling,’ involves a number of people using cars that are parked centrally in dedicated car bays around the inner city. After becoming a member (much like a 6 or 12 monthly gym membership), the cars can be booked (and extended) by the hour via the web or phone. They can then be accessed via a smart card. In Sydney there are 3 car sharing organisations operating: Flexicar (http://www.flexicar.com.au/), CharterDrive (http://www.charterdrive.com.au/) and GoGet (http://www.goget.com.au/).[1] The largest of these, GoGet, has been operating for 6 years and has over 5000 members and 200 cars located predominantly in the inner city suburbs. Anecdotally, GoGet claims its membership is primarily drawn from professionals living in the inner-urban ring. Their motivation for joining is, firstly, the convenience that car sharing provides in a congested, public transport-challenged city like Sydney; secondly, the financial savings derived; and thirdly, members consider the environmental and social benefits axiomatic. [2] The promotion tactics of car sharing seems to reflect this by barely mentioning the environment but focusing on those aspects which link car sharing to futuristic and flexible subjectivities which I outline in the next section. Unlike traditional car rental, the vehicles in car sharing are scattered through local streets in a network allowing local residents and businesses access to the vehicles mostly on foot. One car share vehicle is used by 22-24 members and gets about seven cars off the street (Mehlman 22). With lots of different makes and models of vehicles in each of their fleets, Flexicar’s website claims, “around the corner, around the clock” “Flexicar offers you the freedom of driving your own car without the costs and hassles of owning one,” while GoGet asserts, “like owning a car only better.” Due to the initial lack of interest from government, all the car sharing organisations in Australia are privately owned. This is very different to the situation in Europe where governments grant considerable financial assistance and have often integrated car sharing into pre-existing public transport networks. Urry discusses the spread of car sharing across the Western world: Six hundred plus cities across Europe have developed car-sharing schemes involving 50,000 people (Cervero, 2001). Prototype examples are found such as Liselec in La Rochelle, and in northern California, Berlin and Japan (Motavalli, 2000: 233). In Deptford there is an on-site car pooling service organized by Avis attached to a new housing development, while in Jersey electric hire cars have been introduced by Toyota. (Urry, “Connections” 34) ‘Collaborative Consumption’ and Flexible, Philandering Subjectivities Car sharing shifts the dominant conception of a car from being a ‘commodity’, which people purchase and subsequently identify with, to a ‘service’ or network of vehicles that are collectively used. It does this through breaking down the one car = one person (or one family) ratio with one car instead servicing 20 or more people. One of Paterson’s biggest criticisms concerns car driving as “a form of social exclusion” (44). Car sharing goes some way in subverting the model of hyper-individualism that supports both hegemonic automobility and capitalist structures, whereby the private motorcar produces a “separation of individuals from one another driving in their own private universes with no account for anyone else” (Paterson 90). As a car sharer, the driver has to acknowledge that this is not their private domain, and the car no longer becomes an extension of their living room or bedroom, as is noted in much literature around car cultures (Morris, Sheller, Simpson). There are a community of people using the car, so the driver needs to be attentive to things like keeping the car clean and bringing it back on time so another person can use it. So while car sharing may change the affective relationship and self-identification with the vehicle itself, it doesn’t necessarily change the phenomenological dimensions of car driving, such as the nostalgic pleasure of driving on the open road, or perhaps more realistically in Sydney, the frustration of being caught in a traffic jam. However, the fact the driver doesn’t own the vehicle does alter their relationship to the space and the commodity in a literal as well as a figurative way. Like car ownership, evidently car sharing also produces its own set of limitations on freedom and convenience. That mobility and car ownership equals freedom—the ‘freedom to drive’—is one imaginary which car firms were able to successfully manipulate and perpetuate throughout the twentieth century. However, car sharing also attaches itself to the same discourses of freedom and pervasive individualism and then thwarts them. For instance, GoGet in Sydney have run numerous marketing campaigns that attempt to contest several ‘self-evident truths’ about automobility. One is flexibility. Flexibility (and associated convenience) was one thing that ownership of a car in the late twentieth century was firmly able to affiliate itself with. However, car ownership is now more often associated with being expensive, a hassle and a long-term commitment, through things like buying, licensing, service and maintenance, cleaning, fuelling, parking permits, etc. Cars have also long been linked with sexuality. When in the 1970s financial challenges to the car were coming as a result of the oil shocks, Chair of General Motors, James Roche stated that, “America’s romance with the car is not over. Instead it has blossomed into a marriage” (Rothschilds, Paradise Lost). In one marketing campaign GoGet asked, ‘Why buy a car when all you need is a one night stand?’, implying that owning a car is much like a monogamous relationship that engenders particular commitments and responsibilities, whereas car sharing can just be a ‘flirtation’ or a ‘one night stand’ and you don’t have to come back if you find it a hassle. Car sharing produces a philandering subjectivity that gives individuals the freedom to have lots of different types of cars, and therefore relationships with each of them: I can be a Mini Cooper driver one day and a Falcon driver the next. This disrupts the whole kind of identification with one type of car that ownership encourages. It also breaks down a stalwart of capitalism—brand loyalty to a particular make of car with models changing throughout a person’s lifetime. Car sharing engenders far more fluid types of subjectivities as opposed to those rigid identities associated with ownership of one car. Car sharing can also be regarded as part of an emerging phenomenon of what Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have called “collaborative consumption”—when a community gets together “through organized sharing, swapping, bartering, trading, gifting and renting to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden, and lower environmental impact” (www.collaborativeconsumption.com). As Urry has stated, these developments indicate a gradual transformation in current economic structures from ownership to access, as shown more generally by many services offered and accessed via the web (Urry Mobilities 283). Rogers and Botsman maintain that this has come about through the “convergence of online social networks increasing cost consciousness and environmental necessity." In the future we could predict an increasing shift to payment to ‘access’ for mobility services, rather than the outright private ownerships of vehicles (Urry, “Connections”). Networked-Subjectivities or a ‘Digital Panopticon’? Cars, no longer able on their own to signify progress in either technical or social terms, attain their symbolic value through their connection to other, now more prevalently ‘progressive’ technologies. (Paterson 155) The term ‘digital panopticon’ has often been used to describe a dystopian world of virtual surveillance through such things as web-enabled social networking sites where much information is public, or alternatively, for example, the traffic surveillance system in London whereby the public can be constantly scrutinised through the centrally monitored cameras that track people’s/vehicle’s movements on city streets. In his “sociologies of the future,” Urry maintains that one thing which might save us from descending into post-car civil chaos is a system governed by a “digital panopticon” mobility system. This would be governed by a nexus system “that orders, regulates, tracks and relatively soon would ‘drive’ each vehicle and monitor each driver/passenger” (Urry, “Connections” 33). The transformation of mobile technologies over the last decade has made car sharing, as a viable business model, possible. Through car sharing’s exploitation of an online booking system, and cars that can be tracked, monitored and traced, the seeds of a mobile “networked-subjectivity” are emerging. But it’s not just the technology people are embracing; a cultural shift is occurring in the way that people understand mobility, their own subjectivity, and more importantly, the role of cars. NETT Magazine did a feature on car sharing, and advertised it on their front cover as “GoGet’s web and mobile challenge to car owners” (May 2009). Car sharing seems to be able to tap into more contemporary understandings of what mobility and flexibility might mean in the twenty-first century. In their marketing and promotion tactics, car sharing organisations often discursively exploit science fiction terminology and generate a subjectivity much more dependent on networks and accessibility (158). In the suburbs people park their cars in garages. In car sharing, the vehicles are parked not in car bays or car parks, but in publically accessible ‘pods’, which promotes a futuristic, sci-fi experience. Even the phenomenological dimensions of swiping a smart card over the front of the windscreen to open the car engender a transformation in access to the car, instead of through a key. This is service-technology of the future while those stuck in car ownership are from the old economy and the “century of the car” (Gilroy). The connections between car sharing and the mobile phone and other communications technologies are part of the notion of a networked, accessible vehicle. However, the more problematic side to this is the car under surveillance. Nic Lowe, of his car sharing organisation GoGet says, “Because you’re tagged on and we know it’s you, you are able to drive the car… every event you do is logged, so we know what time you turned the key, what time you turned it off and we know how far you drove … if a car is lost we can sound the horn to disable it remotely to prevent theft. We can track how fast you were going and even how fast you accelerated … track the kilometres for billing purposes and even find out when people are using the car when they shouldn’t be” (Mehlman 27). The possibility with the GPS technology installed in the car is being able to monitor speeds at which people drive, thereby fining then every minute spent going over the speed limit. While this conjures up the notion of the car under surveillance, it is also a much less bleaker scenario than “a Hobbesian war of all against all”. Conclusion: “Hundreds of Cars, No Garage” The prospect of climate change is provoking innovation at a whole range of levels, as well as providing a re-thinking of how we use taken-for-granted technologies. Sometime this century the one tonne, privately owned, petrol-driven car will become an artefact, much like Sydney trams did last century. At this point in time, car sharing can be regarded as an emerging transitional technology to a post-car society that provides a challenge to hegemonic automobile culture. It is evidently not a radical departure from the car’s vast machinic complex and still remains a part of what Urry calls the “system of automobility”. From a pro-car perspective, its networked surveillance places constraints on the free agency of the car, while for those of the deep green variety it is, no doubt, a compromise. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point for re-thinking the foundations of the privately-owned car. While Urry makes an important point in relation to a society moving from ownership to access, he doesn’t take into account the cultural shifts occurring that are enabling car sharing to be attractive to prospective members: the notion of networked subjectivities, the discursive constructs used to establish car sharing as a thing of the future with pods and smart cards instead of garages and keys. If car sharing became mainstream it could have radical environmental impacts on things like urban space and pollution, as well as the dominant culture of “automobile dependence” (Newman and Kenworthy), as Australia attempts to move to a low carbon economy. Notes [1] My partner Bruce Jeffreys, together with Nic Lowe, founded Newtown Car Share in 2002, which is now called GoGet. [2] Several layers down in the ‘About Us’ link on GoGet’s website is the following information about the environmental benefits of car sharing: “GoGet's aim is to provide a reliable, convenient and affordable transport service that: allows people to live car-free, decreases car usage, improves local air quality, removes private cars from local streets, increases patronage for public transport, allows people to lead more active lives” (http://www.goget.com.au/about-us.html). References The Australian. “Kevin Rudd Throws $6.2bn Lifeline to Car Industry.” 10 Nov. 2008. < http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/ 0,28124,24628026-5018011,00.html >.Corrigan, Tim. “Genre, Gender, and Hysteria: The Road Movie in Outer Space.” A Cinema Without Walls: Movies, Culture after Vietnam. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Dwyer, Gwynne. Climate Wars. North Carlton: Scribe, 2008. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4-5 (2004): 1-24. Gilroy, Paul. “Driving while Black.” Car Cultures. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Hirsch, Michael. “Barack the Saviour.” Newsweek 13 Nov. 2008. < http://www.newsweek.com/id/168867 >. Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. Penguin, 2007. Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Penguin, 2009. Mehlman, Josh. “Community Driven Success.” NETT Magazine (May 2009): 22-28. Morris, Meaghan. “Fate and the Family Sedan.” East West Film Journal 4.1 (1989): 113-134. Mouritz, Mike. “City Views.” Fast Thinking Winter 2009: 47-50. Newman, P. and J. Kenworthy. Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Washington DC: Island Press, 1999. Paterson, Matthew. Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rothschilds, Emma. Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age. New York: Radom House, 1973. Rothschilds, Emma. “Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?” New York Review of Books 56.3 (2009). < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22333 >. Sheller, Mimi. “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (2004): 221–42. Simpson, Catherine. “Volatile Vehicles: When Women Take the Wheel.” Womenvision. Ed. Lisa French. Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003. 197-210. Urry, John. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2000. Urry, John. “Connections.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 27-37. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge, and Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. Urry, John. “Climate Change, Travel and Complex Futures.” British Journal of Sociology 59. 2 (2008): 261-279. Watts, Laura, and John Urry. “Moving Methods, Travelling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (2008): 860-874. 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At least as far back as classical Greek times, humankind has speculated over the complexities of creativity as a concept and the modes of its transmission (Madden 133-134). This paper considers what happens when our inherited conceptions of creativity collide with the World Wide Web. It concludes with a brief survey of the Creativity Resource Portal, a current on-line project managed by the authors and related to the conceptual issues raised in the body of the text. Today, creativity has moved beyond its traditional home in the rhetoric of the philosopher and the exploits of the artist to form an integral part of both the theory and practice of a myriad of disciplines. Health professionals (Dossey; Kirklin & Meakin; Meites, Bein & Shafer; Rees; Satalof), scientists (Bohn 1-3, 13-15; Culross), educators (Guilford; Sawyer; Sternberg & Williams; Wilks) and those involved in the corporate world (Forbes & Domm; Mauzy & Harriman; Robinson & Stern) all consider creativity to be a fundamental criterion by which they measure and achieve their successes. In this way, however, creativity has become something of an over-burdened signifier. Now the market is flooded with highly idealised and ever expanding models for understanding and transmitting creativity, in which the medium (transmission) strives to outdo the message (creativity itself). We are not attempting here to arbitrate between these various models with a view to providing a rank order of creativity. Instead, we want to focus on and explore the ways in which recent technological developments, primarily the internet, have been, and might be, used to transmit and facilitate new directions and expressions of creativity and the creative process itself. Although the internet has no single inventor or birth date, its origins lie in the communication system devised by the RAND corporation in the 1960s: a system designed to survive a nuclear war because it had no central point of control. To this extent, one could say that its initial egalitarianism tips towards the expression of creativity. From here, the internet evolved through various mutations, such as APRANET and Bulletin Boards, to become the World Wide Web that emerged in the 1990s. Since then, the internet has encroached further and further into our everyday lives: we buy and sell goods at sites like Amazon or E-bay, we communicate to the world via email accounts at Hotmail or Yahoo, we court potential partners at Lavalife or Okcupid, and we engage in scholarly debates on sites such as M/C – Media and Culture. The point here is that the sheer ubiquity of the internet has brought about a quiet revolution in our everyday modes of creativity. Web navigation, for example, is heavily dependent on the creativity of the user to move through virtual space, even or perhaps especially when he/she must counter the ‘point and click’ inducements of advertising and marketing strategies. Little wonder then that the emergence of creativity as a fundamental tenet for success across a wide array of disciplines, coupled with the pervasiveness of cyberspace, has led to an explosion of both the production and transmission of creativity on-line. One such development is the transmission and dissemination of already created products via the web: that is, products hijacked from the ‘real’. In its most controversial and publicized form, the creative output of musicians has become tender for trade between individuals who subscribe to programs such as Napster and Limewire. Beyond this, the internet extends ever outwards in a panoply of both solicited and pirated images and video clips of people’s creative output. Here the internet seems to move beyond the liberating potential that Benjamin saw in technology’s ability to reproduce the image (Benjamin) towards the simulacra (or hyper-real copies of the ‘real’) proposed by Baudrillard (Baudrillard). On-line creativity has not, however, been limited to the reproduction of artistic output that exists in the ‘real’. As with any practice fundamental to the expression of the human condition, creativity has found new and exciting ways to express itself on-line. For example, digital art has emerged as a serious artistic pursuit since the late 20th century. Here, a number of artists have fused their creative ability and their technological skills to generate new ways in which their creativity can be transmitted. A cyber-poet may meld both the classical poetic forms of stanza and rhyme with the language of HTML or Java to create a cyber-poem (see the work of Komninos Zervos). Visual artists such as Han Hoogerbrugge have also been able to successfully adapt their works to the digital world: Hooderbrugge converted a comic strip he wrote in the mid-1990s to a series of digital animations. As well as this, new on-line formats such as blogs have been used by a number of artists to express their creativity in new and interesting ways (see the work of Olia Lialina). Other artists have dived even further into the simulacra, preferring the aesthetic value of the code itself over the presence of images or words that might signify something in the ‘real’ (see this work by Jason Nelson). Unlike traditional art forms, these emerging digital art forms are intensively interactive and thereby encourage the creativity of their audience. By allowing the artistic product itself to be manipulated, digital artists facilitate new ways of ‘reading’ art. It is tempting then to offer the internet up as something of a creative utopia – an Aladdin’s Cave – a place where creativity, in all its manifestations, can be transmitted to the masses. However, in the final chapter of her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim discusses the notion of a ‘cyber-utopia’ and asks “Who is this cyber-utopia really going to be for?” (Wertheim 295). She goes on to point out that not only do the majority of the world’s inhabitants not have access to the internet, but that out of those who do, many are discriminated against in the virtual world because of their gender, their sexuality, their skin colour or their ethnicity. (Of course, this does not necessarily make online space any less democratic than traditional technologies such as print forms). More recently, Lawrence Lessig has taken Wertheim’s questioning of cyber-utopia to its logical dystopian antithesis in his book Free Culture. Here, Lessig agues that the internet has had a direct impact on the way that culture is made. Specifically, the control that major media conglomerates and governments have over the internet has meant that “the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before” (Lessig 8). Have we therefore clicked open a Pandora’s Box through our incessant attempts to get wired? All technologies are open to abuse. Cyberspace is neither Aladdin’s Cave nor Pandora’s Box but simply a work in progress. And it is on this basis that we are currently creating an online Creativity Resource Portal. This portal does not attempt to resolve immediately the many debates over the nature and transmission of creativity, nor does it set out to completely resolve the quandaries raised by creativity’s cyber manifestations. Instead, it aims, at least initially, to disseminate a broad range of knowledge about creativity – thus encouraging inter-fertilization across disciplines and practices – and also to act as a catalyst for currently unrecognized ways of creating and expressing creativity in the online world. That being said, we hope that future refined manifestations of the site will possess the characteristics of a ‘laboratory’, in which the serious issues of creative freedom and control outlined in this paper – issues of transmission in the broadest sense – might be more directly engaged with. It is through this direct virtual engagement that we hope to reach conclusions capable of extending outwards to the wider, global online environment. This might happen via experiments with new types of non-hierarchical site structures, or with the level of control given to visitors over what happens in the site. But can any structures resist the exercise of power? Can egalitarianism (cyber or otherwise) ever fully eschew borders and margins? These are the questions that challenge and excite us as managers of the CRP. References Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1992. Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988. Bohn, David. On Creativity. London: Routledge, 1998. Culross, Rita R. “Individual and Contextual Variables among Creative Scientists: The New Work Paradigm.” Roeper Review 26.3 (2004): 126-27. Dossey, Larry. “Creativity: On Intelligence, Insight, and the Cosmic Soup.” Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine [NLM – MEDLINE] 6.1 (2000): 12-17, 108-117. Forbes, Benjamin J., and Donald R. Domm. “Creativity and Productivity: Resolving the Conflict.” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 69.2 (2004): 4-11. Guilford, J. P. Intelligence, Creativity, and Their Educational Implications. San Diego: Robert R. Knapp, 1968. Kirklin, Deborah, and Richard Meakin. “Editorial: Medical Students and Arts and Humanities Research: Fostering Creativity, Inquisitiveness, and Lateral Thinking.” Journal of Medical Ethics 29.2 (2003): 103. Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Madden, Christopher. “Creativity and Arts Policy.” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 34.2 (2004): 133-139. Mauzy, Jeff, and Richard Harriman. Creativity, Inc.: Building an Inventive Organisation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Meites, E., S. Bein, and A. Shafer. “Researching Medicine in Context: The Arts and Humanities Medical Scholars Program.” Journal of Medical Ethics: Medical Humanities 29 (2003): 104-108. Rees, Colin. “Celebrate Creativity.” Nursing Standard 19.14-16 (2004): 20-21. Robinson, Alan G., and Sam Stern. Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1998. Sataloff, Robert Thayer. “Interdisciplinary Opportunities for Creativity in Medicine.” Ear, Nose & Throat Journal 77.7 (1998): 530-533. Sawyer, Keith R. “Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation.” Educational Researcher 33.2 (2004): 12-20. Sternberg, Robert J., and Wendy M. Williams. How to Develop Student Creativity. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1996. Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Wilks, Susan. Critical and Creative Thinking: Strategies for Classroom Inquiry. Armadale: Eleanor Curtain Publishing, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Isakhan, Ben, Jason Nelson, and Patrick West. "creativity.com: Aladdin’s Cave or Pandora’s Box?." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/07-isakhan_nelson_west.php>. APA Style Isakhan, B., J. Nelson, and P. West. (Mar. 2006) "creativity.com: Aladdin’s Cave or Pandora’s Box?," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/07-isakhan_nelson_west.php>.

The task of the unpaid reviewer in academic publishing has always been a taxing one. Although the notion is one of blind peer review, the selection of reviewers is far from random. Journals try to balance a prospective reviewer’s expertise with their availability, and with their track record of returning a useful review on time. Ideally, the reviewer should have a specific (reasonably expert) knowledge of the paper’s topic, but should also retain enough in common with the interested, but jargon-averse, academic reader to empathise with non-specialist journal subscribers. Reviewers should be able to judge the quality of the argument, of the writing, and of the contribution of the article to the field. It’s a tough ask, and now there is a further layer of concern: will the reviewer – having satisfied all the foregoing – be able to spot ‘self-plagiarism’? Self-plagiarism is a relatively new evil – at least, few people in the author’s circle appear aware of it. Googling the term results in some 8,000 hits (whereas plagiarism scores 3,150,000). At first blush, the usual interpretation of plagiarism – the pinching of some one else’s intellectual property without acknowledgement – seems to rule out the possibility of self-plagiarism. Surely, if the ideas and words are your own, a little judicious re-purposing is all grist to the mill? Indeed, most of the anti-plagiarism sites, for example: What is Plagiarism? (Georgetown University), don’t include the term at all. Instead, the site offers examples of five types of plagiarism, most of them familiar to seasoned markers of student work, which are sufficiently rigorous to include “the ‘apt phrase’”, defined as the lifting of a part sentence. Their comment on the example they give for ‘apt phrase’ plagiarism involves four words in an original paragraph: “This passage is almost entirely original, but the phrase ‘dissolved into a conglomeration’ is taken directly from Arendt [the example used for illustration]. Even though this is a short phrase, it must be footnoted. Only phrases that have truly become part of general usage can be used without citation.” Georgetown University, then, sees plagiarism predominantly as a matter of correct attribution of authorship. Most journals have a requirement that no work offered to them for review should previously have been published, and that concurrent submissions to multiple journals are not permitted. The issue here, it seems, is that a journal’s reputation is built upon the originality and usefulness of its contents. Journal editors like to feel that they are ‘advancing the field’ with each edition and they are building a readership that can count upon learning something new (or, at least, provocative) for each hour invested in consuming their journal. Where papers have appeared in other forms (based, for example, on a presentation recorded in conference proceedings) this may be acceptable to the journal, provided it is acknowledged, and experienced editors will often check that papers developed from conference presentations have not previously been posted on the web. If two journals in ignorance each accept and publish the same paper at the same time then that reflects very poorly on the academic who failed to deal honestly with the editors. The issue here is one of resources – the printed page, in particular, is expensive – and of the reviewers’ time. Given the unpaid and voluntary labour of reviewers, and the amount of time and energy that goes into deciding which papers to accept or reject, journals think very poorly of someone who ‘withdraws’ a paper after acceptance on the grounds that s/he has got a better offer/earlier publication elsewhere. Most journals would not welcome future papers from that author. If self-plagiarism were a simple matter of passing off published paper A as published paper B (say, by changing the title and offering it elsewhere), then it would be seen to be deceitful and perpetrators would receive little respect from their peers. But these extreme cases are not (generally) the kind of self-plagiarism against which authors are warned. So what is the authorship problem widely referred to as ‘self-plagiarism’? The SPlaT website (SPlaT) is happy to explain: Self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their previous writings in subsequent research papers. Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a re-titled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work. … It is our belief that self-plagiarism is detrimental to scientific progress and bad for our academic community. Flooding conferences and journals with near-identical papers makes searching for information relevant to a particular topic harder than it has to be. It also rewards those authors who are able to break down their results into overlapping least-publishable-units over those who publish each result only once. Finally, whenever a self-plagiarised paper is allowed to be published, another, more deserving paper, is not. Among the more chilling examples of self-plagiarism identified by the developers of SPlaT is “cryptomnesia (reusing one’s own previously published text while unaware of its existence)” (SPlaT). The avoidance of cryptomnesia is one reason why authors are encouraged to use the SPlaT tool. Academic and journal reviewers are also regarded as potential users, and the software is designed to work in three modes – ‘reviewer’s workbench’, ‘author’ and ‘web spider’. It is indeed a crypromnesiac’s concern that the ‘apt phrase’ that came so creatively to the author in an earlier paper might appear again, unwittingly, in the guise of an original composition. However, the injunction to use SPlaT as a ‘reviewer’s workbench’ (where “SPlaT compares a paper under review to a record of the author’s previously published articles extracted from their web site and online article repositories” [SPlaT]) begs the question as to how a review may remain blind – in the sense of not identifying the author of the work to be reviewed – if the ‘workbench’ and/or ‘web spider’ modes of SPlaT are pressed into service. Might it be the case, notwithstanding the foregoing, that the problem of self-plagiarism is as authentic as ‘social anxiety disorder’ (SAD), incidences of which multiplied dramatically once a drug, Paxil, had been shown effective in treating it? In a Washington Post article (Vedantam), the journalist-author comments: “according to a marketing newsletter, media accounts of social anxiety rose from just 50 stories in 1997 and 1998 to more than 1 billion references in 1999 alone” and goes on to say, “The education and advertising campaigns have raised concerns that pharmaceutical companies, traditionally in the business of finding new drugs for existing disorders, are increasingly in the business of seeking new disorders for existing drugs”. Prior to the publicity about SAD, Paxil was an anti-depressant with sales languishing way behind Prozac and Zoloft. The identification (and treatment) of social anxiety disorder did wonders for its marketing. Could it be that self-plagiarism has only come into existence as a major concern for academia now that there is a tool for its detection? Social anxiety disorder may be an authentic scourge – as may self-plagiarism – and the fact that it has been publicised in concert with its cure (or detection) does not mean that the remedy serves no useful purpose. On the contrary, once a population of professionals is attuned to a new way of viewing symptoms and practices then valuable advances may result. However, such advances are only possible when the community concerned has had a chance to consider the matter and discuss the ramifications. At the present, we run the risk of allowing the designers of anti-self-plagiarism software to be the judges and the jury of this new way to commit academic crime. One way to avoid charges of self-plagiarism is self-citation. Leaving aside crytomnesia, it is perfectly possible to cite the already-published reference when an author is aware of reusing a previously-published phrase or idea. Unfortunately, this remedy is also generally frowned upon in many academic circles. The practice undermines the principle of blind peer review – since the identity of the author soon becomes clear in such repeated instances – while readers may become irritated, suspecting that self-citation is a clumsy ruse to improve the citation index ratings of the originally-published article. The issue is of concern to more than journal editors: it also relates to text- and reference-book editors and publishers. One ‘for instance’ was discussed a year ago by the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) who conducted a hypothetical on “self-plagiarism of textbook chapters” and threw the discussion open to the members’ list. The initial self-plagiarism case-study situation was complicated by the supposition that Author A (of Book A) had self-plagiarised a previously-published chapter which had been jointly authored by Author A and Author B (Book B). Notwithstanding this complication, the WAME Ethics Committee addressed themselves to four questions: Is [Does] reuse of a person’s writings in another textbook, but authored by the same person, meet the definition of plagiarism? If so, what degree of identical components needs to be present for this definition to be met? Is it appropriate for authors to write for different textbooks in the same field? If so, can they write on the same topic? If not, what are the potential infringements on the author’s rights to pursue their career/income? Should the editors of these textbooks agree to exclude authors that write for one another’s textbooks? Or is that unfair restraint of trade? For example, if all four textbooks were to agree to limit or completely avoid any overlap among authors, it could effectively deny entry of another textbook into that market. For book A, the author had a co-author. Since this shared work was used for book B, what is the author’s responsibility to the original co-author? (WAME) These are good questions and they are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves about self-plagiarism in our own ‘media and culture’ academic circles. In particular, in the case of textbooks, it is precisely because an author has a standing in the field, and has published on equivalent matters, that editors seek them out and ask them to contribute chapters. Whilst all reputable writers would expect to originate a new chapter according to the specific brief given, it is possible (some might even say likely) that there is an overlap in approach and phraseology. In the case of Books A and B, the overlap stretched the bounds of coincidence in that: “One table is essentially identical, although other tables in the two chapters are different. In addition, there are some passages that contain identical phrases. Most of these appear to have been reworded, but many identifiable words and phrases are identical between the two chapters. There are also areas where the text is completely different” (WAME). However, this hypothetical case is clearly not a situation where the same authorial product was disguised with a new title. Although the whole debate is worth reading, the general consensus of the Ethics Committee was along the lines of (specifically citing one response): I do not see a problem with the author reusing his own material to write a chapter in another textbook (readers of textbooks as opposed to research articles are not expecting originality). The problem is that he should have done this with the concurrence of the two editors and if he signed over his copyright the permission of publisher of textbook A. He should of course also have consulted with his co-author. I think the editors should inform the publishers and his employer of the facts and let them decide what course of action to take. (WAME) The references to re-using the material transparently, and the editors of the textbooks informing the author’s employer, are a constant refrain from a number of contributors to the discussion. Some WAME list discussants offer defences to the charge of self-plagiarism: “the main problem here is not whether the same, or very similar, information can or should be published in more than one place” commented Frank Davidoff, “that sort of thing is done all the time, and can serve important functions. After all, different people read different textbooks, and if it’s important for the information to get out there, why shouldn’t it be made as widely available as possible?” Andrew Herxheimer thought the readers’ perspective had not been given sufficient consideration: “If I were keenly interested in the contents of the chapter in textbook B, I might well wish to know how they had developed, and to look at earlier versions of the material, and to understand why the contents and emphases etc had changed in the way they had.” “The choice of an author for a review monograph or textbook chapter is based always on perusal of the existing reviews and chapters, hoping that the new publication can contain something just as good” argued Rick Nelson, going on to say, “that obligates the author to produce something as similar to his previous publication as possible, and yet different – an impossible task even if such writing were a priority endeavor, which it never is.” (WAME). Irving Hexham, of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, appears to have been substantially ahead of the game in discussing self-plagiarism in the 1990s. His consideration of the issue is generally more sympathetic than SPlaT’s, or WAME’s. For example, “Self-plagiarism must be distinguished from the recycling of one’s work that to a greater or lesser extent everyone does legitimately”, and: Academics are expected to republish revised versions of their Ph.D. thesis. They also often develop different aspects of an argument in several papers that require the repetition of certain key passages. This is not self-plagiarism if the complete work develops new insights. It is self-plagiarism if the argument, examples, evidence, and conclusion remain the same in two works that only differ in their appearance. (Hexham) It appears that Hexham and SPlaT have very different ideas of what constitutes self-plagiarism. Their different perspectives may be influenced by disciplinary perspectives and wider contexts – journal article or textbook chapter, a cannibalised conference paper or thesis – and by whether or not they have authored software to catch the offending behaviour. At least one Australian academic (not in M/C – Media and Culture) has been asked by their University to justify their publications against a charge of self-plagiarism, however, which is how the topic has become visible and why the need for debate has become urgent. Incidentally, the opening sentence of the opening paragraph to the Introduction of the paper on “Splat: A System for Self-Plagiarism Detection” is almost identical to the Abstract for a paper published two years later as “Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science”, viz: “We are all too aware of the ravages of scientific misconduct in the academic community. Students submit assignments inherited from the [sic] their friends who took the course the year before, on-line paper-mills allow students to browse for term papers on popular topics, and occasionally researchers are found out when falsifying data or publishing the work of others as their own.” (Collburg et al.) “We are all too aware of the ravages of misconduct in the academic community. Students submit assignments inherited from their friends, online papermills provide term papers on popular topics, and occasionally researchers are found falsifying data or publishing the work of others as their own.” (Collburg & Kubourov) Further, in these two papers there is a difference in authorship line-up, as with the WAME example… So what of the reviewers in all this? The Journal of Optical Networking, published by the Optical Society of America, comments that “self-plagiarism causes duplicate papers in the scientific literature, violates copyright agreements, and unduly burdens reviewers, editors, and the scientific publishing enterprise.” (JON). In an environment of blind peer review, where the reviewer does not know the author’s identity and is not in a position to check the body of their published work, the acid test becomes whether (in the reviewer’s opinion) the article advances the debate by offering something new. The submission should also repay the time and effort expended in reading and considering the contents. Other than that, issues of in/valid repurposing, repackaging, recycling and redeveloping arguments and findings require debate and determination at a discipline-wide level, rather than at the coalface of reviewers’ practice. References Collburg, Christian, and Stephen Kobourov. “Self-Plagiarism in Computer Science”, Communications of the ACM, 48.4 (April 2005): 88-94. Collburg, Christian, Stephen Kobourov, Joshua Louie, and Thomas Slattery. “SPlaT: A System for Self-Plagiarism Detection” IADIS International Conference WWW/INTERNET, Algarve, Portugal 5-8 November 2003. 09 Oct 2005 http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/icwi_plag.pdf>. Georgetown University. What Is Plagiarism?, Georgetown University Honor Council, Georgetown University, n.d. 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html>. Hexham, Irving. The Plague of Plagiarism, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, 1999 published on University of Missouri Kansas City, Douglas E Cowan Website. 9 Oct. 2005 http://c.faculty.umkc.edu/cowande/plague.htm#self>. JON. “From the Board of Editors: On Plagiarism”, Journal of Optical Networking, Optical Society of America, 4.3 (2005): 142-3, 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.osa-jon.org/abstract.cfm?URI=JON-4-3-142>. Vedantam, Shankar. “Drug Ads Hyping Anxiety Make Some Uneasy”, Washington Post 16 July (2001): p. A01; also published in PR in the News, Council of Public Relations Firms, 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.prfirms.org/resources/news/drug071601.asp>. SPlaT. SPlaT Website, Computer Science Department, University of Arizona, March 2005. 9 Oct. 2005 http://splat.cs.arizona.edu/>. WAME. “Self-Plagiarism of Textbook Chapters”, World Association of Medical Editors, Ethics Committee and list discussants, October 2004. 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.wame.org/selfplag.htm>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Reviewing the Scourge of Self-Plagiarism." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/07-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Oct. 2005) "Reviewing the Scourge of Self-Plagiarism," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/07-green.php>.