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The reporting of food hazards by the media: the case of Greece
No full textThis study focuses on the coverage of food hazards by the Greek mass media. During the study period of three years, 311 articles from two daily and one Sunday newspaper were identified and analysed. The most important results drawn from the analyses are the following: (a) genetically modified foods was the most referenced food hazard; (b) there was often a simultaneous reference to more than one food hazard in the text; (c) most of the articles had informative content; (d) a periodicity existed in the media coverage of food hazards; and (e) the articles’ content was dependent upon the food hazard that was covered. Implications for future research are also discussed. Copyright 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc.
Human resource management with `Asian characteristics: a hybrid people management system in East Asia
No full textLocal complexities and global uncertainties: a study of foreign ownership and human resource management in China
No full textQuality audit roles and skills: perceptions of non-financial auditors and their clients
No full textA major development in Operations Management over the past two decades has been the use of quality audits to gauge the effectiveness of quality management systems in manufacturing and service organizations. Achieving optimal benefits from nonfinancial audits will, however, require that auditors and their clients obtain a greater understanding of and appreciation for the appropriate roles, responsibilities and skills of the non-financial auditor. This research uses data obtained from surveys of 126 practicing non-financial auditors and 400 non-financial audit clients in Australasia to test two propositions about the roles and requirements of non-financial auditors. The results indicate that non-financial auditors believe they are providing a style of auditing that is strongly focused on developing continuous improvement of client’s quality systems. Non-financial auditors also appear to have a desire to meet what they perceive to be the requirements of certified organizations by emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement focused auditing. However, their clients have the opposite perception believing that they are getting less continuous improvement focused auditing than they would like, and more compliance auditing than they need. The results show that client organizations are, in general, looking for a more balanced approach to non-financial auditing in terms of compliance and continuous improvement. The evidence also suggests that a major constraint identified relates to some fundamental issues of auditor independence. This dilemma created is apparent both in the understanding of what the appropriate role of the auditor is (in both the mind of the client and the auditor), and in the nature of the different roles each plays as a stakeholder in a quality system. Copyright 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Student guide to accompany auditing, assurance services and ethics in Australia: an integrated approach
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New trend in self-assembly of colloidal particles
No full textSelf-assembly of colloidal particles are of paramount importance for both fundamental research and technical applications. This chapter shows the state of the art of selfassemblies of colloidal particles. Up to now, colloidal particles, e.g. polystyrene and silica microspheres have been synthesized with extremely uniform sizes. They can generally self-assemble into long-range highly-ordered closely-packed arrays – colloidal crystals only with a simple packing symmetry, such as face centered cubic structure. The recent development allow growth of more complicated structures, such as binary colloidal crystals composed of two differently sized particles and non-closely packed structures via a template assisted self-assembly procedure. This is highlighted in the first section of the present chapter. Besides, directing colloidal particles to self-assemble into lower dimensional structures like plane-like or chain-like structures – clustering – is of increasing interest in the past decade. The second section discusses this research trend in detail. The third section is underline a very recent paradigmatic shift in the research field of self-assembly – growth of patchy particles in order to mimic the self-assembly behavior of molecules.