In recent years, the price of college textbooks has become a growing concern for students and others who care about keeping college costs affordable. As policymakers and higher education systems explore the issue further, there are actions that can be taken immediately on college campuses to reduce the cost of textbooks. This brief presents…

Purpose/Objectives: Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) receive a portion of their annual federal funding as commodity entitlement foods--now called USDA Foods--rather than cash payments. Due to rising food prices in recent years, it has been recommended that schools compare the costs and benefits of commodity and…

Many students are struggling with more depression and anxiety than ever before. These are characteristic dangers of the "consumer class"--1.7 billion people worldwide who are "characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of…

The Report of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 education, described by its Lead Director Professor Richard Pring of Oxford University in the last number of FORUM (Volume 51, Number 2 http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2168/10.2304/forum.2009.51.2.197), highlights the increasing use of what can be described as "edu-dabble" by sectors of the education establishment.

Using data from the 1980 to 2003 panels of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, this article examines purchasing decisions in father-headed single-parent families. Single-father expenditures are compared to both married-parent expenditures and single-mother expenditures on 17 broad categories of household-level goods and services. Multivariate…

As competition for students, faculty and financial support has increased, so has the application of marketing in the field of higher education. One critical application of marketing all too often neglected, misunderstood and mismanaged in higher education is targeting customers for profitability. The purpose of this paper is to enrich the…

New retail locations and formats and changing consumer capabilities and behaviours (including "switching") have encouraged "outshopping" from rural to urban areas. Rural areas have been suffering from a decline in the provision of services, including retailing. One "solution" has been the strengthening of market towns…

Currently there is a scarcity of information in the art education literature about purchasing art. This article examines how art acquires economic and social value, as well as how consumers make decisions when purchasing a piece of art. Where does an art student, or the general public learn about buying art? How much, if any, of this process is…

In the context of the last two years' recession, parents, teachers and administrators seem to increasingly welcome school-business "partnerships" that they hope may help ward off program cuts. Businesses encourage such arrangements because school-based marketing and advertising programs are perfectly poised to "brand" children…

This teaching case documents an actual case of process execution and failure. The case is useful in MIS introductory courses seeking to demonstrate the interdependencies within a business process, and the concept of cascading failure at the process level. This case demonstrates benefits and potential problems with information technology systems,…

In 2005 a survey was used to investigate social norms and attitudes of Viennese high school students (14-20 years, n = 340) toward organic products. Young people, who already participate in household decisions and consume organic products, have not yet been recognized sufficiently in research. The Theory of Reasoned Action and discriminant…

Purpose: Although prior research suggests that economic, behavioral, and psychosocial factors influence decisions not to purchase long-term care insurance, few studies have examined the interplay among these factors in depth and from the consumer's point of view. This study was intended to further illuminate these considerations, generate…

In this article, we look closely at the way power circulates through school routines with ordinary texts in everyday moments. We address texts that support different types of achievement and how critical literacy helps us redefine achievement and examine what we're doing with texts and students in classrooms. We interrogate the notion of…

This study explores two aspects of the privatization of childhood in contemporary urban China: the emergent discourse on children's privacy and children's growing seclusion within the home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author describes urban caregivers' engagement with the issue of children's privacy, and argues that we are now…

This paper assumes that contemporary Western society is a consumer society and argues that the need of global capitalism to sell its commodities in the market place is the fundamental force behind consumerism. A model of globalisation is discussed. In it, we see how the control of information technology means that producers have the power to…