All over the world, work of some kind is (and has always been) part of most children’s lives, as may be seen from the Introduction and many articles in this special issue of Childhood. At certain times and places, and in certain forms and relations of work, the exploitation and abuse of children’s capacity for work becomes a serious social problem. It is in this sense – the abuse of children in...

The idea of knowledge sharing has strong roots in the education process. With the current development of the technology and moving learning material into the web environment it acquired a new dimension. Learning objects are the chunks of knowledge shared by e-learning community. Organizations and individuals are building repositories of learning objects and annotate them with metadata to descri...

This paper outlines the arguments for a common set of accounting standards and the forces that have promoted adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Widespread use of IFRS since 2005 provides an opportunity for empirical investigation of the benefits of IFRS. I summarise results of studies that are relevant for assessing the role of IFRS in both developing and developed ...

We review the evolution of the global standards system and its relationship to industry. We then discuss some of the approaches that governments have taken in order to modify the system for the benefit of domestic and worldwide economic development. We use as an example an effort of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to encourage voluntary consensus standards for interopera...

Conventionally, standards are considered as a governance tool in the production system in a one-directional and hierarchical relationship between foreign trans-national corporations (TNCs) or global buyers on one hand and subsidiaries and producers on the other. They were considered as transmitting necessary specifications of goods – codified knowledge – to the producers. Despite the fact that ...

Introduction / objectives Critical questions have been raised in the scientific literature and by hand-hygiene thought leaders regarding the minimum alcohol concentration that assures efficacy of alcohol-based hand rubs (ABHR). The objective of this study was to determine the relative influences of alcohol concentration and product formulation on the efficacy of ABHR using internationally recog...

Global integration and greater economic interaction implies a need for interoperability and compatibility which can be achieved through appropriate standards for technology and procedures. Such standards are the product of market processes which are historically and culturally specific but which now impact on a much broader range of actors. Understanding the dynamics of these processes is neces...