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The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of availability, both empirically and theoretically, in the context of three Swedish organisations, and identifies the structural influences on availability patterns for work and family.

The article is based on quantitative case studies using employer records and an employee questionnaire in three organisations. Multivariate descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression are used to illustrate and analyse patterns of availability for work and family.

The descriptive data demonstrate the influence of the organisational context and type of production process, as well as gender, on availability patterns. Patterns of work availability appeared to differ across the organisations to a greater extent than patterns of family availability, which were highly gendered. The logistic regression results indicated that: occupation was a significant influence on both temporal and spatial availability patterns across the organisations; gender was the most significant influence on time spent on household work and part‐time working for parents with young children; age of employees and age of employees' children were the most significant factors influencing the use of time off work for family.

Analysis limited to case studies. More extensive quantitative research would be needed to make empirical generalisations. Qualitative research would be needed to establish whether and how employees are able to make use of different availability patterns to improve their work‐life balance.

The concept of availability is a new way of trying to capture and analyse tensions in people's everyday lives as they try to manage multiple demands.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the preferences of young Millennials for a salient product category (toys) and to investigate possible within‐group differences that have relevance for marketers.

The study carried out analysis of commercially collected survey data (538 pre‐teen Millennials) from Harris On‐Line using cluster and correspondence analyses.

Segments exist within the younger Millennial cohort. Specifically, four clusters emerged including enthusiasts, social/intellectuals, creatives and the disengaged.

One limitation is the selection of the toy characteristics included in the cluster variate, which were based on scarce published research and the opinion of Harris On‐Line experts. A second limitation is that the toys were never differentiated between traditional toys and electronic toys. A third limitation revolves around the maturation of the Millennials and how that may affect the clusters over time.

The cohorts are not homogeneous and the marketers should attend to the differences within the Millennial cohort when preparing promotions and in new product development.

To date, few, if any, academic studies have been done that segment the Millennial generational cohort. The research paper utilizes both cluster and correspondence analyses, which are the most appropriate for investigating segmentation in this setting.

The purpose of this paper is to address how adult development (AD) theories can contribute to quality improvement (QI).

A theoretical analysis and discussion on how personal development empirical findings can relate to QI and Deming’s four improvement knowledge domains.

AD research shows that professionals have qualitatively diverse ways of meaning-making and ways to approach possibilities in improvement efforts. Therefore, professionals with more complex meaning-making capacities are needed to create successful transformational changes and learning, with the recognition that system knowledge is a developmental capacity.

In QI and improvement science there is an assumption that professionals have the skills and competence needed for improvement efforts, but AD theories show that this is not always the case, which suggests a need for facilitating improvement initiatives, so that everyone can contribute based on their capacity.

This study illustrates that some competences in QI efforts are a developmental challenge to professionals, and should be considered in practice and research.

Domestic violence is a longstanding criminal behaviour although society has only recognised it as such in relatively recent times. The emerging issue of domestic violence has brought about changes in the way it is perceived, and how it is managed by different agencies including the response of the police. This paper highlights the effects of domestic violence on its victims, the reasons why people appear to remain in abusive relationships, and the initiatives taken by police forces to address this major crime area.

Despite organizational policies aimed at harassment prevention, harassment based on gender and ethnicity remains pervasive in places of work. Although previous research has identified other antecedents such as harassment climate, the purpose of this paper is to consider whether a climate of respect leads to reductions in identity-based harassment.

In a military sample of active duty men and women (Study 1) and a sample of working adults (Study 2), the authors use survey methods to test whether a climate of respect predicts the occurrence of two forms of identity-based abuse: sexual harassment (Study 1) and ethnic harassment (Study 2).

The authors find that a climate of respect uniquely predicts harassment based on sex and ethnicity, above and beyond effects of climate for harassment.

These results suggest that, while traditional harassment prevention efforts remain important for deterring identity-based harassment, promotion of a respectful work environment is also an effective tool.

The purpose of this study was to develop an easy-to-use, theoretically well-founded and psychometrically sound assessment tool of the concept co-workership.

Firstly, inductively generated examples of favourable and unfavourable co-worker behaviours were collected, clustered and then expressed as frequency-based Likert-type scale items. Data were obtained from 825 Swedish white collar workers and military personnel. A factor analysis (principal axis factoring with oblique rotation) resulted in a seven-factor solution built up by 30 items and forming the instrument Co-Worker Questionnaire (Co-Worker Q).

The factors have a strong resemblance to the content of dominating models of leadership, followership, organizational citizenship behaviour and leader–member exchange. The factor scales had relatively high reliability (high Cronbach’s alpha coefficients and low standard errors of measurement). Regarding discriminability, women scored more favourably on five of the factors, men on one factor and age differences were noted on two factors.

Shortcomings include the lack of data on possibly related aspects including person factors, such as personality and socio-economic status, and contextual factors such as more detailed data on the type of work environment and organizational culture.

The instrument has an easy-to-use format and can be used in organization development interventions with a co-workership focus and in individualized coaching or mentoring programmes.

The co-workership concept has so far mainly been used in the Nordic countries. The development of the Co-Worker Q opens up for broader applications.

This survey covers civil, electrical and electronics, energy, environment, general, materials, mechanical, and traffic and transportation engineering. Areas such as biomedical and chemical engineering will be dealt with in future issues. Readers may find that the classifications included in this survey are not mutually exclusive but do occasionally overlap with one another. For instance, the section on environmental engineering includes a review of a book on the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which might as easily have been part of the section on energy technology. Before we go into a discussion of data bases and indexes, I would like to note in this introductory section some recent bibliographic aids published during the period surveyed. Most engineering libraries will find them very valuable in their reference and acquisition functions. Since normal review sources will cover these books, I am merely listing them below: Malinowski, Harold Robert, Richard A. Gray and Dorothy A. Gray. Science and Engineering Literature. 2d ed., Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited, 1976. 368p. LC 76–17794 ISBN 0–87287–098–7. $13.30; Mildren, K. W., ed. Use of Engineering Literature. Woburn, Mass., Butterworths, 1976. 621p. ISBN 0–408–70714–3. $37.95. Mount, Ellis. Guide to Basic Information Sources in Engineering. New York, Wiley, Halsted Press, 1976. 196p. LC 75–43261 ISBN 0–47070–15013–0. $11.95 and Guide to European Sources of Technical Information. 4th ed., edited by Ann Pernet. Guernsey, Eng., F. Hodgson, 1976. 415p. ISBN 0–85280–161–0. $52.00.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.

This study aims to clarify the relationship between inclination angle of hot surface of CPU and its temperature in absence and presence of aluminum foam as a cooling system. It proposes application of the artificial neural [multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function] networks and adaptive neuron-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to predict interface temperature of central processing unit (CPU)/metal foam heat sink.

To provide a consistent set of data, the surface of an aluminum cone with and without installing Duocel aluminum foam was heated in a natural convection using an electrical resistor. The hot surface temperature was measured using five K-type thermocouples (±0.1°C). To develop the predictive models, ambient temperature, input power and inclination angle are taken as input which varied from 23°C to 32°C, 4 to 20 W and 0° to 90°, respectively. The hot surface temperature is taken as the output.

The results show that in the presence of foam, the hot surface temperature was less sensitive to the variations of angle, and the maximum enhancement of the heat transfer coefficient was 23 per cent at the vertical position. Both MLP network and ANFIS are comparable, but the values predicted by MLP network are in more conformity with the measured values.

The effect of metal foam on the inclination angle/hot surface temperature dependence is identified. The optimum angle is clarified. The applicability of the MLP networks to predict interface temperature of CPU/heat sink is approved.