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The need to improve performance and productivity causes conflict when a blind typist comes under scrutiny. Although not intentionally singled out, she felt threatened. This is a sensitive issue that needs to be handled with tact and professionalism. Because of the personalities involved, there is no easy solution to this case, a characteristic that makes “performance shock” a valuable learning tool.

This paper is concerned with what intensive family intervention professionals reveal to the parents with whom they work about whether they themselves are parents or not, as a form of professional self-disclosure in child welfare work. This paper also addresses the act of lying in professional self-disclosure.

The paper draws on material from a series of narrative interviews completed with practitioners from one family intervention programme in an English local authority as part of a study looking at how children’s services professionals experience the suffering of parents. The study was based on a psychoanalytically informed methodological approach, which is represented in the analysis provided in the paper.

The overall team ethos regarding parental status disclosure is considered briefly first then two participants’ accounts are explored in depth. These involved, what can be considered as, questionable or unorthodox stances regarding parental status disclosure (and self-disclosure more generally). The exploration illustrates the role that practitioners’ personal lives and histories can play in influencing how the act of professional parental status disclosure is experienced and how particular positions are invested in regarding the role of self-disclosure in working relationships with parents.

Child welfare and family intervention professionals are often asked personal questions by the parents and carers they work with, including questions about whether they are a parent or not. These questions can be difficult to answer and there is a need for dedicated empirical analysis into the ways in which professionals experience, think about and respond to them and what they disclose about themselves when working with families.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the effects of cultural values on gender gap.

First, by relying on the extant literature, the concepts of cultural values and gender gap are framed and variables are defined. Then, the relationships among variables are hypothesized and the theoretical model is constructed. Finally, empirical tests are conducted, the results are analyzed, and theoretical/practical implications are discussed.

The results show that controlling for the effects of socio‐economic variables, culture still has important implications for gender gap. More specifically, it is found that conservatism value dimension is associated with higher levels of gender gap, but autonomy cultural dimension may lead to gender equality.

This study is limited to three pairs of cultural values as proposed by Schwartz. Another major limitation of this study resides in the theoretical model and linear data analysis techniques used to investigate the relationship between culture and gender gap.

The findings of this study could have important practical implications in many areas of social sciences such as political science, management and organizational studies, education, international law, and human resource management.

By considering the implications of cultural values, policy makers and business leaders may adopt effective strategies to promote gender equalities at the societal and organizational levels.

While many studies have focused on some narrow aspects such as gender‐based differences in labour, employment, remuneration, political representation, education, and leadership, in this study, the authors relied on a comprehensive conceptualization of the gender gap. Considering the reliability of data and the variety of countries/cultures included, the results seem very significant.

Several issues are reported in the literature regarding the preparation and training of nurses for the preceptor role. The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences, growth and development of nurses transitioning to the preceptor role in allied health contexts.

A basic interpretive qualitative research method was used for this study. In total, 20 preceptors who were practicing in a variety of healthcare settings participated in in-depth interviews.

The preceptors of this study found meaning through their teaching and learning encounters with novice nurses. Their meaning making led to identity development and new perspectives on both the nursing and preceptor roles.

This study extends the literature on informal learning and training by focusing on the unique work role of nurse precepting. Conclusions of this study call for additional research that examines other occupational areas in which workers have transitioned from expert to novice again, and how training can enhance these transitions

Participants described several areas of improvement for preceptorships: additional administrative support, guidelines and standards for preceptor training and preparation and additional time and support for transitioning to the preceptor role

Work role transition theory was used in this study to examine the preparation and training of preceptors. This study features the voices of nursing preceptors who have experienced changes in their employment status and major shifts in their work roles transitioning from expert to novice to expert again.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library Board, but opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription for 1981 for VINE is £20 for UK subscribers and £23 for overseas subscribers — subscription year runs from January to December.

Hate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media provides a breeding ground for hate speech and makes combating it seems like a lost battle. However, what may constitute a hate speech in a cultural or religious neutral society may not be perceived as such in a polarized multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Defining hate speech, therefore, may be contextual. Hate speech in Nigeria may be perceived along ethnic, religious and political boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to check for the presence of hate speech in social media platforms like Twitter, and to what degree is hate speech permissible, if available? It also intends to find out what monitoring mechanisms the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put in place to combat hate speech. Lexalytics is a term coined by the authors from the words lexical analytics for the purpose of opinion mining unstructured texts like tweets.

This research developed a Python software called polarized opinions sentiment analyzer (POSA), adopting an ego social network analytics technique in which an individual’s behavior is mined and described. POSA uses a customized Python N-Gram dictionary of local context-based terms that may be considered as hate terms. It then applied the Twitter API to stream tweets from popular and trending Nigerian Twitter handles in politics, ethnicity, religion, social activism, racism, etc., and filtered the tweets against the custom dictionary using unsupervised classification of the texts as either positive or negative sentiments. The outcome is visualized using tables, pie charts and word clouds. A similar implementation was also carried out using R-Studio codes and both results are compared and a t-test was applied to determine if there was a significant difference in the results. The research methodology can be classified as both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative in terms of data classification, and quantitative in terms of being able to identify the results as either negative or positive from the computation of text to vector.

The findings from two sets of experiments on POSA and R are as follows: in the first experiment, the POSA software found that the Twitter handles analyzed contained between 33 and 55 percent hate contents, while the R results show hate contents ranging from 38 to 62 percent. Performing a t-test on both positive and negative scores for both POSA and R-studio, results reveal p-values of 0.389 and 0.289, respectively, on an α value of 0.05, implying that there is no significant difference in the results from POSA and R. During the second experiment performed on 11 local handles with 1,207 tweets, the authors deduce as follows: that the percentage of hate contents classified by POSA is 40 percent, while the percentage of hate contents classified by R is 51 percent. That the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by POSA is 87 percent, while free speech is 86 percent. And the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by R is 65 percent, while free speech is 74 percent. This study reveals that neither Twitter nor Facebook has an automated monitoring system for hate speech, and no benchmark is set to decide the level of hate contents allowed in a text. The monitoring is rather done by humans whose assessment is usually subjective and sometimes inconsistent.

This study establishes the fact that hate speech is on the increase on social media. It also shows that hate mongers can actually be pinned down, with the contents of their messages. The POSA system can be used as a plug-in by Twitter to detect and stop hate speech on its platform. The study was limited to public Twitter handles only. N-grams are effective features for word-sense disambiguation, but when using N-grams, the feature vector could take on enormous proportions and in turn increasing sparsity of the feature vectors.

The findings of this study show that if urgent measures are not taken to combat hate speech there could be dare consequences, especially in highly polarized societies that are always heated up along religious and ethnic sentiments. On daily basis tempers are flaring in the social media over comments made by participants. This study has also demonstrated that it is possible to implement a technology that can track and terminate hate speech in a micro-blog like Twitter. This can also be extended to other social media platforms.

This study will help to promote a more positive society, ensuring the social media is positively utilized to the benefit of mankind.

The findings can be used by social media companies to monitor user behaviors, and pin hate crimes to specific persons. Governments and law enforcement bodies can also use the POSA application to track down hate peddlers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers’ trust is enhanced by e-commerce-based agribusiness companies. It also aims to shed light on the role of social commerce in improving consumers’ trust.

To achieve the research purpose, an in-depth multiple case study is performed. In this study, three cases in short food supply chain (SFSC) in China are selected, and they are all e-commerce agribusiness companies. They adopted common ways to build up, maintain and reinforce consumers’ trust.

It is revealed that the companies innovatively adopted social commerce, both online and offline, to overcome the trust problems usually faced by e-commerce companies. It is also shown that offline contact with potential consumers is an important first step for agribusiness e-commerce entrepreneurs to build up trust with consumers.

By adopting a multiple case study method, the research has limited generalizability to other types of SFSCs. Since the findings are from Chinese agribusiness e-commerce companies, the generalization to other sectors must be done with caution.

Some managerial implications are given as follows: first, offline contact with consumers could be realized through different channels. Taking advantage of existing social network or trying to find consumers in urban communities might be effective ways. Second, trust building with consumers is not an easy task, managers need to emphasize trust building, trust maintaining, as well as trust reinforcing with consumers. In agri-food sector, managers might need to specifically address the importance of food safety and quality so as to not lose consumer trust in one night.

The study has mainly two contributions: first, it has managerial implications for agribusiness e-commerce entrepreneurs, addressing the important role of social presence in building up consumer trust. Second, it contributes to social presence and social relations literature by providing new empirical evidence from e-commerce in agri-food sector and in developing countries.

International New copyright provisions for digital transmission. Two new treaties relating to copyright in digital transmissions have been agreed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation's (WIPO) Diplomatic Conference. WIPO is a UN agency with a membership of 159 states.

The paper identifies lessons to be learned from the planning of Euronet‐DIANE and SCANNET with a view to the general prerequisites and problems to be handled when several interested parties are brought together for the purpose of setting up information services from databases and networks. Online services are placed as one among several communication channels for scientific information. The planning of Euronet‐DIANE and SCANNET in this environment followed different patterns. The basic elements were the same, but the order in which the problems received attention differed.