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Devon County Council was one of the pilot sites for the Government's Care Direct initiative, a multi‐agency partnership initiative for joined‐up information and help for older people. This article describes how the service has developed, the outcomes achieved and the future plans.

The Government last year announced the development of the Care Direct service for older people, a one‐stop shop gateway to information and help. This article describes how plans are progressing to pilot the new initiative in Devon, which is one of six pilot sites.

This Paper Describes how Devon Social Services is undertaking a major revision of its care management policy in response to greatly increased levels of demand. Devon is attempting to develop a differentiated response that is more efficient and effective for the organisation, and that also gives more control to users and carers over their care arrangements.

This paper summarises the outcomes of developing a radically different approach to care management in Devon, described in MCC, Vol. 6, Issue 3. It highlights the lessons learnt and outlines how policy revision is changing the culture of the Social Services Directorate.

The author looks back on a series of articles published since 1996 in this journal, and concludes that the evidence points to the likelihood of continuing difficulties in implementing national policies at local level. The impact of New Labour approaches to community care is considered.

Examines how US and British financial institutions are implementing TQM to differentiate themselves from the competition. Discusses how customer satisfaction is achieved through customer care programmes, quality action teams, improved internal and external communications, and quality performance standards. Contends that an emerging trend in the sector is that of quality performance standard setting, measuring and monitoring. States that the financial sector is responding to this challenge by concentrating its focus on providing quality services to its customers. Concludes that customer care programmes, action teams and improved communications are the first step; the next step in maintaining the competitive edge is the establishment of quality performance standards, and devising systems for measuring and monitoring their effectiveness.

This paper aims to examine the central place of the list and the associated concept of an identifier within the “scaffolding” of contemporary government order.

These terms are deliberately chosen to make strange and help unpack the constitutive capacity of information systems and information technology within and between contemporary government agencies. We draw upon the substantial body of work by John Searle to help understand the place of lists in the constitution of the order of governance.

To enable us to ground our discussion of the potentiality and problematic associated with lists, we describe a significant and modern instance of list-making, situated around the issue of digital identity management.

The theoretical framework discussed allows us to better explain breakdowns in the institutional order characteristic of this domain.

Speculations on the possibility of computers displaying intelligence are usually traced to Turing's 1950 paper, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’. Claims for the literal intelligence of an appropriately programmed computer were publicly refuted by Searle in 1980. Optimism about the adequate simulation of intelligence is now further diminished. Analogies between the computer and the brain or mind have persisted. A contrasting perspective which links computers with documents through writing and through the faculty for constructing socially shared systems of signs has also been developed. From this perspective it can be shown that (i) claims for the literal intelligence of a computer rest on a similar basis to claims for the intelligence of a document, the production of depersonalised linguistic output, and (ii) that such claims are subject to an identical objection, that linguistic output is made available without a prior act of comprehension by the artefact. This paper places the Turing test in its intellectual and historical context. A claim that written words can give the appearance of intelligence, without the human capacity for dialectic response, is found in Plato's Phaedrus. This, too, must be placed in its historical context of a transition from predominantly oral to oral and written communication. Demonstrating that there are extensive similarities between the claims of computers and documents to literal intelligence is part of a progressive demystification of the computer.