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This paper aims to offer a critical biography of Joan Woodward, often considered the founder of contingency theory. This paper examines Woodward’s background to develop a more complete understanding of the factors that influenced her work.

This paper draws on insights gained from personal correspondence with two colleagues of Woodward, one who recruited her to the Imperial College where she conducted her most prominent work and one whom she recruited while at the college. In addition, Woodward’s original work, academic literature, published remembrances and a plethora of other secondary sources are reviewed.

By connecting these otherwise disparate sources of information, a more complete understanding of Woodward’s work and its context is provided. It is argued that Woodward’s education, training, brilliance, values, the relative weakness of British sociology and the need to improve the economy helped to make Woodward’s work both original and practical.

The originality of this work is to examine the work of Woodward through the lens of critical biography. Despite Woodward’s contributions, Woodward remains an underappreciated figure. The purpose is to provide her contribution against the backdrop of the British industrial and educational sphere.

Women and marketing have had a complicated relationship for a considerable time. They have often been involved with marketing‐type practices for longer than we have appreciated to date. Against considerable odds, some have carved out careers in academia and practice that have to be admired. The purpose of this paper is to explore the work of two pioneer contributors to marketing.

This paper engages in a close reading of the work of two female contributors. Their writing is placed in historical context which helps reveal the obstacles they had to overcome to succeed.

Female teachers, lecturers and practitioners had an important role to play in theorising consumer practice and helping people to successfully negotiate a complex marketplace replete with new challenges, difficulties and sometimes mendacious marketers seeking to profit from the limited knowledge consumers possessed.

This paper explores the writings of a practitioner and scholar respectively whose work has merited only limited attention previously. More than this, it links the arguments that are made to the papers that appear in the rest of the special issue.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to help us position and understand the increasing importance of project-based innovation for industrial organization in the 21st century. It builds on and extends Joan Woodward's (1958 and 1965) pioneering research, which classifies industrial organizations according to the complexity of production technology and volume of output. We suggest that a radical revision of Woodward's framework is required to account for the extensive use of project-based organizations to gain competitive advantage through accelerated innovation and growth in new technologies and markets.

I first met Joan Woodward in 1962 when she visited the “Aston” group as we were working on our theoretical and methodological approach to understanding organizational structure and context. We were a brash, young group (the oldest member of the team was 30) working at what was then the Birmingham College of Advanced Technology (CAT). The Birmingham CAT did not have university status and it was not until 1966 that it became the University of Aston. Both what we were doing and where we were located were intriguing to Joan; after all, her famous book on technology and organization had been carried out at the South-East Essex Technical College, another nonuniversity, and, in the status order of the times, “below” Birmingham CAT! Both Joan's work and that of the Aston group illustrate how innovation often comes from the margins of the academic world!

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.

This article aims to develop the methodological and intellectual approach taken in the authors' co‐authored book to explore the synergies and disconnections in the experience of being in the academy at different historical moments using the inter‐relationship between different feminisms in the context of the authors' lived experiences as a mother and daughter whose experience of the academy has crossed second‐wave feminism into third wave. There have been significant demographic, cultural and legislative shifts, but the authors' conversations demonstrate the endurance of imbalances of power and the continuing need for a feminist politics of difference which can engage with contemporary life in the academy.

This is primarily a theoretical paper that adopts feminist approaches to reflection and dialogue. The article is designed to bring together lived experience across generations, feminist theories and methodologies and the implications for activism. The paper uses the device of “I‐Kath I‐Sophie” as part of an autoethnographic approach to the cross‐generational conversation.

Far from being redundant, the authors argue that feminist critiques of inequalities that are often manifest in women's invisibility and silence even in the academy in the twenty‐first century – there is still the need to support a politics of difference and to explore ways of giving women a voice. The persistence of inequalities means that feminist battles have not been entirely won. The authors argue for dialogue between the feminisms of mothers and daughters.

Feminist concepts and arguments from what has been called the “second wave” are still useful, especially in relation to maintaining the category woman as a speaking subject who can engage in collective action.

The authors' arguments support the continuation of spaces for women to share experience within the academy, for example in feminist reading groups and through women's networks.

Feminist theories and activism remain important political forces for women in the academy today and post feminism is a questionable conceptualisation and phenomenon. In times when feminist battles may seem to have been won there remain issues to explore in relation to a new problem with no name.

The article is original in its authorship, methodological approach to a conversation that crosses experience and theoretical frameworks across generations and in its support for a twenty‐first century politics of difference.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a definition of genetic information by taking into account the debate surrounding it. Particularly, the objections raised by Developmental Systems Theory (Griffiths, 2001; Oyama 1985; Griffiths and Knight 1998) to Teleosemantic endorsements of the notion of genetic information (Sterelny et al. 1996; Maynard Smith, 2000; Jablonka, 2002) as well as deflationist approaches which suggest to ascribe the notion of genetic information a heuristic value at most, and to reduce it to that of causality (Godfrey-Smith, 2000; Boniolo, 2003, 2008).

The paper presents the notion of genetic information through its historical evolution and analyses it with the conceptual tools offered by philosophical theories of causation on one side (“causation as influence,” Woodward, 2010; Waters, 2007; Lewis, 2000) and linguistics on the other (“double articulation” Martinet, 1960).

The concept of genetic information is defined as a special kind of cause which causes something to be one way rather than another, by combining elementary units one way rather than another. Tested against the notion of “genetic error” this definition demonstrates to provide an exhaustive account of the common denominators associated with the notion of genetic information: causal specificity; combinatorial mechanism; arbitrariness.

The definition clarifies how the notion of information is understood when applied to genetic phenomena and also contributes to the debate on the notion of information, broadly meant, which is still affected by lack of consensus (Floridi, 2013).

A study of 1,696 loan requests satisfied by the British Library Lending Division showed that approximately 3% are for journals that used to be taken by the borrowing library but are not now being acquired. In the light of a survey of the way librarians in the UK make decisions on journal subscriptions and cancellations it appears that they very rarely replace subscriptions by interlibrary borrowing.

The Electronic Library recently received a disappointed e‐mail asking why the journal, with a title like that, wasn't available electronically. A very good question, which is only partially answered by the fact that the journal is 15 years old and came into the world when the Internet was half its present age and a fraction of its size, CDs were an embryonic technology and the World Wide Web just didn't exist. E‐journals are now here to stay and any publisher worth its salt is looking at how its publications, too, can be made available in this manner. There is inevitably a very large element of keeping up with the neighbours involved — no one wants to seem to lag behind the competition — and too many companies plainly are not flunking the matter through before launching their electronic products. We have no desire to go broke or to launch an unviable product in the name of progress, and perhaps that is why we have so far erred on the side of caution: but believe me, we are working on it.