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The appointment of Mr. Alan Woodward brings a wide experience of the surface coatings industry to his new position as acting sales manager, Surface Coatings Division with Croxton + Garry Ltd.

About 20 years ago the imminent death of the three roll mill was being forecast by many authorities. Their arguments were good. For the previous 50 years the technology of the three roll mill was virtually unchanged and the new sand mills, high speed dissolvers etc, were opening a new dimension to pigment dispersion. It was this that caused roll mill manufacturers, who, up until that time had concentrated on bettering the engineering aspects of their mills to consider how they could improve their customers' products in the various fields of paint, ink, soap, cosmetic and chocolate dispersing. A new era dawned for three roll mills, instead of simply improving their old mills the manufacturers hired dispersion experts. Chemists and technicians from the ink, chocolate and other industries joined the mill manufacturers and it very soon became apparent that many improvements could be made, so much so that leading mill manufacturers set up complete research laboratories separated into the various industries involved. Improvements rapidly followed. One of the first was static hydraulic pressure in place of the mechanical screw system. This soon gave way, on the more expensive mills, to dynamic hydraulic pressure. The difference being that in the latter system a pump is continually operating to maintain a constant pressure on the hydraulic oil and thereby on the rolls. And so was born a three roll mill which for the first time did not need constant re‐adjustment to maintain steady pressure regardless of the temperature when working.

THE several hundred members who heard the thought‐provoking addresses delivered at the Harrogate conference of the British Institute of Management recently must have returned stimulated by much that was said. At the outset the American Ambassador reminded them that the big business tended to suffer from a certain complacency because it thought that operating efficiency could allow it to ignore the whips and spurs of competition, although he did not advocate cutting up the leviathans to nourish a lot of little fish for the sake of seeing them fight. Indeed, he thought the growth of mass markets meant that the creation of business organisations commensurate with catering for them was inevitable.

The British Computer Society is a professional body representing the computing profession in the UK. Within the Society are a number of specialist groups, two of which are the Specialist Group for Developing Countries (Chairman, Dr Y. Paker) and the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (Chairman, Mr A.S. Pollitt). Informal contacts between members of these two groups have recognised:

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.

This paper presents an historical reconstruction of the radicalisation of Alan Fox, the industrial sociologist and a detailed analysis of his early historical and sociological writing in the classical pluralist phase.

An intellectual history, including detailed discussion of key Fox texts, supported by interviews with Fox and other Biographical sources.

Fox’s radicalisation was incomplete, as he carried over from his industrial relations (IR) pluralist mentors, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, a suspicion of political Marxism, a sense of historical contingency and an awareness of the fragmented nature of industrial conflict.

Recent academic attention has centred on Fox’s later radical pluralism with its “structural” approach to the employment relationship. This paper revisits his early, neglected classical pluralist writing. It also illuminates his transition from institutional IR to a broader sociology of work, influenced by AH Halsey, John Goldthorpe and others and the complex nature of his radicalisation.

It is recognised that training is required for staff working with people with a diagnosis of personality disorder, as it poses challenges requiring particular skills and abilities (National Institute for Mental Health in England, 2003a). The proposal to train graduate primary care mental health workers (GPCMHWs) to work with the client group met with some scepticism by senior clinicians. However, the experience of providing training and supervision to the graduate primary care mental health workers to work with clients with personality disorder in Camden and Islington has proved positive. Several characteristics of the GPCMHWs identified in the training literature might contribute to this positive experience. Those factors include cognitive ability, motivation to learn, age, and attitudes. Initial findings from the evaluation of the training shows that graduate workers respond positively to the training, showing improvements in self‐rated knowledge and skills relating to working with the client group, and an eagerness to learn more. The relevance of this to the personality disorder capabilities framework are described.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the origins, members, activities, and influence of the Ratio Club, a British cybernetic dining club that met between 1949 and 1958. Although its membership included some of the best known British cyberneticists, such as Grey Walter and Ross Ashby, along with pioneering scientists such as Alan Turing, the club is poorly documented, and its significance is difficult to establish from published sources.

The approach involved the consultation and analysis of unpublished material in both private and public archives in the UK and the USA, coupled with interviews with surviving members, guests, and contemporaries.

The Ratio Club grew out of a distinctively British strand of cybernetic activity that was mainly fuelled by the deployment of biologists to engineering activities during the Second World War. It was also strongly influenced by the approach of the psychologist Kenneth Craik. Although members were keenly aware of contemporary American developments, such as Wiener's approach to the mathematics of control, and the psychological and sociological concerns of the Macy Conference, the emphasis of the club was on the application of cybernetic ideas and information theory to biology and the brain. In contrast to the wide influence the later Macy conferences exercised through their published transcripts, the Ratio Club influenced its core disciplines though its members, several of whom became prominent and effective advocates of the cybernetic approach.

This is the first journal paper to give an authoritative, detailed, and accurate account of the club's origins, activities, and importance.

The author feels haunted; troubled by the ethnography that the author conducted some years ago of a new partnership group that was attempting to set up a community learning centre. The author is aware that it doesn’t sound like a particularly alarming research topic, and perhaps that is where some of the issues began. The author did not expect an ethnographic haunting to occur. The partnership recruited the author less than a year into the creation of the project and spent two years as a sort of ‘researcher in residence’. The original idea was that the author would observe the initial development of the project and then, when the community learning centre was established, the author would research the centre’s activities and how they were experienced by village residents. However, fairly soon into the project, problematic dynamics developed within the group, leading to irreconcilable conflict between members. The community learning centre was never established and the author was left to piece together an ethnography of a failed partnership. Researching an increasingly dysfunctional partnership was an emotionally exhausting activity, especially when relationships between members became progressively hostile. Managing data collection and analysis at this time was difficult, but the author was shocked that, a number of months (and now years) later, revisiting the data for publication purposes remained uncomfortable. The author managed to produce the PhD thesis on the back of this study, but the author has not felt able to go back to the data, despite there being findings worthy of publication. This ethnography is in a state of limbo and is at risk of becoming lost forever. In this chapter, the author explores the reasons for this and discusses lessons learned for future projects.