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The paper seeks to discuss the author's experience of peer support.

The author provides an account of the introduction of specialist training for potential peer support workers within an NHS Trust.

The paper finds that training should not be provided unless it is known that jobs as peer support specialists can be created for people to move into.

It is important to recognise that what is now being called intentional peer support is a new professional development that has the potential to transform services if people are brave enough to take the plunge.

This paper gives an overview of the development and pilot implementation of a tool to evaluate socially inclusive practice. There are strong links between social inclusion and better mental health outcomes for people who access services, yet a very limited amount of research exists concerning ways to evaluate socially inclusive practice within mental health services. The paper describes the creation of a tripartite tool to access the views of mental health teams who work with service users, and the service users themselves. As part of the movement towards recovery and social inclusion, the Department of Health requires that social and occupational needs become embedded in care plans alongside health needs (DoH, 1999), and so an analysis of care plan documentation completed the evaluation tool. A pilot evaluation was conducted with three mental health teams in Sussex and found issues with engagement and response rate. Lessons learned and future implications are discussed.

A tool was created to evaluate the socially inclusive practice of mental health teams. The tool was based on the 2007 Department of Health best practice guide for the workforce, Capabilities for Inclusive Practice (CfIP), itself based on The 10 Essential Shared Capabilities (Hope, 2004). The tool comprised three parts, a team questionnaire, a service user questionnaire, and a Care Programme Approach (CPA) care plan documentation analysis (see previous paper on pp31‐41). This paper focuses on piloting the tool with mental health teams within Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust as a means of showcasing the evaluation tool. Detailed findings are reported from one assertive outreach team (AOT). The findings suggest that although the team professed limited knowledge of CfIP, they endorsed all capabilities in their practice, although a low response rate limits the extent to which the current findings are generalisable. The triangulation of data provided by the tool facilitates an exploration of the variance of capabilities across team, service user, and care planning perspectives, meaning that specific areas for the improvement of the delivery of inclusive practice can be easily identified.

This article describes the National Social Inclusion Programme's Communities of Influence workstream, the premises on which it was founded, the innovative social inclusion practice it proposed, what was learned and how the work will be taken forwards in the future.

This paper draws on the results of telephone surveys conducted to assess the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the young people of two longitudinal cohorts (aged 19 and 26 years old at the time) of the four countries that participate in the Young Lives research programme: Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. We first review the pandemic experiences of these four countries, which differed significantly, and report on the responses of the individual young people to the pandemic and the measures taken by governments. Our main focus is on how the pandemic and policy responses impacted on the education, work and food security experiences of the young people. Unsurprisingly the results show significant adverse effects in each of these areas, though again with differences by country. The effects are mostly more severe for poorer individuals. We stress the challenges that COVID-19 is creating for meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, in particular in making it more difficult to ensure that no one is left behind.

Strategic option generation is a fundamental step in strategy formulation. Several lenses have been proposed to explain its foundations, including the microeconomics positioning school, and the resource and capabilities based view of the firm. These approaches are largely based on inductive and deductive logics, which are not the logics that provide strategic options that are potentially novel, profitable, and largely differentiated from competitive offerings. In this chapter, we propose a unifying framework of the cognitive foundations of strategic option generation. Building on five fundamental cognitive acts – imitation, framing, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and mental simulation, this proposed model both synthesizes the extant literature and provides guidance about promising avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.

This chapter introduces the reader to the meaning of competitive advantage and posits that a firm’s strategy is defined as the managers’ theory about how to gain and sustain competitive advantage. The author demonstrates how a firm creates its competitive advantage by creating more economic value than its rivals, and explains that profitability depends upon value, price, and costs. The relationship among these factors is explored in the context of high-technology consumer goods – laptop computers and cars. Next, the chapter explains the SWOT [s(trengths) w(eaknesses) o(pportunities) t(hreats)] analysis. Examining the interplay of firm resources, capabilities, and competencies, the chapter emphasizes that both must be present to possess core competencies essential to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage through strategy. Next, the chapter describes the value chain by which a firm transforms inputs into outputs, adding value at each stage through the primary activities of research, development, production, marketing and sales, and customer service, which in turn rely upon essential support activities that add value indirectly. After describing the PEST [p(olitical) e(conomic) s(ocial) t(echnological)] Model for assessing a firm’s general external environment, the chapter explains Porter’s Five Forces Model. The chapter then describes the strategic group model and illustrates that model by reference to the pharmaceutical industry. The author notes that opportunities and threats to a company differ based upon the strategic group to which that firm belongs within an industry. Finally, the chapter explores the importance of strategy in technology-intensive industries and emphasizes that sustained competitive advantage can be accomplished only through continued innovation.

Although there is widespread agreement that organizational agility is increasingly becoming critical to achieving sustained competitive advantage, there is little consensus on what exactly constitutes organizational agility, or how it may be assessed and improved. The purpose of this paper is to contribute toward operationalization of the organizational agility construct through a high-level conceptual framework grounded in dynamic capabilities.

This is a conceptual paper that presents a new organizational agility framework, which draws from, and builds on, the existing literature.

This paper defines organizational agility as rapid, continuous and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and/or maintaining competitive advantage. The 5S Organizational Agility Framework proposes five dynamic capabilities (sensing, searching, seizing, shifting and shaping) underpinning organizational agility.

The framework presented in this paper contributes toward operationalization of the organizational agility construct.