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Suggests that commitment and flexibility have often been identified as important outcomes of HRM practice. However, the relationships between different facets of employee commitment and flexibility have not been extensively studied, while most attention has been given to organizational and labour market flexibility rather than personal flexibility. Argues that flexible organizations require senior managers who display both personal and strategic flexibility. Points out that these qualities are likely to be positively associated with some forms of commitment rather than others, at a time when there is much discussion about employability and the changing nature of psychological contracts. Presents an evaluation of a major senior manager development programme in a UK National Health Service region which was designed to enhance organizational and personal flexibility. Puts forward evidence on its impact on various facets of employee commitment, using a longitudinal/control group research design.

The current policy context demands that health service providers demonstrate that services are effective, efficient, value for money and of good quality. Recent Government interest in intermediate care has increased pressure on day hospitals in particular to supply such evidence, because they face competition for their core services (such as rehabilitation care) from other community‐based providers. This review was conducted as part of a small study to evaluate a day hospital service in North London. Findings suggest that the outcomes of day hospital care are especially difficult to appraise because of the highly variable nature of both individual facilities and the needs and capabilities of patients attending. Traditional quantitative methods, such as randomised controlled trials or the use of standardised tools to assess treatment outcomes, face severe methodological problems owing to this variability. Three problems in particular would appear to hamper such research: comparability difficulties, owing to great variations in facilities and patient profiles; defining outcomes, because varying need may result in very different intended treatment outcomes, and determining complete costs, because patients rarely receive day hospital treatment in isolation from other health and social care services. The review suggests therefore that future researchers take a more user‐focused and qualitative research approach to the evaluation of day hospital care, such as by evaluating joint care plans with patients and staff, by assessing costs, by following small numbers of users through treatment and by studying users' and carers' views of (and preferences for) care.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the self‐initiated repatriation experience of native professionals as they return to the labour market in the Republic of Ireland of their own volition and without the support of an employer.

A mixed methodology was employed to gather the data. In total, 40 responses were received from an initial open solicitation calling for research participants. Following a short survey receiving 34 responses, individuals who had returned without the aid of an employer to the Republic of Ireland and were willing to participate in further research were invited to participate in either a focus group discussion or in‐depth individual interviews. Ultimately, there were seven participants in the focus group and eleven individual in‐depth interviews.

The study found that the experiences of those in this study returning of their own volition and those of the more traditional repatriate do not seem to differ significantly across the facets of adjustment relating to adjustment in the general home country environment and adjustment to home country nationals, although subtle variations may be found. The main differences may be found when one investigates the facet of adjustment to work. Given that those returning of their own initiative are not returning to a position within a parent company, they must seek out their own employment. This adds a further source of stress and upheaval to an already difficult repatriation process.

This is an exploratory study and hence requires further empirical verification. Nonetheless the study provides some useful signposts for future study in the area.

This research is unique in that it bridges a significant lacuna in the existing international human resource management literature by concentrating on the self‐initiated repatriation experience (SRE). This research is all the more important given that increasing numbers of individuals have returned to Ireland to seek work at their own discretion with the advent of the Celtic Tiger.

Disasters and other emergencies are increasing, with millions of people affected by events like earthquakes, fires and flooding. The use of mobile emergency alert systems (MEAS) can improve people’s responses by providing targeted alerts based on location and other personal details. This study aims to understand the factors that influence people’s willingness to share the personal information that is needed to provide context-specific messaging about a threat and protective actions.

Drawing on protection motivation theory (PMT), this study proposes and tests a model of willingness to use personalised MEAS that incorporates key factors related to an individual’s appraisal of a potential threat (i.e. perceived vulnerability and severity) and coping capacity (i.e. response efficacy and self-efficacy), with deterrents like response cost and privacy concern. This study uses survey data from 226 respondents in New Zealand and SmartPLS to assess the model.

The results show how willingness to use MEAS is influenced by people’s appraisal of an emergency threat and their perception of how using MEAS would help them to cope effectively. Fear and perceived severity are significant motivators of MEAS use, along with coping appraisal. However, when the negative influences of privacy concern and response cost are strong enough, they can dissuade use, despite knowing the risks.

The study addresses a gap in research on the use of alert systems like MEAS, which require sharing of personal information and continuous engagement such as the real-time disclosure of one’s location. It confirms the significance of factors not studied in prior research, such as privacy concerns, that can dissuade use. This study also extends the application of the PMT in the context of emergency management.

ONE MUST BEGIN with Dickens. A chapter by Christopher Hibbert in Charles Dickens, 1812–1870: centenary volume, edited by E. W. F. Tomlin, and The London of Charles Dickens, published by London Transport with aid from the Dickens Fellowship, make a similar study here superfluous; both are illustrated, the latter giving instructions for reaching surviving Dickensian buildings. Neither warns the reader of Dickens's conscious and unconscious imaginative distortion, considered in Humphrey House's The Dickens World. Dickens himself imagined Captain Cuttle hiding in Switzerland and Paul Dombey's wild waves saying ‘Paris’; ‘the association between the writing and the place of writing is so curiously strong in my mind.’ Author and character may be in two places at once. ‘I could not listen at my fireside, for five minutes to the outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead.’ (Our Mutual Friend)

EVERY method employed by librar ns to bring books to the notice of readers may be justified It is thus desirable to devote an occasional issue of THE LIBRARY WORLD to this attractive subject. Our writers take differing views, but there is always a single aim in their work: to bring right book and reader into acquaintance. We might have to meet the challenge, which indeed one of our writers implies, that such book display may deflect the Library from its original, rightful purpose. Until these terms are defined such a challenge is a begging of the question. Often we have mentioned the question, For what public is the public library working? Was it intended to serve as an auxiliary, and then an extension, of the official education system? It has always indeed been more and less than that. Our founders were able to argue that libraries would withdraw men from beer and ill‐company, but from the first they probably failed to do that, and made their appeal to the intelligent elements in the community. As they developed and public education waxed, there grew up an enormous literature, available in early years in small quantity, the aim of which was entertainment only, and there survived—there survives still—a notion which was based on an earlier conception of books, that to read was somehow educative and virtuous, whatever was read. Librarians hold this notion in some measure to‐day, although the recent success of twopenny libraries which are mainly devoted to the entertainment type of literature must have made them revise the view somewhat.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.