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Within teacher education, many experienced in-service teachers routinely mentor pre-service teachers during teaching practicums. Notwithstanding the benefits pre-service teachers are meant to experience from these mentor–protégé relationships and experiences, recent research has demonstrated that mentors, too, may experience some (oftentimes unintended) potential benefits. The purpose of this paper is to further investigate such potential benefits within a Canadian secondary school physical education (PE) context.

The researchers employed a qualitative case study methodology. The three primary data sources included field observations/notes, journals and interviews. More specifically, over a ten-week period, the researchers made 26 field visits, observing two mentors’ interactions with five protégés before, during, and after PE class instruction; collected the two mentors’ ten journal entries, all made in response to researcher-provided writing prompts; and interviewed the two mentors, both individually and together.

The mentor teachers viewed the mentor–protégé relationship/experience as meaningful professional development, recognizing that it approximated a professional learning community. Relatedly, the mentor teachers experienced professional growth with respect to their own teaching identity and teaching practice.

This research could inform those who structure and/or coordinate mentoring research within teacher education programs so that they might place a more purposeful focus upon the potential and/or idealized outcomes for mentors (as well as for protégés). Given the single case study methodology, this research may lack generalizability to other educational contexts.

This research adds to the emerging body of research that investigates how mentoring may provide benefits to mentors. More specifically, this research suggests benefits to mentors relate, especially, to their own teaching identity and practice.

The issues involved in the construction of an expert system for retrieval are described, together with some of the techniques that have been used in artificial intelligence and information science to tackle them. The solutions adopted by the prototype expert system PLEXUS are described, with particular reference to the semantic processing that takes place. The paper concludes with a discussion of continuing issues on which work is currently proceeding.

This paper reports on a comparative evaluation of two computerised reference retrieval systems, INSTRUCT and PLEXUS. Instruct is a statistically‐based system based on best match searching and automatic index term weighting while Plexus uses expert systems techniques to improve access to a conventional Boolean search system. After an introduction to the retrieval techniques used by the two systems, their retrieval effectiveness is compared using a set of nineteen queries and 512 documents on the subject of gardening. The best results were obtained by using the terms suggested by the Plexus system as the basis for an Instruct search.

Touristic enterprises can significantly contribute to the economic and social well‐being of a community. One practical way to increase the birth of touristic enterprises in a community is to increase the supply of indigenous tourism entrepreneurs. To achieve this quest, it is necessary to determine the touristic enterprise creation process. Once this is accomplished, a community may then develop appropriate policies to stimulate tourism entrepreneurship. This paper presents a conceptualization of the tourism entrepreneurial process including research and management implications.

The author places the departure by the Change to Win Coalition from the AFL–CIO in contextual and theoretical terms. For context, it is argued that associational rights for U.S. wage-earners have historically and generally been subordinate to the rights of capital owners. As such, the rules regulating industrial relations tend to punish broad acts of wage-earner solidarity, channeling labor toward a strategy of achieving a larger share of the rewards of production through private contracts with employers. This has given birth to business unionism, a style of union representation characterized as exclusionary, neutral with regard to political party, business-like in operation, and accommodative to market capitalism. Presently, the internationalization of capitalism is challenging business unionism by exposing its contradictions and vulnerabilities. As political theory would predict, this is pressuring the AFL–CIO and affiliates to socialize labor–capital conflict. This shift, in turn, resulted in several major points of contention within the house of labor, leading to the departure of the Change to Win affiliates.

This paper aims to contribute a personal account of doing critical research that uses the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu and also that takes a feminist approach to research. It aims to reflect on what this might mean in order to understand information systems and their uses at work and in everyday life.

The approach is confessional and describes the way in which critical qualitative research was undertaken in specific areas – that of call centres in Northwest England, gender and the UK ICT labour market and PhD research into issues of gender and home e‐shopping.

The findings as such suggest that social theory and critical approaches to research can contribute to understanding of IS at work and in everyday life. The account discusses the complexity of applying social theories and how difficult theoretical tomes are to understand, especially for the novice researcher.

The paper highlights the importance of hearing the silent or silenced voices and letting stories be told. A theme throughout is how theory is linked to practice.

The paper contributes to the special issue call for reflexive essays written in simple terms with details about how and why particular social theories or approaches were adopted. This will be of value to PhD and IS researchers whose work is informed by social theory.