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KENT is one of the more beautiful of England's counties and one of the richest in ancient history. From the days of early invasions it has been in the forefront of national progress, habitation and culture; the number of family seats and landed gentry estates increased each decade, and by the eighteenth century Kent was among the premier parts chosen as a place of residence for the aristocracy, and those wishing to join that select circle. No contemporary history of that period was complete without reference to the families responsible for building the many lovely houses, landscaping the fallow countryside and populating the busy county towns.

This paper was read at the Library Association Conference, Resource Centres in Schools, at Loughborough University of Technology in October 1971. It describes some of the more sophisticated American Resource Centres and deals with a situation a step or two away from general practice in this country. The author reports what he saw and how the centres are used, and so perhaps suggests both where and where not to aim in developing Resource Centres here.

Each member of the Journal’s Editorial Advisory Board reviews the state of empowerment in today’s organizations.

This paper is the first in a regular series of articles in JFBM that will share “a conversation with” thought leaders who are active in the family business space. The world of family business is, like many other arenas, constantly evolving and as the authors learn more about how and why families “do business” the approaches and tools for working with them also evolve. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate further new research in areas that practically affect family businesses and to “open the door” to practical insights that will excite researchers and provide impetus for new and exciting study. The specific purpose of this paper is to explore “what is strong governance.” There has been much interest in governance lately yet there is a tendency to treat governance in a formulaic way such that, at the moment, the notion that every family business must have a family council or a formal structure in order to be considered “effective” and “successful” predominates. The authors’ panel challenges and discusses this notion drawing on the experience and knowledge as family business advisors, consultants and owners.

The impetus for this particular conversation is a result of a brainstorming conversation that Lorna Collins and Barbara Murray held in February 2014 where they focussed on “how JFBM can encourage and stimulate researchers to engage in aspects of research that makes a difference to the family business in a practical way.” This paper reports a conversation between Barbara Murray (Barbara), Ken McCracken (Ken) and Martin Stepek (Martin), three leading lights in the UK family business advising space, all of whom have been involved in running or advising family businesses for more than three decades, held in August 2015. The conversation was held via telephone and lasted just over 60 minutes. Lorna Collins acted as moderator.

Strong governance is not just about instituting a “family council” or embedding formal governance mechanisms in a family business. Evolutionary adaption by family members usually prevails such that any mechanism is changed and adapted over time to suit and fit the needs of the family business. Many successful family businesses do not have recognized “formal” governance mechanisms but, it is contended, they are still highly successful and effective. Future areas of research in governance are also suggested.

This paper contributes to the family business discourse because the debate it reports challenges the basic assumptions upon which much consulting and advisory practice is conducted. It also challenges the notion of “best practice” and what is “new best practice” and how is it that any “best practice” is determined to be “best.” Furthermore, the panel provides insights in to the “impact of family dynamics on governance” and “the impact of family dynamics on advisors.” The paper content is original in that it provides an authentic and timely narrative between active family business practitioners who are also scholars and owners.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

Consecration is the process by which producers in creative fields become canonized as “greats.” However, is this the end of the story? Research on consecration focuses on the drivers of consecration but pays little attention to the post-consecration period. Furthermore, the research ignores the dynamics of consecration. To address these gaps, we examine the changing fortunes of a consecrated artist – the musician Phil Collins. We identify the ways in which three actors (fans, critics, and peers) assemble for consecration, disassemble for deconsecration, and reassemble for reconsecration. Examining the changing public image and commercial fortunes of Collins as a solo artist between 1980 and 2020, we identify an N-shaped process of rise-fall-rise that we call the Phil Collins Effect. This effect offers a new way of thinking about how cultural producers gain, lose and regain status in their fields.

AS J. L. Hobbs shows so clearly in his recent book, the interest in local history is growing enormously at present. The universities, training colleges and schools, as well as the institutions of further education, are all making more use of local studies—geographical, economic, social and historical—in their regular courses, in their advanced work, and in their publications.

The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.