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I have worked in libraries for nearly three decades and have adopted as a maxim “the right books in the right hands at the right time”. For a variety of reasons it is not always possible to have the “right book” as such and a good working substitute is often a photocopy. One major area where photocopies are a practical means of provision is in our student collection, the Reserve Collection, where one or at most three copies are held. This makes available information which should be read at an appropriate place in a course. We believe that in the future a financial penalty will be incurred and will be hard to meet. This type of copying will fall under “systematic single copying”, an iniquitous catch‐all phrase. In the past we have taken pride in the fact that with efficient management by the library, co‐operation with academic staff and good sense from our students we could provide whatever was needed with a high level of certainty. The effect of militant copyright holders if unchecked will seriously impede us in achieving our aims and this will be one more factor in turning our graduates from people with wide information horizons into narrowly trained technocrats. We must ask if this is in the national interest. We are and will be in intense competition with other nations. Wrong use of copyright alone will not create this adverse state; it is but one element along with the high rate of inflation in books and journals, VAT at above zero rating, uncritical publication, repetitive publication, increasingly adverse staff/student ratios, bureaucratic dominance, policies that enforce a blinkered approach and deny imagination and so on.

On its stated terms as “a descriptive conspectus” of the 550 titles registered in British Library publications 1988, together with the many newsletters and priced and unpriced ephemeral literature emanating from its multifarious services and agencies, this careful compilation will no doubt fulfil a need for students and teachers of librarianship and information science here and abroad. There is a select bibliography of two pages and a 28‐page index. Proof reading is excellent, just a few slips, e.g. the Dainton Committee was set up in 1967 not 1957, IOLR had c.400,00 books ands serials, not 4 million.

This chapter analyzes art-based methods that focus on the deliverables required from the student in an academic exchange.

The study will focus on a group of second-year Master’s students who, accompanied by an artist-coach and a researcher, were asked to produce an artwork reflecting their views on the technical or theoretical issues in accounting. These works were invented and realized in a four-day workshop and exhibition organized by the students.

Student submissions were found to fit into four types of outcomes: instrumental, developmental, directed, and embedded. The first two are produced by the processes mobilized in art-based teaching, while the second two are linked to the specific form of the artwork engaged in by the teaching process. Observing that few theories have explored the range of outcomes attributable to the form, the author draws on the experiment as well as Winnicot’s concepts of transition and intermediate objects to define the specific transformative quality of art forms. By investigating the special area where the delimitations between the self and the world are blurred and changing, the art-maker student adopts a posture of a natural researcher who creates knowledge at the moment he defines his self — or to put it differently, through art-making, the student produces his/her self and his/her knowledge at the same time.

Recognizing that empowering the complexity of expression liberates access to knowing abilities and independent critical learning.

Imperial College in 1969 looked like a man's world; it was certainly difficult to locate a ladies’ room which was not apparently hastily constructed in a tight space as an afterthought to a great design. Yet I joined a powerhouse of women. Joan Woodward had already tempted Dorothy Wedderburn from Cambridge and together they had secured large sums of research monies from the Research Councils, Fords, Pilkingtons, ICI, the Post Office, the Coal Board, government departments, and other supporters who were each captivated by the promise of the work and rare combination of intellectual strength and practical concerns of its leader. With research funds flowing in abundance, driving passions to explore further the relationship between structure, technology, and performance, and very few specific commitments, Joan and Dorothy set about recruiting what was to be one of the largest groups of young researchers in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s.

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.

Achieving quality standards in postgraduate education, particularly among Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students, can be challenging. In addition to the diverse educational and cultural backgrounds of these students, thesis writing frequently involves the development of new skills associated with the comprehension of a large volume of information, critical analysis and the development of an academic writing style. Many students need support in one or all of these key areas. Universities currently provide a number of different writing support activities to address students' needs. The purpose of this study is to report on a writing support intervention that employed a specialist in academic writing to support HDR students in the business faculty.

Following a two‐year period, the intervention was evaluated to assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of this support using qualitative methods. The results of this study are presented and discussed from different angles. First, a lecturer in academic writing support outlines her observations and reflection on the value of individual consultations and students' progress. Second, the attitudes and experience of students and their supervisors to this service are discussed. This is followed by the faculty senior management view with regard to the effectiveness and efficiency of this service.

This research found that both students and their supervisors expressed satisfaction with the service offered. Also it was found that the writing quality of submitted theses is improving; the costs of thesis editing have reduced; HDR students appear to be more satisfied with and confident of their academic writing; the attractiveness of the PhD program has been enhanced, as judged by the increase in PhD enquiries and the quality of potential applicants.

The results reported here indicate that the intervention was successful. However, the sample size was relatively small and the HDR candidates and supervisors were drawn from only one faculty in one university.

The study provides some recommendations that could be taken into account by senior management and academic staff in order to set up and deliver a faculty‐based writing support service for HDR students, which would bring benefits to students, their supervisors, faculties and universities.

The value of this research is that the writing program was proven to be beneficial for universities to support research students in the development of their writing skills, which in turn, could improve the quality of thesis and ensure on time completion.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of reflexivity in ensuring quality in the conduct of qualitative organizational and management (especially case study based) strategic performance management research. It argues the importance of research reports to include a reflexive account of the comings and goings about the circumstances that may have impacted upon the research to justify its validity. A project on UK‐regulated public utilities is used to illustrate the benefit of such an account and how it may be presented.

The paper draws on a two‐year longitudinal research project, which used longitudinal case studies to examine the impact of regulatory policy incentives on the strategic management of UK monopoly network utilities, to present a developed approach for presenting reflexive accounts in qualitative research. It focuses on the longitudinal tracer methodology that allows a close examination of detailed yet holistic operational activities, which is particularly good for strategic performance management research.

The paper suggests that the more explicit the reflexive appreciation during the conduct of the research, the better it satisfies the conditions of reliability and validity which are themselves well‐known prerequisites for ensuring quality in qualitative research.

Strategic performance management research is characterised by a need to examine closely detailed internal decision‐making processes. Such an approach is supported by the emerging activity‐based view of management, known as strategy‐as‐practice, that concerns understanding micro‐activities of the organization. The provision of a reflexive account in research reports alerts the reader to these equivocal conditions under which the findings were derived.

The paper concludes that an appreciation of the epistemological and ontological positions of the tracer methodology has an impact upon the way in which a reflexive account of organizational research should appropriately be presented. It suggests some potential issues to include in the presentation of reflexive accounts.