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One of Valuing People's central principles is that people with learning disabilities will be included in society. But how do service providers do that? This article suggests that instead of services' attention being directed towards needs and deficits, it is more important to concentrate on people's strengths and capacities. From the engagement in the mutual exchange of community involvement comes a sense of belonging, of safety, of importance and entitlement. A method is described that starts with an inventory of someone's capacity, then a corresponding list of the assets and resources of the community and finally building mutually beneficial partnerships between local disabled individuals and other individuals, organisations and associations.

CRITERIA FOR RESTRICTING ELIGIBILITY for social services present a bleak future for some people with a moderate learning disability and may have other social costs. There is another way: lower‐cost, flexible models of support which both meet the aspirations of the people themselves and provide a solution for local authorities. KeyRing's living support networks constitute a successful example.

In Control is a system of self‐directed support. This paper tells the story of its first two years and of the pilot implementation projects run in six local authorities. The key findings from the evaluation are that people are more self‐determined, people have a better sense of direction in their lives, people's support has improved, people's money situation has improved, people are improving their home situation and people's community lives are improving.

This article outlines the work being taken forward by In Control, an independent social enterprise and charity, with a range of innovative PCTs and local authorities, to explore how the concept of personalisation may be applied in health. The programme has been called Staying in Control, to reflect the need for joining together health and social care so that a person does not lose control when their health deteriorates and different funding streams and services come into play.

Sam Walton opened his first Wal‐Mart discount store in 1962. Today, Wal‐Mart is not only the world’s largest corporation but also the world’s most admired company, according to a 2003 Fortune magazine poll. Wal‐Mart is competitive and successful because it has been doing many things right. This article helps shed light on the rise of Wal‐Mart and the roots of its competitiveness. Business practitioners aspiring to succeed can learn a great deal from studying the Wal‐Mart way of doing business.

In 2006/2007, the Canadian academic library community came together in the largest national LibQUAL+^® consortium to conduct ARL library service quality survey. This paper aims to address how and why the national consortial project came about, the challenges for recruiting and managing participants, and what was learnt, together with possible future directions.

This paper uses a case study approach.

The research touches on the challenges planning and implementing LibQUAL+^® with such a large, diverse consortium, with its bilingual mandate and multiple library types, and what made the project successful and its limitations.

The most apparent accomplishment of this project was successful collection of a large, diverse data set for comparative analysis of services and facilities – a meaningful data set both for individual libraries seeking appropriate Canadian comparators and for analyses by region, institutional categories, etc.

A valuable result of the project was to engage more Canadian academic libraries in the process of service assessment. CARL's bi‐lingual consortium approach will provide a valuable example for other national organisations attempting to carry out similar projects.

This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.