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The London Borough of Ealing Public Library Service installed a DS Module 4 system in summer 1984; by January 1985 all twelve branches and the Bibliographic Services Department were on‐line. This paper describes our experience of the Module 4 system to date, from initial choice to current performance.

Adopting a feminist constructionist perspective, this article proposes an analysis of the micro-level processes and dynamics of interpersonal, gendered, business relationships between female entrepreneurs, therefore constituting an extension to network theory in the women's entrepreneurship research field.

The qualitative research builds on a single, longitudinal case study of a successful, 15-years long collaboration between two female entrepreneurs. Qualitative data were collected over two years, through formal and informal interviews with the entrepreneurs, observations and complementary documentation. The data analysis is based on a grounded theory and narrative approach.

The article proposes a thick narrative of the evolution of the dyadic business relationship, and reveals the power of gender role stereotypes in its progressive formation and development.

The article produces situated knowledge about female entrepreneurs and strong interpersonal business ties. The limitations relate to the specificity of the case analysed, representing the viewpoint of privileged, white, Western, educated and wealthy female entrepreneurs. It therefore does not account for the diversity of women's entrepreneurship.

The article enriches and extends social network theory in the women's entrepreneurship field through analysing how gender is done in discursive and social practices at the interpersonal level. The case also constitutes an illustration of social feminism in women's entrepreneurial practice, challenging dominant gender stereotypes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore four women principals’ experiences with power in the course of their daily leadership. The data used in this exploration was collected through in‐depth interviews, conducted from a phenomenological perspective, during the second and third years of a three‐year study on the leadership experiences of the four principals. The thematic findings which emerged from this data included empowerment, positive power, traditional power and negative power, and are discussed in relation to three lenses of power: dominance or “power over”, facilitation or “power through”, and as energy and competence or “power with”. The four principals’ experiences were remarkable in that they were extensively engaged in interpreting, experiencing and using power as “power through” and “power with” rather than as “power over”. The findings from this research serve as examples of ways in which power is enacted by women leaders within traditional organizational settings, and the potential of their actions to positively transform school organizations and the experiences of those who work within them.

Can volunteering help people with mental health issues reclaim their lives? Claire Helman describes the Capital Volunteering project, which aims to tackle social exclusion by increasing volunteering opportunities across London.

Seclusion is the supervised containment of a patient, away from others, when immediately necessary to manage safety on a psychiatric inpatient ward. When seclusion is necessary, it should be used for the shortest time possible, with a regular multidisciplinary review of the patient’s mental and physical health, medication and risk guiding decisions around continuation or ending of this restrictive measure. However, many medical and nursing staff can be anxious about taking part in such reviews. Simulation has been used in many areas of medicine to help people to develop competence and confidence, in a safe setting where their own needs can be paramount. This paper aims to describe the use of a blended learning approach, including simulation, to build confidence and competence amongst healthcare professionals in the safe review of seclusion.

A multidisciplinary group, including input from individuals with lived experience of use of seclusion, put together a one-day training course, which included group debate exploring the relationship between seclusion and the Human Rights Act, guided discussion of videos exploring some aspects of practice and a half-day of simulation where multidisciplinary teams could act as the team reviewing a patient who had been secluded.

This paper found that the course’s blended learning approach helped participants to feel more confident in their understanding of several aspects of seclusion, including what their team discussions should include before and after seeing a patient and in knowing when to end a period of seclusion.

While simulation is slowly becoming a more familiar component of the undergraduate and postgraduate education offer in psychiatry, the authors are unaware of any evaluation of a dedicated simulation-based training course around reviews of seclusion.

Stress issues can have detrimental effects on staff wellbeing. Quest International, a UK fragrance specialist, has addressed the issue by forming its own counselling group, explains occupational stress consultant, Carole Spiers.

To study sexual deals, the Italian ethnologist Paola Tabet introduced an original frame of analysis, the “economico‐sexual exchanges” frame, which she conceives as a continuum, from marriage to prostitution. The purpose of this paper is to know if we have to accept the idea of a sexual social contract as a holistic way of understanding, like Carole Pateman, or whether we have to admit the heterogeneity of sexual transactions.

According to the social function of the contract presented by Yvon Pesqueux, this paper will try to seize the contractual forms of sexual transactions, developing at the same time in the logic of the psychological contract, in particular to approach more finely the notion of consent, a notion at the heart of the debates concerning economic sexuality and which cannot be reduced to the expression of personal freedom. Pateman's work is also too fundamental to be ignored and so the author summarizes the main ideas.

It can be said that the social reality of sexual transactions exists between two opposite contractual and anti‐contractual ideologies, between a gender idealistic point of view and a management realistic one. Individuals, men and women, are more or less free to sell or buy sexual services. If freedom exists, contracts can be spoken about; if not, a contractual point of view appears only as a justification for the strong.

The paper presents a sexual/gender point of view in the contractual theories.

Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by offering a conceptual toolbox that defines shadowing in terms of a set of framing practices and provides in‐depth insight into the methodological choices and challenges that organizational shadowers may encounter.

In this article, the authors explicate the specific framing practices in which researchers engage when taking an intersubjective approach to organizational shadowing. To demonstrate the value of viewing shadowing as framing, the paper grounds the theoretical discussion in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from three different ethnographic studies.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis of fieldwork experiences, the paper argues that organizational shadowing is constituted by three interrelated framing practices: delineating the object of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. These analytical constructs highlight specific activities with which shadowers are confronted in the field, namely foregrounding and backgrounding particular aspects in defining a given object of study, trying to keep this object in focus as the fieldwork unfolds, and making decisions about the degree to which the relationship with shadowees should be taken into account in understanding this object.

This article provides an in‐depth reflection on the subtle practices that constitute organizational shadowing. It offers a useful conceptual toolbox for researchers who want to use this method and demonstrates its operational value to help them understand how knowledge construction is the outcome of a coconstructive process that depends on a series of decisions negotiated in ongoing interactions with the actors under study.

Utilising data from 18 in‐depth case studies, this study seeks to explore training, development and human resource development (HRD) practices in European call centres. It aims to argue that the complexity and diversity of training, development and HRD practices is best understood by studying the multilayered contexts within which call centres operate. Call centres operate as open systems and training, development and HRD practices are influenced by environmental, strategic, organisational and temporal conditions.

The study utilised a range of research methods, including in‐depth interviews with multiple stakeholders, documentary analysis and observation. The study was conducted over a two‐year period.

The results indicate that normative models of HRD are not particularly valuable and that training, development and HRD in call centres is emergent and highly complex.

This study represents one of the first studies to investigate training and development and HRD practices and systems in European call centres.

My first memory is of my mother’s first memory of me She’s told me this story so many times that I feel like I’m telling the story from my own memory. As if I remember being in the delivery room… “Boy I remember that labor I had with you! Lord Jesus! You was the worst of all of ’em.” “You came out weighing ten pounds and five ounces.” “And once you came out, the doctors and all the nurses just looked at you like they was in shock. Then they kept calling other doctors in to come and look at you.” “But they wouldn’t let me see you. My legs was still propped up with that sheet in the way. So I couldn’t see nothin’.” “And they just kept calling more doctors in, and all the doctors kept saying the same thing:” Doctors: We’ve never seen anything like this! “But they still wouldn’t let me see you. Finally I just started yelling, ‘let me see my child. What’s wrong with my baby?!’” “The doctor finally looked at me and said ‘Ma’am, this is the cleanest baby I’ve ever seen.’ They gave you to me and you didn’t have any fluid or blood on you. Not one drop.” perhaps all the blood was used up from hundreds of years of doing nothing but bleeding When the doctor cut the umbilical cord, how different was that cut from the cut his great, great, great, great, great-grandfathers made when they cut us off from our African mother culture and all that was life-giving to me? and my life… a testimonial to the blade My earliest memory is of being two or barely three years old, walking into the kitchen and watching my mother change my little brother’s diaper. I asked her a question about the diapers. I can’t remember what I said, but her response was “I’m going to put YOU in one of these diapers, if you pee on yourself again.” I don’t know why she was so upset, seeing that when they brought us here on enslavement ships, they packed us like animals, forcing us to piss right where we were – on ourselves and on anyone next to, or below us. And it seems like I’ve been pissing on myself and everyone around me – ever since. And it seems I’ve been getting pissed on, ever since. So, what’s the big deal mama? I remember the first time I was with a girl. I was three or four. Her name was Chasa Palamore – and she was three. Her brothers pushed me and her into doing it once in the alley and another time in their oldest brother’s basement bedroom. I don’t think we ever really did anything; just naked and grinding. And it seems like I’ve been making love in alleys and dark hidden-away basements, ever since with far-away people still watching and cheering me on. yeah, over and over I attempt to make love but after the applause dies down everyone – including me – just ends up getting fucked and I can trace this one too, back to the white slaveowning sucker he wanted Lucile to have high priced babies so he forced me to fuck her And that can’t be washed away with constitutional suds when you create human breeding Farms, you produce studs and we still walk the streets, reproducing the culture whitey produced in us. I remember being four or five years old, living on 68th & Justine. Until I left home at 17, every place I ever lived was all black. The only white person on the block was my mother. But we still think she was a black woman trapped in a white woman’s body. I remember when me and my brothers would get into fights on the block. All the kids would gather around and sing: It’s a fight! It’s a fight! It’s a Nigga and a White. Gimme skin Gimme skin The Nigga gonna win Being 100% certain that I was black, the song never bothered me much. I’d just stand there amazed thinking, “These kids have got to be pretty stupid if they think I’m white.” These were the same folks I played with everyday. I remember having this thought that I didn’t have the vocabulary to express. The thought was like “Hey, I’m one of y’all, you idiots, Don’t you get it? How y’all gone let this shit split us up like that. Later I was to learn about the house Negro and the field Negro, and how our enslavers used “divide and conquer” to cause division and disunity amongst their captives. For hundreds of years, they’ve used our differences to cultivate division and hostility among us. They used everything from age to skin color to divide us. So when I stood in the middle of Justine about to fight, I was experiencing the lingering effects of the latter. I remember the Columbus song in fourth grade: In 14 hundred, ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue He sailed, and sailed, and sailed, and sailed! and found this land for me and you it was cold blooded murder I was a helpless nine year old child and they created that vicious lie and thousands more just like it and fired them into my defenseless mind it was cold blooded murder murdering my sense of self murdering my identity preventing the possibility that I could connect to a source of pride severing the connection between me and all that could give life to my spirit yeah I know of other truths now but can a fact learned at 30 overcome a lesson internalized at seven? I remember the winters on 43rd Street – a block east of King Drive. I remember my mother sending me and my brother out in the snow with a bucket. We’d fill the bucket up with snow, and stop to have a snowball fight and play in the snow. Then we’d take our bucket full of snow up to our apartment on the third floor, and set the bucket by the stove so the snow could melt. Once the snow melted, we opened the back of the toilet, and poured the water in, so we could flush the day’s waste. I remember eating oatmeal for every meal. Oatmealf or breakfast Oatmeal for lunch Oatmeal for dinner and for dessert? Oatmeal cookies and I didn’t think about it then, the way I think about it now. I didn’t know I had a right to live better than that I remember reading my first book. I was 19 years old and in the Navy. It was Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.” Shortly afterwards, I’d read my first non-fiction work. It was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. In Malcolm I found the answers to all the questions the white world could not answer. Like the question of why in the fuck was I 19 years old and just starting to read! Much of what we accomplish is motivated by the belief that others have in our ability. I went through an educational system that couldn’t even identify my abilities let alone believe in them. Low tracked and labled I get sad when I think of the potential that was wasted in those years that I languished in a system that destroyed my belief in my own worth. Though tragic, that’s nothing compared to the potential destroyed by capitalism and slavery. What would our future African civilizations have looked like if Europeans hadn’t murdered us and our continent? Would we have performed cold fusion by now? Perhaps we would have produced a renewable energy source that didn’t harm the ozone layer, or pollute the air we breathe. If sons of slaves could produce a revolution in blood storage and perform the world’s first successful heart transplant, what could we have done by now if capitalism, slavery, and racism hadn’t gotten in our way? as a result, the most beautiful thing we’ve been able to produce under this oppressive system, is our struggle against it I remember last week Just this past thanksgiving I was at my brother Mike’s house. Mike is the oldest, then Carole, then Tony, then me, then Sean. Everyone but Sean was there and Mama had made her ridiculously delicious Sweet Potato pies. When I was little, whenever mama made those pies, people we know would come from all around the city to get a couple slices. I remember one year, lot’s of folks were in and out of the house, and a lot of pies came up missing, and soon they were all gone. We always thought someone was stealing them. But that night, this past Thursday, Mike finally told us it was him. Mike didn’t grow up with us. He and Carole lived with their aunt, and they were even poorer than we were. He was visiting with us that year in the late 70s. He told us he ate seven pies and hid two of them. We all had a very good laugh about that. But someone asked a question that night that never got answered “Why in the world did you eat SEVEN pies?” It’s not like Mike was overweight. He was slim, like me. Here’s what I believe America makes life very uncertain for Black people so many times we get all we can while it’s there, cause you don’t know if it will be there tomorrow Mike grew up not knowing where his next meal was coming from. you figure out the rest Hey, maybe that’s why I was born so clean maybe I knew that life on the outside of the womb wasn’t so certain so I consumed all I could while I was in there I remember tomorrow I saw it a few times in my dreams My great, great, great, great-grand daughter was reminiscing with her younger brother about how they’d wrestled in the grass when they were children. Then they discussed the meeting they have tomorrow with other teachers in the New Afrikan School System, in the United Republic of New Africa, in the southern and eastern regions of what used to be called the United States. They met and poured a libation calling out the names of all the ancestors who struggled to liberate our people I remember the work I must do to ensure my name is called