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The aim of this paper is to detail the innovative campaign co‐developed by Words&Pictures and Specsavers to raise the caliber of Specsavers' profile in the optics profession among university optometry graduates, to produce a continuous flow of talent within the company, and to give customers the best service.

Adopting a collaborative approach, Specsavers' canvassed the opinions of its employees and joint venture partners to develop a new HR strategy to attract and nurture outstanding talent. In order to implement the new strategy, Specsavers turned to Words&Pictures, which created a high‐end internal brand, INsight, to showcase the new five‐part recruitment and development program.

Organizations that face similar recruitment challenges would do well to re‐assess the needs of the business, including the inter‐personal and communication skills required by their employees.

Working together, Specsavers and Words&Pictures combined their unique strengths to create a visually stunning, professional, practical, aspirational and fun suite of training materials for pre‐registration optometrists. This has helped to elevate Specsavers' pre‐registration optometrists' program above its competitors and positioned the company as unrivalled in its attitude towards employee acquisition, development and retention.

‘Why,’ asks Tom Howarth, High Master of St. Paul's, ‘is it considered an almost unspeakable human defect to have élitist tendencies?’ Either Mr Howarth is unobservant or he observes selectively.

It seems fitting, in this particular issue of Technical Education at the present time, for a former editor of an educational monthly — New Education — whose magazine changed ownership last December in somewhat dramatically sudden circumstances, to seize a second chance of looking forward to try to make out future trends. Is the Black Paper an off beat isolated phenomenon, soon to fizzle out of the second lease of life which Ted Short gave it at Easter? Or is it the first of a series of attacks on the steady reform of educational institutions and curriculum which has been going on over the last twenty five years? Is Tom Howarth, with his new views on culture and anarchy, a second Matthew Arnold, come to pluck English Education from the slough of despond into which it has been steadily sinking for years? Or is his book the last gasp from a fading corner of the educational scene, which has only lasted so long because class attitudes and institutions are so deeply ingrained into English society? It may be still too early to say. But it looks as though this sort of debate — or one very like it — will go on in the educational world into the forseeable future.

This chapter analyses the politics of bird hunting in relation to the empowerment of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in the European Union (EU), with specific reference to Malta’s first years of EU accession.

In particular, the analysis focuses on the activism of Maltese and International ENGOs – with special focus on Birdlife Malta and Birdlife International – on this issue, which is characterized by extensive EU legislation and by constant lobbying.

This chapter argues that ENGOs, both Maltese and European, were influential on State power in Malta, especially by resorting to the EU, and also being given prominence by the media. Yet the hunting lobby was influential too, and its influence on Malta’s main political parties is an overdetermining factor, which remained in place even after EU accession.

This chapter concludes that despite Malta’s EU accession, national political factors remain highly influential in the Maltese hunting issue, and that one can expect more antagonism in the years to come.

Purpose – We share experiences from the research process that expose the shortcomings and flaws of the different research production review mechanisms. Our aim is to highlight the resistance and paternalistic misunderstandings that characterise some processes when considering indigenous ‘subjects’.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter draws upon examples from primary source material as the basis for analysis and discussion. These examples are drawn from academic reports, correspondence to authors and media accounts. The critical approach is influenced by the theoretical works that address the influence and infiltration of ‘commonsense’ understandings, and the resistance to alternative academic inquiry and interpretation of indigenous sports participation issues in Australia.

Findings – The structure, resources and mechanisms available to the dominant alliance of dominant groups serve to curtail and suppress alternative research efforts.

Research limitations/implications – The available examples are not drawn from the broad field. Indeed, they are limited to those available via research circles of colleagues. Any conclusions should be considered within the notion of context specific rather than any broad generalisation.

While the use of the pragmatic sociology of critique has enjoyed increasing academic popularity, the relationship between justification and broader power relations remains unclear. Recent attention to the concept of ‘domination’ suggests the need for a greater focus on how employed public goods reinforce prevailing social arrangements. In this article we explore the public debate over the expansion of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas (so-called ‘fracking’) in the United Kingdom (UK). This technology has generated significant debate and controversy. Through a detailed examination of public inquiries into the technology we explore how different actors employ discursive strategies to justify their claims for the expansion or rejection of fracking. Through this analysis, the article identifies how some of these justifications enjoy precedence over others within the prevailing neoliberal political regime. By explaining how such a political regime is constituted, our study contributes to better understanding how different justifications support hegemonic political ideologies.

Although the healthy organisation has attracted the attention of researchers over the last decade and beyond, the concept remains poorly defined. Nonetheless, there would appear to be an underlying acceptance that health is a desirable state, and is one which is likely to enable the organisation to cope effectively with the challenges presented by its environment. Using financial measures as one index of the economically healthy organisation, this paper explores organisational health within two financially healthy and two financially unhealthy clothing companies in Northern Ireland. Statistical analyses reveal that each of the organisations was unhealthy for different reasons and in different ways. Furthermore, the findings suggest that “wealth” does not necessarily mean “health”, and it may in fact be indicative of organisational myopia rather than Utopia.