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Countless organisations have developed “lists” of management competencies based on behavioural criteria. The objective of this competency development is to build a more competent managerial group in the context of a rapidly changing environment. This paper argues that most sets of “management competencies” are developed without recognition of their inherent contradictions and without due regard to their contextuality. Through the use of storytelling as a methodology, two case histories are outlined to show how competence is subject to, firstly, subjective interpretation and preference and, secondly, to the specific context in which behaviour takes place. The implications for management and organisational development are then discussed.

This paper investigates the usefulness of textbook and company approaches to developing managerial skills and competencies. It suggests that textbooks, based on an “experiential” approach to skill building, are contradictory in that they ultimately privilege predispositions over training in the practice of behaviours. The development of managerial skills therefore, is restricted by the individual's predispositions towards behaving in a certain way. In addition, the paper argues that the managerial competency approach used by many organizations, and also reflected in textbooks, fails to appreciate the predominance of the situation or context in determining how managers behave. Ultimately, the education of business students and managers, on courses at university and in‐company, dealing with managerial skills are deficient because “skills” cannot be abstracted from either the person or the context. The idea of managerial competence as a fact of being is illusory, managers are always and constantly being competent or incompetent.

This purpose of this paper is to examine the role of engagement and empowerment in “Transforming Care”, for people with a learning disability. The aim is to shift the balance of power so that people are able to live ordinary lives in the community, in the home they choose, close to people they love. It shares ideas to support people to take control over their own lives and to influence the system, so that it works with people, rather than “doing to” people.

The paper examines barriers and enablers to people having their rights as citizens. So that people have as much choice and control as they are comfortable with to live an ordinary life (bearing in mind any legal restrictions). The paper includes people’s involvement in system/service redesign. It critiques traditional views of looking at language, participation and power. The authors have used the language throughout which people have told us they prefer as a descriptor.

The authors present a framework for looking at the power of, and around, people with a learning disability who have mental health issues or have displayed behaviour that can challenge services.

This paper offers advice on how to address power imbalances at individual level and at organisational/system level. It looks at the language we use, the information we share and how we work with experts by experience to ensure we can transform care and support and enable people to live ordinary lives as citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

Research Governance has been introduced to regulate research involving National Health Service (NHS) patients and staff but the process is lengthy and bureaucratic and has improved little since its introduction. The paper seeks to investigate changes over time.

A comparison between two studies, one in 2003‐2004 and the second in 2004‐2005, provided the opportunity of observing the process of Research Governance as it was developing. Both studies included postal questionnaire surveys and interviews with study participants.

In order to achieve Research Governance approval, application forms have to be completed, reviews undertaken, sponsors and indemnity information identified and honorary contracts from individual PCTs applied for. Honorary contracts can require references and health and Criminal Records Bureau checks. The process reduces the time available for research and employs large numbers of people, yet is still inefficient. Some of the requirements reduce the quality of the research and researchers' rights are marginalised.

The studies took place in a rapidly changing research environment. Further studies should continue to assess the situation and report any progress in making Research Governance less onerous for researchers.

There is an urgent requirement to investigate how procedures can be simplified and made less bureaucratic and costly, and to protect the rights of researchers. Without this, primary care research will be seriously disadvantaged and may become impossible to pursue.

The study compares process over time and shows that achieving Research Governance approval is seriously limiting research in primary care.

OUR readers may be amused this month by the microfilm imaginings of our correspondent in “Letters on Our Affairs,” but there is undoubtedly a more marked disposition now than formerly to reduce to a mechanism many of the usual routines of libraries. We suppose routine is always mechanical, is repetitive and, for the enterprising ambitious library worker, a matter of boredom. How far the “electronic brain” and other more recent developments of science can be adapted to our simple processes remains to be seen, but all experiment is good even if it does not survive the initial stage. What is to be most feared in any profession is the standardizing inflexibly of its techniques ; that way lies its old age, perhaps its petrification. It is for this reason that we welcome such things as those we have already discussed at times in our pages—the central cataloguing experiment of Harrods, the punched‐card vouchers and other records sponsored (so far as libraries are concerned) by Mr. T. E. Callender, the highly mechanised method of classing propounded by Dr. Ranganathan, the placing of D.C. numbers on the title pages of the books they publish by Jonathan Cape and Harrap, the visible fines receiving box and many more such things. No one uses them all. They free librarians, it is urged, for more specifically library service. We hope that they do. We have always before us the undoubted truth that the good man scraps methods that are obsolescent and the librarian (if one now exists) who is not a business man—especially if he is charged with a large library—is a somewhat pathetic person.