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The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) has recently launched a major new project to address the growing international concern that existing business reporting models are inadequate, and that recent attempts to develop new solutions and reach a global consensus have failed. David Illingworth, President of the ICAEW, explores how key players in the market including investors, managers, regulators and commentators can begin to assess the underlying issues which need to be addressed and shape a reform program that meets their collective aspirations and needs.

This work concerns William Norman Illingworth [1902–1980]. Disillusioned with teaching in conventional schools and inspired by Rudolf Steiner [1861–1925] he founded Sangreal School, in 1947, and operated this until the early 1970s. Sangreal was what I describe as a “conservative alternative school”, employing methods and pursuing goals not found in most British schools of the period but, unlike avowedly progressive establishments, guided by socially conservative principles. The purposes of the work are both to rescue his/Sangreal’s story from obscurity and to encourage research to establish if other such schools have existed and, if so, to describe and analyse them in an effort to give the category conservative alternative school the recognition it properly deserves.

The method is a combination of life history/biography and case study of a specific school.

The story is interesting in its own terms and points to the existence of a hitherto unnoticed category in history of education.

This work may lead to the proper recognition of a neglected category.

This work deals with a school hitherto unknown to most people and may lead to the recognition of a new category.

Astronomy has experienced a rapid rate of discovery and change in the recent past, particularly because of the space program and general technological development. Through information gathered from artificial satellites, radio astronomy, orbiting observatories, and space probes, astronomy has advanced rapidly since the 1950s. This progress has also affected standard reference sources in the field.

The cause of construction problems is suggested as being the lack of industry cohesion. This can only be addressed successfully by design professionals and construction professionals working more closely together, i.e. considering buildability. Buildability is a problem of managing the transfer of appropriate knowledge about the construction process to the design process worker. It is not solely about the technicalities of the construction process. It is suggested that no buildability strategy which seeks to impose predetermined construction solutions will be readily accepted by design professionals. The development of a design buildability strategy which transfers construction process knowledge in such a manner as to be seen as an adviser on simplification, would not be seen by design professionals as a convergent approach to buildability. Such a strategy would represent just one of a range of strategies to achieving overall project buildability.

The results of a model based survey of contractors' planning engineers in France and the UK suggest that planned completion times for constructing an identical high‐rise in situ concrete framed structure are significantly and dramatically lower in France than in the UK. Average planned construction periods in France were 13 weeks, some 9 weeks faster than the UK average of 22 weeks. Since planned construction periods reflect past experience, French contractors apparently achieve superior levels of production performance whilst at the same time working fewer hours per week, utilizing directly employed workers and employing fewer supervisors. If such planned completion times are truly representative, the findings indicate comparatively poor UK contractor performance, and signify future problems for the British builder in the emerging European marketplace. The causes of such poor performance are complicated, but based on indicative French best practices: production is enhanced when scheduled overtime is avoided, a directly employed and mainly skilled workforce is engaged, and a maximum working time of 40 hours per week is the norm rather than the exception.

The objective of this longitudinal ethnography of a rural small town in Northern Sweden, following the presence and identifying the processes associated with an incoming entrepreneur, was to better understand entrepreneurship in a rural context. The significant shaping of entrepreneurship by context is increasingly recognised, with entrepreneurship in depleted communities being an important part of this research movement. This chapter is positioned at the conjunction of these literatures. The authors have studied this community for 10 years; regularly interviewing the entrepreneur and residents; attending meetings and making observations. The authors found that the entrepreneurial creation of garden provoked a raft of change, such that entrepreneurship reverberated throughout the town. To explain these effects, the authors developed the concept of entrepreneurial energy. Entrepreneurial energy is a vitality produced in and by entrepreneurship. It works, in part, as a role model, holding up examples of what can be done. But much more, the presence of entrepreneurial energy serves to invigorate others. It becomes amplified in new ways of doing, new ways of being, yet calcified in the entrepreneurial actions of others. The authors saw how it unleashed the latent, promoted the possible, to entrepreneurially revive the town.

It is important that agency advice and support for SMEs in rural areas is congruent with how business-owners perceive their needs and challenges. To explore how well matched these two sides are, this chapter investigates the difficulties faced by small businesses operating in rural southwest Scotland.

In-depth interviews with business influencers (those whose activities affect businesses either through application of policy initiatives, development of policy or the giving of business advice) and owner-managers of rural businesses compare and contrast the perceptions of the challenges of rurality for small businesses.

Mismatches are revealed between the concerns of rural business-owners and what business influencers understand them to be. Business influencers consider that structural weaknesses and a ‘lifestyle’ business culture in the region inhibit growth, but business owners are strategic in their business aspirations and approaches to growth. However, they are also highly critical of the promotion of the region and concerned about the misunderstanding of potential visitors that the region is remote and difficult to access.

This chapter reports experiences in a particular rural location; such experiences are typical of many rural regions and, thus, the findings should be transferable.

The region’s economic strategy focuses on reducing the significant prosperity gap with the rest of the country. Key to this is the development of indigenous business sectors. However, the policy interventions derived from a misapprehension of the constraints and underpinning culture of indigenous businesses are unlikely to be successful and may be counter-productive.

Contrasting the perspectives of those who do business with those who influence business reveals issues of understanding which need to be addressed.

Town Clerk's Office, Town Hall, Bethnal Green, E. 18th November, 1916. To the Chairman and Members of the Public Health Committee. Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, At a recent meeting of the Public Health Committee, the Chief Sanitary Inspector reported upon legal proceedings which had been unsuccessful owing to the case of “Hunt v. Richardson” decided by a King's Bench Divisional Court of five Judges on the 2nd June, 1916, and I then reported upon the legal aspect of the case.

This paper aims to provide an overview of developments in digitisation policy and practice at the National Library of Wales (NLW) from 1995 to 2007 and drawing out the lessons learnt.

A chronological overview of developments focusing on the pilot phase, policy statements of 2001 and 2005 and on specific projects that have been undertaken during this period.

Provides a comprehensive view of digitisation at NLW and its evolution over time as well as identifying some key strategic decisions and some important lessons learnt.

This paper aims to outline developments as they occurred at NLW and does not aim to place those developments, or any current or future strategies, in a wider context.

This paper provides the digitisation community with an account of how digitisation was adopted as a core function (at a relatively early stage) by a national repository and can be of value to those still considering implementing digitisation in earnest for the first time or are looking anew at their digitisation strategy.