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Gender in the workplace. Is it still an issue? While it is increasingly easier in the early 21st century for women to work, manage, and take positions of high responsibility in American business, some issues and difficulties still remain. This series of vignettes touches on some difficult situations—for both women and men—involving sexual and romantic relationships in the workplace, decisions on whether to start a family, dress codes, family obligations, and sexual harassment.

Argues that while engineering decisions can have a significant impact on the fortunes of a manufacturing business, the methods of evaluation currently available are limited in their ability to predict, accurately, comprehensively and reliably, the full financial effect of such decisions. Proposes the creation of a “whole business simulator” (WBS) from the elements of a computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system and specialist simulation modules. Argues that the system would be capable of evaluating any engineering decision by generating the time‐phased financial performance of the simulated company in the form of standard accounting reports. Describes a demonstration system which has been developed to prove the viability of the concept.

The aim of this paper is to examine open access ready reference suites.

The paper discusses various reference sources represented in the open access domain of the web.

The paper finds that, in spite of the variety of open access reference suites mentioned, it is still advisable to be on the lookout for new developments, as some highly relevant sources are not available in any of them, especially some of the best open access subject encyclopaedias in the sciences and social sciences.

The paper provides useful reviews of various open access reference sources.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of expatriate adjustment through naturally occurring data. Specifically, through an investigation of three e‐mails sent to the author by a friend, Doug, the paper explores the notion that adjustment is a fluid concept and that through qualitative research methods it is possible to appreciate the expatriate experience in the context of an expatriate's “whole life” of experiences. This is in contrast to positivist approaches to the study of adjustment which offer limited snapshots of adjustment at particular moments in time.

The paper investigates three e‐mails sent by Doug to the author. The e‐mails constitute a form of naturally occurring data, and through forms of narrative analysis the e‐mails are able to be examined to throw light on the process of expatriate adjustment.

The paper highlights ways in which qualitative research methods generally, and specifically when used in relation to expatriates, enable a fuller understanding of the processes of “adjustment” that expatriates experience and its relationship to their life as a “work in progress”. This type of research approach and analysis complements the more positivist study of expatriates. In some aspects it supports research findings on adjustment, but it serves to humanize the independent expatriate and their experience.

The research is a case study of only a single subject. The paper suggests the potential for using naturally occurring data in the study of expatriates and independent expatriates in particular.

Stories of the experiences of expatriation offer insightful and “real” access to the lived experience of the expatriate. In this sense, they can be much more powerful than other forms of cross‐cultural training.

The paper highlights the importance of naturally occurring data and the need to consider “whole lives” in the past and present, of research “participants”.

This chapter contrasts two “careers in dope” (Waldorf, 1973), one a Hispanic crack dealer and the other a White trafficker of powder cocaine. The first dealer worked openly on the street, in the urban style; the latter dealt indoors, exclusively through networks of kin and friends, the only way to sell drugs in the suburbs. This chapter seeks to establish “suburban” drug sales as a particular modality, with dynamics specific to its context.

Two in-depth case cases are examined. They are drawn from a larger set of oral interviews that explore the life histories of drug dealers, with an emphasis on how they sold marijuana and cocaine, and how and why they quit selling.

First, the suburban style of drug sales has much to do with the mitigated risks White people face as dealers. Second, suburban dealing illuminates the limits of conventional economic theory to explain drug dealing universally.

Because suburban drug deals happen among friends and kin relations they are never anonymous. Making sense of economic transactions among intimates raises a number issues fundamental to economic anthropology: the ambivalence of gifts in socialeconomic relationships, and more generally the integration of economic phenomena in social dynamics.

A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities.

This research analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews with adult siblings and their elderly parents through the lens of assemblage theory.

This paper advances a conceptulisation of the family as an evolving assemblage of components, including individual members; material possessions and home(s); shared values, goals, memories and practices; prominent familial attributes of love and care; and marketplace resources. Three features of the assemblage come to the fore in senior families: the fluid meaning of independence for the elderly parent, the evolution of shared family practices and the trajectory of the assemblage that is a function of its history and future.

This research focuses on a stage of family life that has been under-theorised; applies assemblage theory to the family collective, demonstrating that a family can be conceptualised as an ever-evolving assemblage of human and non-human components, and this is a useful lens for understanding how senior families “do” family; and argues for a broader notion of family – one that is not household-centric or focused on families with young children, that encompasses members and materiality and that foregrounds the dynamic, evolving nature of family life.