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Gives the highlights of the 2004 annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA) held in Orlando, Florida, in June 2004. These included differing viewpoints on publishing and licencing scholarly work and technology trends.

Examines how the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, West Yorkshire, UK, has employed freelance life coaches to help local government staff in their careers and general well being.

Provides a description of the nature and benefits of life coaching from the senior occupational health adviser for the council, Susan Gee. Includes comments from two of the life coaches used by the council, Alison Tempest and Lisa Lawton. Quotes employees who have been able to make positive changes to their jobs and lives thanks to receiving life coaching.

Discovers that life coaching can lead to a reduction in sickness absenteeism and a lowering of stress levels among employees.

Highlights a creative and innovative way to help employees to stay well and happy at work.

In the light of impending changes that will affect the MCB publishing enterprise, explores the leadership strategies which the owners have pursued. These comprise: management action learning; systems development; mentoring and coaching, and structured change. Concludes with personal experiences of members of the management teams in different departments.

The purpose of this paper is to describe learning gained from involving service users and carers as researchers in an action research study. The researchers aimed to introduce self‐directed support in mental health services – part of the government's personalisation agenda, which requires a move from current social care commissioning, where a person is matched to available services, to one where a person self‐assesses, has an agreed support plan and then with appropriate help, purchases his or her own services to lead as independent a life as possible. This development is allied closely with the mental health service recovery approach.

Three service users and two carers were recruited to work alongside the lead researcher. Service users were fully involved in the steering group – part of participatory action research project. Data were collected from: debriefing meetings with co‐researchers between April and December 2007; a group interview held by the lead researcher; and participants' journal comments and self‐reflections.

The main areas in which service users and carers found involvement difficult were: overcoming professional language barriers; emotional impact; and power imbalances between themselves and professionals. Findings suggest that considerable improvement is required by mental health professionals and managers if service users and carers are successfully involved in projects.

This is a small study within a larger action research project. Findings are not generalisable owing to the small sample; however, findings are supported by the service‐user involvement literature.

Few studies explore participation effects on service users and carers from their perspective. This research provides insights into what needs to be addressed to improve service user and carer involvement to improve mental health services.

The purpose of this paper is to refine and validate the most widely used leader behavior measurement instrument, LBDQXII, into a more parsimonious instrument for assessing cognitive templates of preferred leader behavior across cultures.

The 100-item LBDQXII survey was administered to 6,451 participants from 14 countries; these data were used to refine the survey.

The shorter survey instrument is a valid and reliable tool for assessing preferred leader behavior. Four periods in the LBDQXII “evolution” are identified: emergence, expansion, stagnation and revival.

The new LBDQ50 can be used to collect data across cultures, contributing to both global management development and scholarly studies.

This project corresponds to calls to shorten the well-established leader behavior instrument into a measurement tool that is reliable and valid across cultures and languages. This can be administered by both private and public organizations, contributing to greater effectiveness. Furthermore, it retains its scholarly scope encompassing follower-centric studies of leadership.

Leadership processes are found in all aspects of life and can be better understood and improved within and across cultures using the shorter version.

An efficient instrument to measure preferred leadership behavior across and within cultures. The availability of the LBDQ50 will allow practitioners and researchers to advance understanding of preferred leadership behavior as a predictor of organizational effectiveness. Most such instruments are overly-long, which hinders data collection opportunities. This newly developed instrument can lead to better response rates and easier applicability in organizational settings.

The purpose is to argue that market-generated and brand-related phenomena such as fandoms work as a social and institutional force beyond the market and to showcase their influence on the society as a whole.

The influence of fandoms on many societal institutions is explored through the literature on fandom studies and consumer research.

The research indicates that market-generated resources and their related sociocultural dynamics play a significant role in shaping the evolution of many institutions of current societies.

The research is exclusively focused on fandoms despite the varied facets of market-related sociocultural dynamics, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here shifting the focus from fandoms to brand systems.

Researchers, especially in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may use the perspective shift from market to society to enlarge the scope to new fields of study, out of the market.

The research provides new lenses to understand emerging phenomena in fields such as religion and/or politics difficult to understand with traditional frameworks.

This paper provides exploratory research identifying market-related social and institutional processes and emphasizing how they influence other societal institutions, such as family, religion, corporations, professions, and politics; rather than bringing social and institutional processes into the marketplace.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of having a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in a forensic setting.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight women with a diagnosis of BPD in private secure units. The interview data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Four main themes emerged: identity, power, protection and containment, and confusion. The themes of identity, power and protection and containment represented polarised positions which in turn contributed to the theme of confusion.

There are limitations to this study mainly the heterogeneous nature of the sample. However, good quality control and the similarities with previous findings indicate that this study makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of BPD in a forensic setting. In addition it has implications for further research; exploring sense of self and the differences between a sample from a community and a sample from a forensic setting with a diagnosis of BPD.

For practitioners to acknowledge power dynamics and to be able to formulate and address these with patients with a diagnosis of BPD.

This is the first IPA study to ask women with a diagnosis of BPD in a forensic setting what their experience is. It is a qualitative study due to the need to genuinely explore the topic and to provide a basis for others to conduct further research.

The importance of analytical techniques in international marketing is illustrated. An overview of related research is given. The question is asked, “Which way will research on the subject go in the future?”

Affect is a dynamic construct that varies over time and can significantly influence motivation and performance in organisational contexts. This chapter addresses key conceptual and methodological challenges that arise when aiming to measure affect as a within-person process. The literature has been divided on whether the structure of affect is unipolar or bipolar and no research has considered this structure across levels of analysis. Measuring affect as a within-person process also requires a brief scale that can be administered with minimal disruption. This chapter presents data that provide evidence for bipolarity in the structure of affect. We use these data to validate the momentary affect scale, which is a new brief affect scale that can be used in within-person research designs and applied settings.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a UK-based interdisciplinary workforce development project that had the aim of improving service delivery for children and young people who self-harm or are feeling suicidal.

This innovative practice-higher-education partnership utilised an iterative consultation process to establish the local workforce need and then facilitated the systematic synthesis and presentation of evidence-based clinical guidelines in a practical format, for staff working directly with young people who self-harm in non-mental health settings.

The development, content and structure of this contextualised resource is presented, along with emerging outcomes and learning from the team. It is anticipated that this may also be a useful strategy and resource for other teams in other areas and is intended to provide a template that can be adapted by other localities to meet the specific needs of their own workforce.

The paper demonstrates how higher education-practice partnerships can make clinical guidelines and research evidence in a field often thought of as highly specialist, accessible to all staff. It also shows a process of liaison and enhanced understanding across universal/specialist mental health service thresholds.

This paper demonstrates how collaborative partnerships can work to bridge the gap between evidence-based guidelines and their implementation in practice, through innovative multi-agency initiatives.