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The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss a distribution outsourcing alliance between a small‐to‐medium scale food processor and a national distributor of frozen and chilled food products. The paper discusses the influence of market dynamics, core and differentiated competencies and strategic intents on alliance formation and operations in the small‐to‐medium scale food enterprise sector.

The dyadic relationship of a small‐to‐medium scale food processor and its distributor is investigated through reviewing past studies of processor‐distributor alliances, conducting in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with senior managers in both firms, and reviewing documents and correspondence between the firms.

The partners do not complement their core and differentiate competencies to achieve greater customer value creation through a joint enterprise business model. The alliance focuses pre‐eminently on short‐term sales development and cost savings targets. Non‐achievement of these targets adversely influences partners' trust and commitment to the alliance. A significant strength of the alliance is its capacity to identify customer needs and use this knowledge to speedily develop and introduce new products. In its present form this alliance is unsustainable. The partners should adopt a new philosophy and vision to pursue an alliance that will use their core and differentiated competencies more effectively.

To generalise the findings and inform theory building, the research has to be replicated in other businesses and market environments. The findings are specific to the market environment and strategies of a single small‐to‐medium scale food processor and a single national distributor of frozen and chilled foods. Multi‐case studies in multi‐contexts (capturing varying sizes of business, industry sectors, target market segments, competitive environments and market environments) have to be completed to enable generalisation and theory building.

This paper demonstrates the disadvantages of pursuing distribution outsourcing alliances with a short‐term and enterprise level perspective. The case study provides real life evidence of the benefits of pursuing distribution outsourcing alliances based on a joint enterprise philosophy.

This paper contributes to knowledge on distribution outsourcing alliances, a topic that several recent studies have identified as not having been explored in great detail in extant supply chain studies.

In the last‐issued volume of his monumental History of the Novel, Dr. E. A. Baker remarks that librarians do not expect to be thanked for their services and then, characteristically, proceeds to thank some dozen or so. Whatever our expectations are, we are none the less appreciative when a writer does express his debt; it helps us, it justifies our work. Few tributes of late have been more graceful than this paid by Mr. J. D. Griffith Davies in his useful and attractive Honest George Monk, which has lately come from Mr. John Lane: “What I should do without the kindly help of my friend, R. J. Gordon, Librarian of the Leeds Public Libraries, I really don't know. Like some fairy godmother he produces for my use the rarest books; and his keen personal interest in all forms of research, and the unfailing courtesy of his colleagues, makes the Reference Library at Leeds one of the homeliest places for work.” It is worth while to compare the expression here with the words Mr. Berwick Sayers has written at the end of his preface to the 1937 edition of Brown's Manual.

The purpose of this paper is to extend awareness that workplace bullying impacts on the health of individuals both within and outside the workplace and that there are implications for workplace health management.

The paper contextualises the problem of workplace bullying and workplace health management and introduces the five articles in the special issue.

Workplace health management is becoming more prominent in some organizations and workplace health management, and a corporate culture based on partnership, trust and respect, offers considerable potential to move the agenda forward. Moreover, there appears to be a paucity of knowledge available as to how workplace health management strategies and programmes impact on organizational culture and assembling and sharing such a knowledge base could be a useful step.

Further research is required to extend the studies presented and to address workplace bullying from the perspective of workplace health management.

Research is required to explore the extent to which the potential of workplace health management programmes to impact positively on corporate approaches to bullying and harassment has been realised and how those programmes have influenced corporate culture.

A partnership approach to knowledge creation and sharing has the most potential for successful outcomes and accords closely with the inferred ideals of the Luxembourg Declaration for Workplace Health promotion.

The paper addresses a perceived gap in the literature linking workplace bullying to the impact on individual health and the implications for workplace health management.

The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to detect and prevent virtual property theft in virtual world environments. The issue of virtual property theft is a serious problem which has ramifications in both the real and virtual world. Virtual world users invest a considerable amount of time, effort and often money to collect virtual property, only to have them stolen by thieves. Many virtual property thefts go undetected and often only discovered after the incident has occurred.

This paper presents the design of an autonomic detection framework to identify virtual property theft at two key stages: account intrusion and virtual property trades. Account intrusion is an unauthorized user attempting to gain access to an account and unauthorized virtual property trades are trading of items between two users which exhibit theft characteristics.

Initial tests of this framework on a synthetic data set show an 80 per cent detection rate. This framework allows virtual world developers to tailor and extend it to suit their specific requirements. It provides an effective way of detecting virtual property theft while being low maintenance, user friendly and cost effective.

To the author’s knowledge, there is no detection framework, system or tool that works on virtual property theft detection in virtual world environments without access to authentic virtual world data or attack data (because of privacy issues and unwillingness of virtual world environments companies to collaborate). The topic of virtual property theft, lack of existing labelled data sets, user anonymity, size of virtual world environments data sets and privacy issues with virtual world companies and a number of other critical factors distinguish this paper from previous studies.

The transition period from eating disorder inpatient (IP) care to outpatient care can be difficult for patients and is often characterised by high relapse rates. This study aims to co-develop a novel treatment pathway to support patients during this critical period.

This was a mixed-methods case study using co-production methodology and a nested qualitative component. The authors co-developed an initial proposed pathway structure with clinicians and people with lived experience of an eating disorder, based on a review of the literature. They then conducted interviews with clinicians and patients (n = 8) to refine the pathway; these were analysed using framework analysis.

A four-component pathway structure was developed. Six main themes emerged from this qualitative analysis: autonomy, the need for holistic patient care, difficult experiences, service provision, relationships and feedback on the discharge pathway.

This study highlighted the importance of centring patient autonomy during treatment, as well as ensuring treatments are holistic in nature. This may reduce the high levels of relapse associated with discharge from IP treatment and improve the quality and effectiveness of eating disorder treatment delivered.

Co-production approaches were used to develop the IP discharge pathway with members of a Lived Experience Advisory Panel alongside clinicians. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was also the first intervention development study aimed at providing targeted support for patients dealing with the adverse effects of hospitalisation and difficulties transitioning to outpatient care.

As the internet has evolved through the emergence of social media, so too have the communicative practices of The Archers listeners. Many of them now use Twitter to comment, discuss the show or participate in the omnibus episode ‘tweetalong’. Primarily, this chapter recognises the hundred-plus Twitter accounts which have been created by listeners to authentically roleplay characters, organisations, animals and even objects from the show. I frame these practices and ground the chapter in academic discourses of ‘fan fiction’. Reflecting on my own activity as @borsetpolice, I look at the role and place of this fan fiction from the individual practitioner’s perspective but also the wider listener base. In this chapter, I develop an argument that these practices contribute towards the community of listeners online, as well as the show itself. I explore the types of activities and accounts involved, where they often focus around major storylines, and then reflect in detail on the individual’s motivations and practice. I situate this in terms of an opportunity to become involved in an online community that aspires towards everyday rural ideals, and how this can be understood as a significant affective experience for listeners. This need for escapism into ‘banal’ worlds, the desire to participate, and the sense that fan fiction is a game that we take part in are also drawn out as significant.

Previous research suggests that service user and carer involvement (SUCI) in clinical psychology training may have an impact. The purpose of this study was to develop a validated questionnaire to enable trainee clinical psychologists to rate this.

A collaborative project was carried out with service users and carers and trainee clinical psychologists. The principles of questionnaire design were followed. The authors developed and validated a trainee self-report questionnaire, based on focus groups and relevant literature indicating potential impacts of involvement on practice. A draft 60-item version was piloted with 15 trainee clinical psychologists. Then, 133 trainees from 22 UK clinical psychology courses completed it (estimated response rate of 13.2%). The sample was representative of UK trainees in gender and ethnicity, but slightly older.

The principal component analysis produced a 36-item questionnaire with four factors: human communication, carer perspectives, empathy and challenging/changing. The questionnaire showed good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Stakeholder consultation suggested face and content validity and there was some indication of construct validity.

The project has resulted in a usable co-produced questionnaire, which is now available to clinical psychology courses to assess the self-reported impact of SUCI in training, and which may also be used in future research.

THE note of the Conference at Harrogate was the question of unemployment in relation to libraries. The arguments advanced were intended for the wider public rather than for librarians, and reproduced a now fairly familiar argument that the issues of books from libraries have increased by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the depression. It is quite clear that many men who normally would not read quite so much have turned to books for consolation and guidance. The fact that branch libraries were closed at Glasgow as an economy measure, and were afterwards re‐opened under the force of public opinion, would emphasize the opinion generally held that in times of economic stress it may be an even greater economy to increase expenditure upon libraries than to curtail it. This argument is, of course, in a region which the average material mind of our governors cannot always reach. It is nevertheless true, and the Conference provided ample evidence of its truth.

The purpose of this book is to open a conversation on the idea of information experience, which we understand to be a complex, multidimensional engagement with information. In developing the book we invited colleagues to propose a chapter on any aspect of information experience, for example conceptual, methodological or empirical. We invited them to express their interpretation of information experience, to contribute to the development of this concept. The book has thus become a vehicle for interested researchers and practitioners to explore their thinking around information experience, including relationships between information experience, learning experience, user experience and similar constructs. It represents a collective awareness of information experience in contemporary research and practice. Through this sharing of multiple perspectives, our insights into possible ways of interpreting information experience, and its relationship to other concepts in information research and practice, is enhanced. In this chapter, we introduce the idea of information experience. We also outline the book and its chapters, and bring together some emerging alternative views and approaches to this important idea.