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In banks, hotels, post offices, restaurants, nightclubs, travel and tour guide agencies, airlines, shops and railways it is normally the larger groups of lower graded staff who are most frequently in contact with the foreign language speaking customers. While many companies are prepared to send individual managers to expensive language schools to learn the basic language skills they are frequently reluctant to establish a tailor made oral course for their ‘front‐line’ staff even though this would result in substantial savings in company time and effort and give them a strong advantage over their competitors.

This paper aims to capture the views of forensic mental health service users; focusing on how services promote the aspiration to work, the development of skills for work, and the vocational rehabilitation process. It seeks to provide insight into forensic mental health service users' views on the barriers and enablers to accessing work together with suggestions for enhancing practice, and implications for further research.

Ten participants from a range of forensic mental health services throughout Scotland took part in semi‐structured interviews. Participants were involved in either paid work, voluntary work or work preparation. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) allowed exploration of an individual's lived experiences and how they make sense of this.

Service users valued the opportunity to address vocational issues at the earliest opportunity in their rehabilitation. Work had an overwhelmingly positive impact on mental health. Analysis of interview transcripts revealed three master themes: “Normalising my life”: the positive impact of work; “Gradual steps”: facing barriers; and “Practical help and encouragement”: feeling supported. There is much to gain from good multidisciplinary rehabilitation within secure hospitals and the community, with work playing an important role in recovery and symptom control. Forensic services should focus on employment and the aspiration to work early, demonstrating awareness that attitude and the aspiration to work are a much more reliable indicator of success than diagnosis and mental health symptoms.

Few qualitative studies have investigated service users' views of work within forensic mental health, yet such information can be crucial to enhance and improve service delivery.

Dialogic peer coaching as leadership can enable teachers to influence each other's professional learning. The purpose of this paper is to shift the emphasis from the role associated with the designated title of leader to the purpose and relevance of teacher leadership in the context of dialogic peer coaching.

The research was undertaken as a small qualitative case study embedded in a school-based, teacher professional development project. Nine groups of peer coaches from five unrelated schools engaged in a formal process of collaborative inquiry over two years. Interview data from 13 volunteer teacher participants were analysed using the constant comparison method and themes determined.

The study revealed that there was growth in teacher leadership capabilities as they become dialogic peer coaches to each other.

Through their collaborative peer coaching dialogue teachers have the transformative space to articulate their thinking. They can engage in dialogic feedback where they are positioned as experts in their own practice.

The teachers in this study are positioned within communities of practice as co-constructers of knowledge and co-learners. On the basis of the findings the authors suggest that this can support the development of high capacity leadership in schools. This stance contrasts with a technicist approach to teacher professional learning in which teachers are situated as absorbers or recipients of knowledge constructed elsewhere.

The research reported in this paper addresses three key elements of leadership: individual development; collaboration or team development; and organisational development. It outlines a means by which teacher leadership can be strengthened to address these elements in schools.

Measuring the efficacy of workplace culture-shift efforts presented a substantial challenge in the author's research exploring how culture shifts during deliberate change initiatives. In response to this challenge this conceptual article proposes that the relative value participants attribute to desired culture outcomes can function as a proxy for measuring culture shift over time, providing applied researchers and practitioners with a simple way to measure efficacy of change initiatives.

This conceptual article reviews the difficulties of defining and measuring workplace culture using widely known, contemporary models and instruments. It then builds an argument for using differential measurement of the relative value attributed to culture shift outcomes (valuing) as a proxy for workplace culture shift, followed by discussion of how to conduct measurement.

This article deductively demonstrates that parsimonious measurement of culture shift is not only simple and feasible, but that practitioners and researchers alike can use a valuing approach to determine the efficacy of efforts to shift workplace culture.

Used to complement existing methods and instruments, or on its own, this approach to measurement can build deeper insights into what is going on during deliberate change initiatives, while answering the reflexive questions “are we doing the right things,” and “are we doing those things the right way?”

The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in gender‐biased employment practices that it is perceived have occurred in New Zealand accountancy workplaces over the last 30 years, using Oliver's model of deinstitutionalization.

Sequential interviewing was carried out with 69 experienced chartered accountants and three human resource managers, and at a later date with nine young female accountants.

Evidence is presented of perceived political, functional and social pressures cumulatively contributing to deinstitutionalization of overt gender‐biased employment practices, with social and legislative changes being the most influential. Deinstitutionalization appears incomplete as some more subtle gender‐biased practices still remain in New Zealand's accountancy workplaces, relating particularly to senior‐level positions.

This study adds to understanding of how professions evolve. The purposeful bias in the sample selection, the small size of two of the interviewee groups, and the diversity in the interviewees' workplaces are recognized limitations.

Identification of further cultural change is required to deinstitutionalize the more subtle gender‐biased practices in accountancy organizations. This could help to avoid a serious deficiency of senior chartered accountants in practice in the future.

This paper represents one of a limited number of empirical applications of the deinstitutionalization model to organizational change and is the first to address the issue of gender‐biased practices in a profession. The use of sequential interviewing of different age groups, in order to identify and corroborate perceptions of organizational change is a novel approach.

To report on the 20th North American Serials Interest Group held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2005.

Provides a concise review of the conference, whose theme was Roaring into our 20s.

A variety of topics of interest to serialists were covered in the programs through plenary, concurrent and workshop sessions.

This paper is a useful summary of a conference of interest to library and information management professionals.

The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the literature concerning interlending and document supply and related matters.

The paper is based on the reading of over 150 journals, as well as monographs, reports and web sites.

Important developments in ILL include OCLC's launch of an ILL resource particularly useful for public libraries. More on pay per view (PPV) and patron driven acquisition (PDA). The perils of journal usage measurement are identified in an important article and more on open access in the UK with more responses to the Finch report.

This is the only regular literature review that focuses on document supply and related issues.

Purpose – This article examines the relationship between strategic sports metaphors, such as “slam dunk” and “trash talk,” and white middle-class heterosexual masculine embodiment in competitive work environments. Competitive organizations, like sports arenas are contested spaces, and in these environments employees, like athletes, work to “position” themselves to maximize their chances of winning valuable projects and clients from other employees and competing companies.

Value of chapter – Unlike previous research which finds that men's use of sports at work is primarily a feature of male networks and socializing, the argument presented here is that sports tropes are used and enacted by men to structure the production process, including intra- and inter-organizational business meetings, client projects, and committee work. Sports references are also used to construct hegemonic masculinity at work, which results in women, gays and black men being constructed as inferior.

Research implications – The issues raised in this chapter will be useful for empirical studies that examine the relationship between the importance of sports at work, and whether groups such as women, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, older, and overweight business professionals identify with sports and whether this destabilizes assumptions of embodied heterosexual able-bodied male superiority.

Approach – The data used in this analysis draw upon the my background as a Division I collegiate basketball player and 10 years of experience and observations as a marketing professional and business executive in the financial services industry in the United States.