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This article seeks to consider the practical implementation of an electronic records management system in the National Health Service Purchasing and Supply Agency, a UK government agency.

It examines the four main stages from specifying and selecting the system through to post‐implementation evaluation and identifies the lessons learned within the context of the specific organisation and its record‐keeping culture.

The implementation of an ERM system causes a massive cultural shift that can be made easier with the backing of senior management. However, the desired results can also be achieved with a strong team if senior management empowers the project but does not get personally involved.

This article will give insight to those organisations that are thinking of implementing an ERM system.

Mr R. Britten Spence, 49, has been appointed Scottish regional manager for Liquid Plastics Ltd, the Lancashire based manufacturer of elastomeric membrane systems.

Mead Data Central up for sale. Mead Data Central has been put up for sale by its parent Mead Corp., which wants to concentrate on its core forestry business. Mead has not put a price tag on how much it will ask for MDC, which earned $50 million on revenues of $551 million last year. Mead itself posted profits of $124 million on sales of $4.79 billion last year.

It seems that sociology (the science of society) has not until now seriously undertaken the operational definition of the concept of “organizational efficiency” or “social performance”. The reason for this huge and inexplicable oversight might be that sociology does not use as a routine the systemic and sociocybernetic approaches. In fact, it does not seem possible to define operationally the concept of organizational efficiency since only a systemic and sociocybernetic conception of the organization could provide in principle the subconcepts of globality, inputs, outputs, transformation and feedback so absolutely indispensable for expressing this definition in terms of the relation between the means used (X) and the ends achieved (Y). Even the outputs “Y” and the inputs “X” have to be previously viewed from a globalizing systemic angle, which means grasping the needs and satisfaction of the system from its point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider, from a historical perspective, New Zealand’s reputation as a country largely without corruption, with particular reference to the colonial government’s confiscation of Māori land in the 19^th century and beyond.

This paper is based on published historical commentary.

The findings are that much of the Māori land confiscation was rendered legal for illegitimate purposes, and that the colonial and successive New Zealand governments abrogated the country’s foundational document, the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between the colonial government and many Māori chiefs in 1840. Adverse consequences for Māori have been felt to this day, despite the Treaty settlements process that began with the Māori renaissance in the mid-1970s.

The academic analysis of corruption in New Zealand has seldom if ever adopted this historical perspective.

Teacher attitudes towards the implementation of SPECS, a planning‐programming‐budgeting system designed for schools, were measured for a three‐year period in River Park School District. Researchers hypothesized that many teachers would resist SPECS since the paperwork required might detract from instructional time and detailed specification of their activities might threaten professional autonomy. Indeed, by the time data were analyzed, many dissatisfied teachers were actively organizing to suspend the use of SPECS. Results showed that supporters of SPECS among the teaching staff were few in number when compared to its critics, but that fully half the teachers surveyed were indifferent to the program. Over the three‐year period attitudes became slightly more negative towards SPECS. The most striking finding was the strong negative feeling in the high school and the strong positive feeling in the junior high. Differences in administrative effort and commitment and the development of structural effects within each school seem to explain part of this difference.

Some superficial similarities between Australia and Canada are readily apparent: enormous countries, well endowed with resources, their relatively small populations derive in large part from European immigrants. As far as the structure and performance of their economies are concerned, both are relatively affluent, trade‐dependent countries with a long tradition of agricultural and extractive activity, a beleaguered manufacturing sector, anxieties about their abilities to exploit technological change and the most severe recession since the 1930s.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.