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States that building bridges with political colleagues who do not share a common ideology can be difficult and that adopting a conciliatory approach without watering down one’s principles raises its own challenges. Reports that as both an elected representative and researcher, the author collaborated with a number of her colleagues in an action learning team to analyse the results of adopting a Heart Politics approach towards their political antagonists, using strategic questioning as a participatory tool. Reveals that in the process the action learning team learned a great deal about the importance of genuine listening and relationship building and about how to cultivate trust and respect among a diverse group of community representatives.

Many organizations now utilize action learning, and it is applied increasingly throughout the world. Action learning appears in numerous variants, but generically it is a form of learning through experience, “by doing”, where the task environment is the classroom, and the task the vehicle. Two previous reviews of the action learning literature by Alan Mumford respectively covered the field prior to 1985 and the period 1985‐1994. Both reviews included books as well as journal articles. This current review covers the period 1994‐2000 and is limited to publicly available journal articles. Part 1 of the Review was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning (Vol. 15 No. 2) and included a bibliography and comments. Part 2 extends that introduction with a schema for categorizing action learning articles and with comments on representative articles from the bibliography.

This article asserts that modern representative democracy was never intended nor designed to function as a democracy and that progress in the past two hundred years has come from the persistence of citizens operating outside established hierarchical power structures. A transformation of modern representative democracy is underway and information and communication technology (ICT) is a key component in the evolution of more participatory democratic governments. The failings of modern representative democracy are highlighted by the decline in voting turnout rates and a high level of dissatisfaction with and distrust of elected political leaders. While advances in technology and the expansion and availability of information can hinder and harm efforts to advance democracy, this article seeks to balance the discourse by emphasizing the potentials and benefits and by seeking solutions to problems in the representative systems. This is approached through the examination of four areas of enormous innovation and experimentation in utilizing ICT to develop new forms of greater citizen participation within representative democracy and for creating more effective direct democracy: voting from home, scientific deliberative polling, electronic town meetings and direct democracy activities. The main conclusion is that ICT has aided forces that favour a stronger infuence by citizens in representative government which is already in the process of being transformed as nations move towards the global economy and citizens insist on more self‐governance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Spencer Insley.

Spencer gives a short biographical account and is then interviewed by Jerome. Areas covered in the narrative are the misery of mental illness, the prodromal signs of illness, hospital admission and discharge to supported accommodation.

Apart from the losses resulting from a diagnosis of major mental disorder, Spencer also talks about the loss of friendships. His admission to hospital was especially traumatic, leaving him frightened and confused and feeling he was treated like an animal.

While Spencer's is only one story of many, his experiences have a sorry familiarity to them.

Too long denied in the history of psychiatry, service user narratives help us understand the nature of mental suffering and the often inadequate nature of service responses to mental distress.

Involuntary admissions to hospital need to be handled in a more therapeutic manner.

So often it is nurses and occupational therapists who have the most impact on the lives of those with lived experience. Psychiatrists were felt not to be interested in Spencer, whereas his community mental health nurse “Had a genuine interest in what I was doing and how I was getting along”.

The not-for-profit (NFP) context displays unique characteristics that include stakeholder diversity, multiple stakeholder agendas, and the pervasiveness of philanthropic values and related organisational mission. This study investigated accountants’ perceptions of NFPs’ characteristics that enable and inhibit their communication along with the strategies they adopt to overcome their communication challenges.

This qualitative interview-based study is informed by Giddens’ structuration theory. Thirty NFP accountants, from three Australian states, were interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to identify the relationships between NFP organisational characteristics and accountants’ communication strategies, and their interactions with organisational structures.

The study reveals important relationships between many stakeholders with limited financial acumen, organisational resource constraints, the currency of NFP information technologies, the dominance of operational mission over financial imperatives, and the supply of organisational accountants. Accountants’ structural adaptations emerge in their adopting multiple forms of communications reframing.

The NFP environment exhibits a mix of characteristics, some of which pose challenges for accountants’ communication while others facilitate their communication.

Increasingly, governments are relying on NFPs for the provision of services once provided by the state. Enhancing NFP accountants’ communication has the potential to improve outcomes for NFPs.

The study broadens prior research on accountants’ communication beyond formal written reporting to recognise and articulate their informal communication strategies.

In spite of changes in the way people with learning disabilities are perceived, issues of sexuality and personal relationships remain particularly problematic for them. Living Safer Sexual Lives1 was a three‐year Australian action research project which sought to address how people with learning disabilities view these issues. During the first stage of the project, 25 people with learning disabilities told their life stories, with a focus on sexuality and human relationships, to experienced qualitative researchers. In the second stage of the project, these stories were used to provide people with learning disabilities, families and service providers with workshops and resources designed to help people with learning disabilities to live safer sexual lives.

This paper aims to provide a selection of poetry titles from the Poets House Showcase of 2005.

This article gives a review of the 2005 Poetry Publication Showcase.

This review represents a wide‐ranging selection of contemporary poetry collections and anthologies.

This list documents the tremendous range of poetry publishing from commercial, independent and university presses as well as letterpress chapbooks, art books and CDs in 2004 and early 2005.

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the attitudes, feelings and perceptions of Australian consumers towards service frontline employees with accents that differ from Standard Australian English, taking into consideration service‐country image and customer emotions.

This paper reports on a qualitative study designed to uncover the attitudes and perceptions of Australians towards service personnel with foreign accents.

The findings revealed that hearing a service provider with a foreign accent, particularly in services encounters without face‐to‐face contacts, often evokes a negative predisposition to certain accents, reduces the customers' level of tolerance and increases the perception of the service provider's lack of understanding. This negative stereotype bias seems to be moderated by the accent (a proxy of ethnicity) and service‐country image and influenced by customer emotions in the service interaction.

Future studies could also use a controlled experimental design where accent could be used as a sensory cue to further test the validity and reliability of the current findings while controlling for factors such as ethnic background, employment, education and age. Further research should also take service types and service outcomes into consideration in examining the effect of accents on customer service evaluation.

Accent as a service employee attribute influences customers' evaluation of the service encounter because of the stereotype customers have. Training in language skills, cross‐cultural interpersonal skills and authority to deviate from the script should be given to minimise the negative effect of service employee accent. Service firms also need to develop strategies to manage customer emotions and reactions.

This paper contributes to the service literature about service employee attributes and is particularly relevant to economies such as the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia where immigrants are a large part of the service workforce.

The increasingly important issues of transparency and citizen involvement have challenged public administrators in the budget process. This paper adopts a contingent valuation approach, surveying citizens in the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on their preferred allocations of both a large city budgetary increase and a large city budget reduction. The results are then used to examine how citizen assessment of service quality and importance are related to their desired changes in net budget allocations. We believe that this is a major improvement in the contingent value approach, and can serve as a useful tool to public administrators for identifying the public’s budget priorities.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with orientation to library facilities and services, instruction in the use of information resources, and computer skills related to information gathering. This is RSR's twelfth annual review of this literature and lists items published in 1985. A few references are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for the review.