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The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of key word sign by staff in organisations working with children and adults who have intellectual disabilities.

This commentary provides an overview of both historical and recent research in this area.

After a dearth of research on signing, new studies are emerging, but appear to identify the same issues – and many of the same solutions – as those from 40 years ago.

Sign needs to be seen as a cultural intervention necessitating attitude change and policy development.

Paradigm shifts in the field of intervention and in AAC are needed to address these issues.

The purpose of this paper is to comment on the article “Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus: Our Heritage – the role of heritage exhibitions in tackling social isolation.”

This provides some further reflection and points for discussion on topics arising from the themes in the original article.

Issues are raised about the medicalisation of conditions and the ways in which a social and cultural model of disability challenges preconceptions and assumptions about personhood and victim status. Reference is made to the broader context of hidden histories and the ways in which people with learning disabilities are now taking active roles in reclaiming the story of their lives in the past and now.

The paper aims to raise awareness of critical issues of learning disability history prompted by the original paper.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on “Finding the sparkle: storytelling in the lives of people with learning disabilities”, Nicola Grove's paper highlighting the power of the story as one approach to empower people with intellectual disability.

This commentary reflects on the power of personal story sharing as a way to empower people with intellectual disability, value their experience and promote inclusion.

Personal stories are important because they help both ourselves and others understand who we are. Stories are not static and stories can be told from different perspectives. Telling stories can be protective and healing.

Communication that develops social closeness is important and can be undervalued. There needs to be a greater focus on ensuring people without words can tell their stories and on services recognising the importance of this.

The ability to tell a story, whether personal or fictional, is a skill which can enable people to build a sense of identity, friendship, community and self-advocacy. However, narrative is rarely prioritised in services. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper describes two approaches to the development of storytelling for people with learning disabilities used by the charity Openstorytellers. Reflections from interviews are used to illustrate how individuals view their experiences as storytellers, and the benefits that come in the wake of learning to tell and listen to stories.

Storytelling led to an increased sense of purpose, confidence, communication and value. The findings are based on subjective perceptions by the people concerned, and were not obtained through independent research. However, they represent a first step towards evaluating the impact of multidimensional interventions.

Services need to consider how they enable their members to participate actively in the sharing of experience, and imaginative and creative activities. Storytelling, both mythic and personal, can help to develop social relationships and active participation in one's community.

Both of the approaches described here (Learning to Tell; StorysharingTM) are innovative approaches which are new in the field of learning disabilities.

Our study investigates the relationships between risk management systems (RMS), strategy and organizational performance. The existing research has extensively studied the effect of strategy on organizational performance. There is also a growing body of literature suggesting that RMS positively influence the achievement of organizational objectives. However, there are only a few conceptual papers (and no empirical evidence) on the relationship between strategy and RMS. We investigate whether different strategy types (defender, analyzer, prospector, and reactor) induce different levels of RMS development and, hence, affect performance indirectly, as well as directly. We use regression analysis and survey data to test the proposed relationships. Our results confirm the direct effects of strategy type and RMS development on performance. We confirm that prospectors perform better than defenders, analyzers, and reactors across five measures of performance (profitability, sales growth, market share, new product development, and customer satisfaction). We also find that companies with more developed RMS perform better in terms of non-financial performance (measured by new product development). Contrary to the prevailing evidence, we do not find significant results for financial performance. Moreover, our findings show that there is no mediating effect of RMS development in the relationship between strategy type and performance. This implies that RMS and strategy act as independent variables, each individually affecting organizational performance.