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This paper reports the results of a study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board which sought to investigate links between Web search strategies and retrieval effectiveness. A total of 68 students, enrolled on masters programmes in librarianship, information management and information systems, searched for two topics using the AltaVista search engine. Logs of the resultant 341 queries, along with relevance judgements for over 4,000 retrieved items, were analysed using factor analysis and regression. The differing but complementary types and strengths of evidence produced by these two forms of analysis are discussed and presented. Retrieval effectiveness was associated positively with best‐match searching and negatively with Boolean searching. The implications of these findings for Web searching are discussed.

Social Work education has seen some changes since my first paper on how The Archers could be used to enhance a student's understanding of service user experiences (Burrows, 2016). Social Work students still, however, need to understand the difficulties that their future service users may experience; learning is developed through lectures, seminars and workshops, and most of all through practice experience, but a real challenge for educators is how to show students the constant lived reality of families and communities who have complex difficulties. A visit to a household only gives a snapshot of their life, and service users may be guarded in their behaviour during a professional visit. My original paper considered the educational value of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective of The Archers, in catching unguarded moments and drawing attention to issues in the community. From the impact of rural poverty and unaffordable housing, through issues of mental health, hospital discharge, to adult survivors of child sexual abuse and the tangled webs of modern slavery, these issues will resonate with any social worker, in Adult, Children and Families or Mental Health fields. These are not just issues in a rural setting; professionals in more urban settings will recognise these as things the families and individuals they work with must deal with from time to time.

The chapter explores how the recent storyline about modern slavery has landed in Ambridge, commending the writers and producers for the job they have done in engaging NGOs and pressure groups active in this area. It situates the plight of ‘The Horses’ as hidden in plain sight and probes the dark side of this important social issue in the context of how far the systematic exploitation of vulnerable people provides a ground floor within a profoundly unequal economy. Modern slavery speaks of a wider form of neoliberal necropolitics – in which logics of accumulation and hierarchies are played out on the bodies of workers. In this form of political economy social and emotional vulnerability and economic precarity combine together, trapping those unable to escape exploitation. It explored the policy context for the Modern Slavery Act and the assessment of how many people are enslaved in the UK. I also make the link from the extreme nature of modern slavery and connections with extractive and abusive employment situations throughout the economy. While Modern Slavery is an extreme form of precarity, where people are controlled and forced to work, scholarship on precarity shows us that it is a spectrum disorder, where economic abandonment pushes people away from a liveable life.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critically reflective account of the process of conducting an impact evaluation of a dance-theatre company’s staged productions and workshops.

There are two main approaches: the introspective critical reflection on the process of performing an impact evaluation; and the drawing/colouring methods used to perform it.

It is more difficult to provide impact evaluations of the soft rather than hard outcomes of publicly funded performance arts. The engagement of third-party evaluators may help overcome the challenge that many “accepted” approaches are outwith the skill or financial resources of smaller non-profit organisations.

Although based on a single case, the authors believe that the evidence how the use of innovative methodologies may be more appropriate to performing arts impact evaluations, even those less familiar to management researchers.

This paper offers insights into various methods of impact evaluation that may be of use to smaller non-profit arts organisations who may be constrained by limited skills and financial resources.

This paper provides an original contribution to understanding innovative methodologies to perform arts impact evaluations, particularly those assessing soft outcomes, and a contribution in recognising the role of academic researchers in performing such evaluations.

Historically, Panama has always been “a place of transit.” While technically the isthmus formed part of Colombia in the nineteenth century, it was linked geopolitically to the United States soon after the California gold rush, beginning in the late 1840s. The first attempt at building a canal ended in failure in 1893 when disease and poor management forced Ferdinand de Lesseps to abandon the project. The U.S. undertaking to build the canal could only begin after Panama declared itself free and broke away from Colombia in 1903, with the support of the United States.

As a network analyst, I am fascinated by social interactions. The ways in which people connect with one another and exercise power and authority by deploying different forms of capital. This piece returns to the underlying and changing kinship network structure of the village of Ambridge over time, explores the role of ‘kin-keeping’ as deployed by the matriarchs Peggy and Jill. I am most interested in the ways in which gender as performed by the women of the village intersects with abundance or lack of other forms of capital, and how far inequalities persist and why. It is clear that there is an intergenerational power dynamic at play in the spreading or hoarding of the various dimensions of power layered together and how forms of capital intersect for protection or precarity. Social and cultural capital at birth in the village is defining in terms of both ‘serious’ life outcomes as well as how more minor infractions and foibles are viewed. Further, I return to discuss how my various network-based predictions have fared over time. The Headlam Hypothesis and the fate of Ed Grundy – King of Ambridge are revisited and their durability explored.