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The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential and durability of arts practice as research through developing a new approach to arts research that challenges the conventional association between dominant constructions of community and dominant modes of research.

A co-design approach, situated in arts practice, has been used to generate a conceptual framework that offers potential to open up the workings of communities by examining them from the standpoint of those who have everyday experience of these communities.

The paper argues that there can no longer be clearly demarcated boundaries between “academics” and “community partners” in a genuinely co-designed arts research process. Rather, there are “research partners” who share mutual recognition of skills and experiences that allow them to commit to a durable “new creative scholarship” that reflects their collective identities.

The conceptual framework celebrates the life stories of individuals at the expense of the grand metanarratives favoured by empirical sociology and mainstream humanities. The framework reflects the commitment of the authors to create accounts of communities that do justice to their collective wisdom, dynamism and connectivity, as well as their transience, their needs to transform and their responses to change, in ways that reflect the lives of those involved rather than the needs of externally imposed disciplinary regimes.

The conceptual framework is a new approach to qualitative research; its value lies in putting the participants at the heart of the research process where they not only generate narrative, but also situate, mediate and remediate it in ways that extend conventional participative research practices.

Misconduct by lawyers in law firms is often attributed to pressures from increasing competition for legal services. Modern firms do face fierce competitive pressures. We can gain more subtle insights, however, by focusing on the specific markets in which particular firms operate and how forms of influence in law firms interact with common patterns of behavior in organizations. This chapter draws on this approach to analyze the experience of Jenkens & Gilchrist, a national law firm that had to close its doors in 2007 because of tax shelter work that triggered civil lawsuits and government investigations.

The relevance of finance for strategy is probably never greater than during a recession. We argue that the strategy literature has been virtually silent on the issue of recessions, and that this constitutes a regrettable sin of omission. Recessions are also periods when the commonly held view of financial markets in the strategy literature – efficient, and therefore strategically irrelevant – is particularly misplaced. A key route to rectify this omission is to focus on how recessions affect investment behavior, and thereby firms’ stocks of assets and capabilities which ultimately will affect competitive outcomes. In the present chapter, we aim to contribute by analyzing how two key aspects of recessions, demand reductions and reductions in credit availability, affect three different types of investments: physical capital, R&D and innovation, and human- and organizational capital. We synthesize and conceptualize insights from finance- and macroeconomics about how recessions affect different types of investments and find that recessions not only affect the level of investment, but also the composition of investments. Some of these effects are quite counterintuitive. For example, investments in R&D are both more and less sensitive to credit constraints than physical capital is, depending on available internal finance. Investments in human capital grow as demand falls, and both R&D and human capital investments show important nonlinearities with respect to changes in demand.

The development of social enterprises in Ireland holds much promise with regards to the potential to create innovation and growth within local economies. However, fulfilling this promise requires the ability to recognise the complexities of this multifaced sector. In response, this article proposes Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) as having the theoretical capability to develop and create further progress in social enterprise development in Ireland.

ANT upholds that reality consists of series of heterogeneous networks composed of relations between entities. This relational lens foregrounds the interactions among the varied actors involved in social enterprise. To investigate the capabilities of ANT, this paper aligns ANT with three core areas of concern for social enterprise research: structure, power and shared meaning.

ANT works to address these identified key concerns by bridging the conceptual divide between theory and practice within the social enterprise sector. This brings to light the state of affairs as empirically practiced and not as recognised under traditional dualisms. As a result, the influences which shape the collective reality of social enterprise networks can be empirically investigated.

As an alternative sensibility, the core capabilities of ANT lie in the ability of the theory to reclaim an empirical grasp of a local environment. In this instance, it is demonstrated as to how this theoretical approach can be used to understand how growth and development manifests within social enterprise networks. From this, there is a great potential to use these insights to direct change in the place of random, and often contested, growth.

A vector autoregression model estimated on US data before and after 1980 documents systematic differences in the response of short- and long-term interest rates, corporate bond spreads and durable spending to news total factor productivity shocks. Interest rates across the maturity spectrum broadly increase in the pre-1980s and broadly decline in the post-1980s. Corporate bond spreads decline significantly, and durable spending rises significantly in the post-1980 period while the opposite short-run response is observed in the pre-1980 period. Measuring expectations of future monetary policy rates conditional on a news shock suggests that the Federal Reserve has adopted a restrictive stance before the 1980s with the goal of retaining control over inflation while adopting a neutral/accommodative stance in the post-1980 period.

This paper aims to present on-going research on the role of social networks in community preparedness for bushfire. Social networks are significant in helping communities cope in disasters. Studies of communities hit by a catastrophe such as landslides or heatwaves demonstrate that people with well-connected social networks are more likely to recover than others where their networks are obliterated or non-existent. The value of social networks is also evident in bushfire where information is passed between family, friends and neighbours. Social interactions are important in creating opportunities for residents to exchange information on shared risks and can lead them to take collective actions to address this risk.

This paper presents on-going research on social networks of residents living in fire-prone areas in Australia to investigate how knowledge related to bushfire might flow, either in preparation for, or during a hypothetical emergency. A closer examination of social relations and characteristics within networks is critical in contextualizing this knowledge flow. This understanding will contribute to collected evidence that social networks play a particularly important role in collective action in building adaptive capacity.

The types of networks studied reflects how people’s emergent roles and their inter-relatedness with one another helps to build adaptive capacity and greater awareness of the risks they face from fire. In doing so, the paper questions individualized attributes of “leaders” that disaster literature can over-emphasize, and critiques notions “vulnerability” in a social network context. It demonstrates that social capital can be generated through emergent, contextual, processual factors.

The paper contributes critical knowledge and evidence for fire agencies to engage with community networks and support those people who are playing a vital catalytic, bridging and linking role to strengthen their potential for adaptive capacity in mitigating bushfire risk.

Over several decades many ranking techniques have been proposed as aids to journal selection by libraries. We review those closely related to physics and others with novel features. There are three main methods of ranking: citation analysis, use or user judgement, and size or ‘productivity’. Citations offer an ‘unobtrusive’ quantitative measure, but not only is the absolute value of a citation in question, but also there is no consensus on a ‘correct’ way to choose the citing journals, nor of the ranking parameter. Citations can, however, point out anomalies and show the changing status of journals over the years. Use and user judgement also employ several alternative methods. These are in the main of limited applicability outside the specific user group in question. There is greater ‘parochialism’ in ‘use’ ranking than in ‘judged value’ lists, with citation lists the most international. In some cases, the attempted ‘quantification’ of subjective judgement will be misleading. Size and productivity rankings are normally concerned with one or other formulation of the Bradford distribution. Since the distribution is not universally valid, for library use the librarian must satisfy him/herself that the collection conforms to the distribution, or that his users would be well served by one that did. This may require considerable effort, and statistics gained will then render the Bradford distribution redundant.

Substance use plays a significant role in the perpetration of much intimate partner violence (IPV). However, responses to these two issues are rarely integrated. Single focus programme responses can lead to poor outcomes for men as well as their families experiencing these intersecting issues. This scoping paper aims to establish the current state of knowledge on contextual factors influencing the development and implementation of combined programmes.

Four electronic databases were systematically searched in May 2021 and December 2021. Twenty-one peer-reviewed studies reporting on ten programmes were included.

This scoping review revealed that combined programme responses are an underdeveloped area of research and evaluation. The limited evidence base indicated systemic barriers hindering services’ capacity to expand this field of work, affecting implementation and outcomes. Support is required from the wider service systems to intervene in men’s perpetration of IPV in the context of substance use.

Findings in this scoping review demonstrate the importance of fostering a coordinated and collective response to IPV in the context of substance use. Combined programmes have the potential to reduce siloed practices, enabling more holistic responses for men with intersecting issues. However, researchers and policymakers must also address contextual issues hindering or enabling combined programmes’ implementation and development.

Mapping the evidence based on combined programmes provides direction for further development and research to expand this field of inquiry.

This article discusses the labelling and location of self‐organising community groups ‐ ‘self‐help’, ‘peer support’ and ‘service user’. It notes the increasingly close relationship between these groups and statutory authorities, and how this relationship may put the benefits of the groups at risk. Historical, cultural and social factors are discussed to help explain differences and separate developments within African, Caribbean and other Black communities.