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Reports on management issues arising when authorities decide to close public library service points. The data come from two British Library funded projects. The first used a questionnaire survey of all local authorities in England and Wales to reveal the extent of reductions in access, followed by “before and after” studies of users affected. The second study investigated what authorities had learned from their experience of closing libraries. Twenty authorities that had closed libraries for financial reasons were surveyed and senior managers interviewed in ten of these. The study concludes that there are no criteria which can justify closure to library users. Consultation is often minimal due primarily to the short budget timescales. The process of closing libraries can be traumatic, the public backlash often deterring local politicians from agreeing to further cuts. A key issue in preventing the closure of libraries is the way authorities conventionally measure their success. Authorities need to recognise that the local library has a wide‐ranging social value, besides being a source of reading material. That value is identified by the research.

Labeling women as risk‐averse limits the positive benefits both women and organizations can gain from their risk taking. The purpose of this paper is to explore women's risk taking and reasons for stereotype persistence in order to inform human resource practice and women's career development.

The paper draws on literature about gender and organizations to identify reasons for the persisting stereotype of women's risk aversion. Utilizing literature and concepts about risk appetite and decision making, the paper evaluates results of the Simmons Gender and Risk Survey database of 661 female managers.

The paper finds evidence of gender neutrality in risk propensity and decision making in specific managerial contexts other than portfolio allocation.

More in‐depth research is needed to explore the gender‐neutral motivators of risk decision making and to explore risk taking in a more diverse sample population.

The paper explores why women's risk taking remains invisible even as they take risks and offers suggestions on how women and organizations may benefit from their risk‐taking activities.

The paper synthesizes evidence on risk taking and gender, and the evidence of female risk taking is an important antidote to persisting stereotypes. The paper outlines reasons for this stereotype persistence and implications for human resource development.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptually and empirically explore issues that explain why women entrepreneurs access only a small percentage of venture capital (VC) investment in the USA.

The focus is on the situations women entrepreneurs face, and the strategies they adopt, to successfully fund their high‐growth businesses with venture funding. Rather than looking for answers at the individual level (men v women), the authors focus on the construct of gender and the way that the socially constructed business practices and processes of access to capital may appear neutral and natural but, in fact, may deliver differential consequences to women and men. When entrepreneurs and capital providers are interacting around the terms and particulars of a business venture, they are also participating in a less obvious conversation – an interaction that is call the Shadow Negotiation. Through interviews with women who have been successful or are in the process of accessing VC for their businesses, patterns of women's awareness and strategic responses that illustrate this phenomenon are identified and their implications discussed.

Women are actors with agency, taking control over situations that may be stacked against them. The analysis suggests that women entrepreneurs vary in the degree to which they identify the gendered landscape they are navigating, and the level of attention and care that management of this landscape demands.

This study complements existing research, both theoretically and prescriptively.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and critique the swing in international policy from encouraging lower income countries to erect local stock exchanges in the 1990s to discouraging them on efficiency grounds after the US securities markets collapsed in 2001.

Surveys existing literature and data about stock exchanges in emerging market countries for evidence justifying a supportive policy approach to local exchanges in lower income countries.

Basic indicators of stock exchange performance in lower income countries from the World Development Indicators database reveal positive trends alongside the less auspicious indicators emphasized by international organizations opposed to stock exchange development in lower income countries. A survey of finance and development literature generally, and work on capital markets specifically, provides evidence of and rationale for the public benefits of stock exchange development, particularly in emerging market countries. Review of governance structures of stock exchanges in low and middle income countries finds the public interest reflected in government participation in stock exchange boards and in their predominantly non‐profit status. Existing research on stock exchange trading systems provides a rationale for specific policy choices to encourage stock market performance and also highlights areas for further policy‐relevant research.

Provides evidence and rationale to bolster the case for public support of local stock exchange development in low and middle income countries in the face of opposition to such efforts from international development agencies like the World Bank.

To stimulate research on Latin American businesswomen's career development and help human resource practitioners design culturally‐adapted advancement programs.

A total of 27 interviews with human resources professional from US Fortune 500 companies with business in Latin America undertaken during 2001‐2003 are the basis for reporting on women's advancement programs in Latin America. A survey of literature on culture in Latin American work organizations provides basis for suggestions about cultural adaptation of these programs. Latin American businesswomen's perceptions of their own career development, recorded in interviews with over 100 businesswomen in six Latin American countries in 2002 by participants in the Women Business Leaders in Latin America project, corroborate these suggestions.

Women's initiatives imported from the USA to Latin America are likely to suffer several shortcomings unless modified to accommodate several common cultural attributes of Latin American work organizations.

Provides a guideline for developing gender diversity practices specifically suited to the Latin American context.

Major cross‐national projects on women, culture and leadership in business to date tend to neglect the Latin American region. This research begins to highlight and remedy that lacuna.

One of the nine thought provoking essays assembled by Peter Vergo in the recently published The New Museology (Reaktan Books, ISBN 0 948 462 035 hardback, ISBN 0 948 462 043 paperback) is “The Quality of Visitors' Experiences in Art Museums” in which Philip Wright discusses the lack of awareness among museum personnel of what exactly their institutions are doing, and indeed should do, in a period when “films, television, video and pop access photography have inevitably altered, if not actually undermined the hierarchy of images that museums aim to display”. Few curators have had professional surveys of their audience undertaken, some have dismissed colleagues' changes as pandering to commercialisation, and invest in sophisticated technology and displays in such a way as to distract from the integrity of the objects in their care.