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THE re‐refining of used lubricating oil became established in Great Britain during the second world war and is now carried out by six main companies. The UK consumption of lubricating oils is about 1,150,000 tons per annum and only about 5 per cent of this is being recovered for further use. The remainder is either burned as fuel or disposed of as a waste material by tipping—causing a most serious pollution problem.

Mergers, frequent and disruptive business practices, are increasing in the U.S. and abroad. A qualitative inquiry of a newly‐merged travel agency revealed six acculturation themes: identity, reputation, leadership, membership, information, and appearance. These themes suggest an acculturation agenda for the long period of turmoil that follows a merger.

The purpose of this study is to develop an in-depth understanding of the overall process of facilitating co-creation of e-government services, focusing on the government's role in fostering citizen engagement.

This study conducted a meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies encompassing analyses on a case-specific level followed by syntheses on a cross-study level.

Through meta-synthesis, the study developed an integrated framework, the process theory view of enabling co-creation of e-government services, illustrating how co-creation could be initiated and facilitated by the government.

By providing critical insights into co-creation steps, the process theory view offers a holistic theoretical understanding of enabling co-creation by identifying factors driving and motivating governments to initiate co-creation activities, interpreting the prerequisites for co-creation and the importance of impact assessment.

This study offers important implications for public authorities, administrators and policymakers by helping them enhance their knowledge base on the co-creation process to facilitate a higher level of collaboration between citizens and government for effective and efficient public service delivery through e-government.

While it is widely acknowledged that citizen engagement is crucial for improving and transforming the development and delivery of e-government services, it is equally recognized as a challenging and complex task. Through a meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies, this study is one of the first to develop a process theory view for offering a holistic understanding and crucial insights for addressing the concerns over the co-creation of e-government services.

Around 60 per cent of people with dementia in the UK live at home. The experience of caring for a family member with dementia can be rewarding and positive, but it can also be significantly stressful. Current healthcare policy is encouraging greater provision to support family carers. Along with respite-care, day-care and support group-based initiatives, there has also been a focus on developing dementia-specific communication training. The paper discusses this issue.

The authors outline a new initiative “Empowered Carers” which is being piloted in the North of England. Empowered Carers is an online support and communication training service for family carers who are caring for someone with dementia at home. It utilises online video conference-calling technology to connect carers with support workers, and also allows for simultaneous interactions involving other family members. A central tenet of the approach is a theoretically grounded support model, based on the concept of mentalisation.

The authors describe the background to Empowered Carers, and how a conventional evaluation strategy for the initiative is being used alongside a socio-linguistic approach (Conversation Analysis – CA). This aims to provide empirical evidence about how the assimilation of mentalisation is reflected in the structuring of speech patterns in carers during support sessions.

The authors explain the CA method, how it has been applied to similar talk-based therapeutic settings, and why its ability to explore sequential linguistic patterns across extremely large data-sets is particularly suited to studying interaction in emerging online arenas.

With the long awaited ratification of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009, it appears that plans within Europe to achieve an ‘ever closer union’ are back on track, yet, in the field of illicit drug policy, harmonisation remains as elusive a goal as ever. Sweden and the Netherlands have long provided examples of the different paradigms of drug policy operating within Europe and this article seeks to examine whether, as European Union harmonisation moves forward, recent developments bring the two any closer to convergence on this contentious issue. In addition to changes in Swedish and Dutch drug policy, the progress of the drug policy of other European countries has been evaluated. The article concludes that the Swedes and the Dutch remain ultimately wedded to their national policies and that movement both towards increased repression of drug use and increased liberalisation of drug use can be observed among other European countries. Harmonisation of European drug policy therefore remains in a state of stalemate.

A response to Chatwin's article (2010), which argues that European harmonisation of illicit drug policies remains far from realisation, this paper seeks to recommend developing a more specific conceptualisation of European integration in the area of illicit drugs and argues that harmonisation was not a realistic aim of the European Union (EU).

This is a review paper which seeks to advocate the application of a more rigid analytical framework in drug policy analysis that takes into account the “soft” methods of governance used by the EU. The paper also uses secondary data sources to emphasise the argument.

Domestic convergence has been observed across a number of policy areas.

The nature and level of convergence remains contested and more data are needed to clarify any trends. Future research would be necessary to demonstrate that convergence occurs as a result of EU action rather than other factors.

There remains little in the way of research on the processes of European integration and their specific impact on drug policy at the European and domestic level. This paper will be of value to scholars in the field of European integration who are seeking to expand their research into a new policy sector, as well as researchers in the drug field who are looking for a more formal analytical framework.

This chapter provides a critical exploration of the European Union’s impact on the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) proceedings and Outcome document. It demonstrates that the ability to produce a European ‘common position’ ahead of the UNGASS debates represents a significant step forward in the ability to ‘speak with one voice’ in the global illicit drug policy arena, and has played an important role in ensuring key issues such as human rights and public health remain on the agenda. In highlights, however, a European failure to engage with issues such as the continuing suitability of the international drug conventions to preside over the current climate of drug policy innovation and experimentation, and the unintended consequences of a ‘war on drugs’ approach. Ultimately, therefore, it argues that these failures will hamper the development of a more progressive and effective global drug policy.

These are the days of falling standards and sagging morale, nowhere more apparent than in the one‐time efficient public service. The division between management and workers in the field in the large public enterprises has grown wider and wider and we tend to blame the lower strata of the structure for most of the ills which beset us, mainly because its failures are more obvious; here, the falling standards of work and care speak for themselves. The massive reorganization of the National Health Service and local authorities has made evident, especially in the first, that the upper strata of the colossi which dominate our everyday lives have their ills too. Local authorities have been told “The party is over!” and the National Health Service has been told of the urgent need for the strictest economy in administration; that the taking over of personal health services from local authorities was wrongly attributed to “managerial growth” instead of a mere “transfer of functions”, but, nonetheless, new authorities were created, each with fast‐growing administrative organs operating services—doctors, nurses and patients—which had remained unchanged. Very large local authorities, with many functions lost to others, one would have expected to have resulted in economy of administration, has all‐too‐often been the opposite. Hardly surprising that those who pay for it all, distinct from those who receive of its largesse, are being stirred to rebellion, when they have been overtaxed, ill‐used and what is more important, ignored for so long.

In Britain, the last two decades have seen a considerable increase in focus on service users' involvement in the provision of services that directly affect them, particularly where service users originate from a hard to reach population such as drug users. While the National Treatment Agency and drug and alcohol action teams often extol the virtues of the involvement of drug users in their service provision, participation of this type does not come without problems of its own. Experience of drug user involvement in service provision is much more established in Europe and this article seeks to utilise European examples in illustrating the potential pitfalls of such a strategy. Case studies are examined from three countries: the Netherlands, where drug policy is relatively liberal and drug user groups have been established since the 1970s; Denmark, where drug policy is fairly well balanced between repression and tolerance and drug user groups have been established since the 1990s; and Sweden, where drug policy is relatively repressive and drug user groups are only just emerging. Salient points from these case studies are then used to form the discussion, relating European experiences to the situation in Britain.