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The public library service for the County of Cheshire administered by the former Cheshire County Council since 1922 was mainly a book lending service to the more rural areas of the county with village library centres staffed by volunteers and later a mobile library service. Branch libraries served small towns and the suburban fringes of the larger towns with a student library postal loan service as support. Library services in most of the larger towns were run by the borough or urban district authorities, and in all there were eighteen library authorities in Cheshire by 1964. In 1965 S. G. Berriman, the former County Librarian of Middlesex, was appointed to the new post of Director of Libraries and Museums for Cheshire County Council, and with the support of an independent Library Committee, rather than a Sub Committee of the Education Committee, he proposed and achieved a massive development programme. Between 1964 and 1973 the face of the Cheshire Library Service was transformed as substantial money both capital and revenue was made available for the very first time and many new libraries were built. With the advent of local government reorganisation and the proposed changes to the shape of Cheshire that exciting developmental period was over, and Berriman decided to retire early as Director of Libraries and Museums to allow a new man to steer the service into the new Cheshire. Appointed in 1972, that man was Alex Wilson.

Summing up the positive and negative effects that will result from the completion of the Single Market in 1992, we can conclude that although there will be a certain amount of restructuring in business activity, the labour market and the overall supply of tourist services, there are going to be some very important benefits as well.

Research into the provision of management education in the UK and Europe is summarised and perceived future demand, constraints on growth and planned strategic initiatives, primarily in the UK, are presented. It is concluded that teaching will need to be much more issue‐based than disciplinary‐a feature of the newer management education programmes (e.g. IMC′s MBA).

Focusing on The Agency, a project of Contact Theatre in North Manchester, the chapter uses records of a conversation between the two authors as well as detailed fieldnotes as the starting point for reflection on the nature of ‘youth participation’ which The Agency nurtures and supports. It shows how entrepreneurship can be and is being seized by young people who see the possibility of making a difference both for themselves as individuals and for their own communities. Young people are identified as protagonists of their own practice, becoming involved, with the support of facilitators, in both self-development and community development and, thus, we argue in new forms of cultural democracy in which relational practice that challenges the shaming of marginalised communities is at the fore. Historic and contemporary forms of working-class culture offer a powerful lens through which new anti-racist forms of community and cultural democracy emerge. For this to happen, recognition and resourcing are each essential.

This chapter focuses on the Street Work Homeless Project that was the site of one of the ethnographic case studies conducted in Manchester and also one of the participatory action research projects. The participants – men with lived experience of homelessness – were in many ways the antithesis of those usually considered for inclusion in a study on youth participation. However, the chapter shows how there is much to learn from this project, particularly in terms of how marginalised groups can actively participate in and for society. In preparation for the chapter, Rowley and Charles revisited their reflections and learning from the project. From this process, they wrote conversations exploring tensions that ran throughout the project. These tensions, and an antidote, are explored in the chapter. The chapter emphasises the importance of relationality in building mutuality and trust, the limitations of empowerment due to internalising pathologising dominant narratives, and the need to witness rather than spectate the more discomforting aspects of learning participation. By working through these tensions, it was possible to shift relations and roles between those designated as facilitator and participant leading to the question ‘who was lost and who was found?’. The chapter concludes that such processes are necessarily agonistic and creative to enable more inclusive and democratic participation to occur for marginalised groups.

In recent times, extant literature increasingly underscores the importance of indigenous innovations. This chapter provides an empirical illustration that a collaboration between indigenous knowledge systems and mainstream knowledge systems will not only help overcome the shortcomings in both systems, but also result in more cost-effective and environmentally friendly solutions. The chapter also advocates for public policies that facilitate the development and dissemination of such innovations. Using a case study from the Nigerian context, a framework is provided in this chapter, to illustrate how scientific knowledge can be applied to indigenous innovations to result in the next generation of sustainable, cost-effective and environmentally friendly solutions.

This chapter examines the interactions of formal and informal forms of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business support, characterised as interactions within an ‘enterprise industry’. An analysis of the interactions revealed in the existing literature for different forms of business support develops a new conceptual framework for understanding those varied forms of external influence targeted at SMEs that constitute and extend a ‘patchwork quilt’ of provision. This chapter focusses on how different forms of support and advice interact, the centrality of state influence and how such interactions can be considered part of a firm’s regulatory context. This conceptualisation allows the consideration of both business support and state regulations to move beyond conceptions of positive or negative impacts on factors such as firm growth. Instead, it establishes a conceptual lens for considering how the different forms of external influence can shape the practices and attitudes of SMEs and their owner-managers. Policy makers and organisations within the enterprise industry seeking to develop effective forms of support or regulation should not consider such activities in isolation or in simple, decontextualised positive or negative terms.