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This article traces the impact of educational policy on the role of primary head teachers in Britain spanning the end of the New Right and the start of the New Left policy implementation processes. It is based on the reported perceptions of a sample of primary school head teachers who have been in post over the entire seven year period. It is argued that the conceptual framework derived from the early work on headship in the UK is still appropriate to an analysis of the role of the primary school head as both leading professional and chief executive but that the emphasis has shifted from one in which heads are selected from aspects of their role to one in which heads are now required to extend their involvement in school management across the main aspects of both parts of their role.

Against a British policy backdrop, which places an ever- increasing emphasis on workplace learning in pre-service professional programmes, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of the mentor to professional knowledge development in nursing, paramedicine, social work and teaching.

Taking the form of a literature review, it explores the influence of policy, professional and theoretical conceptualisations of the mentor role, and structural factors influencing the mentor’s contribution to professional knowledge.

Where there are clearly delineated policy obligations for the mentor to “teach”, mentors are more likely to make connections between theoretical and practical knowledge. When this responsibility is absent or informal, they are inclined to attend to the development of contextual knowledge with a consequent disconnect between theory and practice. In all four professions, mentors face significant challenges, especially with regard to the conflict between supporting and assessor roles, and the need to attend to heavy contractual workloads, performance targets and mentoring roles in tandem.

The authors argue first for the need for more attention to the pedagogy of mentoring, and second for structural changes to workload allocations, career progression and mentoring education. In order to develop more coherent and interconnected professional knowledge between different domains, and the reconciliation of different perspectives, it would be useful to underpin mentoring pedagogy with Bhabba’s notion of “third space”.

The paper makes a contribution to the field since it considers new obligations incumbent on mentors to assist mentees in reconciling theoretical and practical knowledge by the consequence of policy and also takes a multi-professional perspective.

The professional discourse on academic library planning and design is examined. A critical realist philosophical stance and a constructionist perspective constitute the theoretical framework that, paired with Fairclough's methodology for critical discourse analysis, is used to examine the constitution of interpretative repertoires and of a discourse constructing the academic library as a learning place. The information commons, learning commons, and library designed for learning repertoires are described and the effects of discursive activity are analyzed. Three types of effects are presented: (1) the production by the LIS community of discourse on academic libraries of a sizable body of literature on the information commons and on the learning commons, (2) the construction of new types of libraries on the commons model proposed by Beagle, and (3) the metaphorization of the library as business. The study concludes that the existing discourse takes a facilities management perspective dominated by concerns with technology, equipment, and space requirements that does not address the physical, psychological, and environmental qualities of library space design. Consequently, it is suggested that architectural programming techniques should be used in library planning and design that consider the architectural features and environmental design factors contributing to the making of a place where learning is facilitated.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight, through a theoretical and empirical analysis, the expected effects of the use of tools and techniques of project management on the performance of SMEs in Africa.

The study uses data from a questionnaire survey of 157 SMEs in Senegal. The sample was chosen for convenience. Also, for data processing, the author mobilized descriptive statistics, factor analysis and regression analysis.

Regardless of size, SMEs use project management tools and techniques. Their use positively and significantly influences their business and social performance. Also, the size of the SME is positively and significantly associated with the use of tools and techniques; however, the results show that the older the SME, the less it uses such tools and techniques.

This research provides an overview of the tools and techniques of project management used by SMEs and their contribution to performance, everything that can support them in choosing the appropriate tools and techniques to respond to their needs. A limitation of this research is that it does not mention the tools that contribute the most to the performance of the SMEs.

Contrary to the results of some previous research studies on SMEs in Africa, showing that the way in which SMEs operate in Africa is often characterized by less use of formal management tools, for cultural and institutional reasons, this research shows that these have a very appreciable degree of openness to project management tools and techniques.

In the presence of a low rate of investment in research and development in the fish industry, the Moroccan government launched in 2009 a new fisheries program which directs fish processing companies towards a non-price competitiveness strategy. These companies are driving to establish a modernized value chain that supports product innovation in its performance generation. This study therefore aims at measuring the impact of this value chain on the performance of a new product taking into account the early stages of development, namely prototyping.

First, the authors tried to collect the data in a dichotomous qualitative form for the structure of the innovation process which reflects the measure of elapsed time for each stage of the innovation process in the two cases, namely, sequentiality and parallelism of the steps. The authors then addressed a second time to the quality managers to provide them with quantitative data. Nevertheless, the evaluation of the improvement of the innovative product had remained qualitative.

The study shows that there is a positive and significant relationship between the partially parallel structure and the internal improvement objectives of the new prototype.

The main limitation of this study was the very small sample of firms operating in innovation, which did not allow us to apply a parametric analysis such as logistic or linear regression according to a normal law on a sufficient number of observations according to the transversal approach. As theoretical implications of this study, Davila et al. (2006) argue that to succeed in a product development process, it must be possible to measure the resulting performance. Assessing performance in the product development process is particularly important for managers and decision makers to address key management issues such as “what we do”, “what we have learned” and “what should we do in the future” (Tatikonda, 2007).

The empirical implications of this study have shown that accelerating the execution of innovation activity is enormously favored to increase the performance of the innovative product over the medium term. This will enable the company to be efficient in terms of market entry time with good quality and as soon as possible mainly in the early stages of development of the new product.

Compared with previous studies, the originality of this study is to answer two inadequacies in the theory of performance of the new product, namely, the objective/quantitative nature of the practice measured in the innovation process and the use of a holistic approach based on the performance indicators of the innovative product at each stage of the innovation process.