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The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of older people and their sense of developing wellbeing, including consideration of the strategies they employ to respond to perceived risk.

An Appreciative Inquiry study was used, which collected data with 58 participants in focus group and individual interviews. Interviews focussed on ways in which older people in South Africa, Australia, Germany and the UK understand and seek to maintain wellbeing.

The changing time horizons of older people lead to perceptions of risk and concerns that embrace societal as well as individual concerns. Often, this leads to a sense of societal responsibility and desire for social change, which is frustrated by a perceived exclusion from participation in society.

In mental health practice and education, it is imperative to embrace the shift from ageist concerns (with later life viewed as risky and tragic in itself) towards a greater sensitivity for older people’s resilience, the strategies they deploy to maintain this, and their desire for more control and respect for their potential to contribute to society.

Variation in time horizons leads to changes in temporal accounting, which may be under-utilised by society. Consequently, societies may not recognise and support the resilience of older people to the detriment of older people as individuals and to the wider society.

This paper reports on data from two linked studies in the UK and Germany which evaluated the potential of a quality management system, Qual A Sess, to play a role in self‐regulation in care homes for older people in the context of calls for EU‐wide harmonization of standards. Qual A Sess was developed by German and UK organisations to assess the quality of care in care homes and mechanisms to improve the quality of care through the development of action plans involving residents, families and staff in the process. This paper compares the outcomes of Qual A Sess in care homes in both countries, by focusing on the data available about the action plans generated by the Qual A Sess process, and suggests that standardization of quality indicators may be inappropriate in the context of local differences.

The success and adaptability of healthcare organizations will depend more and more on their ability to draw on the capabilities of their people. Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital, a rural Ontario hospital, has evolved an organization and culture based on shared leadership and decision‐making responsibility. Today this extends to front‐line teams. This did not come about, however, without continuous effort. Successful transition takes preparation, guidance, much thought, commitment and patience.

This paper reports on a seminar organised as part of an ESRC‐funded series on older people and care homes that focused on the period of transition into a care home and the experiences of older people immediately before and after they made the move. The papers presented suggested that there were ways in which older people could exercise choice and control over the process, but that problems existed, ranging from the ways in which assessment and referral systems were crisis or service led, to how people were supported after their move. This paper outlines these arguments, and concludes that such processes need to be addressed if the quality of care at this difficult period is to be improved.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the components of a gang culture in conflict with society, and second, to explore how gangs, the community, and law enforcers externalize the gang problem from the vantage point of worldview and worldmaking.

The researcher gathered news articles from the Nexus-Lexis research database system within a one-year period (from February 2012 to February 2013). The data was randomly selected and representative of newspapers published throughout the USA. The news articles were coded based upon the aspects of culture (lens of perception, motives for human behaviors, criteria for evaluation, basis of identification, means for communication, justification for social stratification, and mode for production and consumption). A thematic analysis was also conducted to determine: the aspects of gang culture in conflicts with society; and how the gangs, the community, and the law enforcements externalize the gang conflict.

Results suggest that gang violence is largely due to issues of identity, values, and gang cohesiveness rather than the result of the pathologically based environmental conditions. Criteria for evaluation and issue of identity constituted 66 percent of the violent conflict with society. In the context of worldviews and worldmaking, gang members and law enforcement personnel are more likely to adopt a rigid, win-lose framework while members of the community are more likely to prescribe to a flexible and holistic perspective toward the gang problem. In sum, gang violence is not necessarily a deviant or antisocial act; rather, it is a result of the conflicting narratives between the gang cultures and the culture-at-large.

In dissecting gang behavior from a cultural perspective, it is easy to categorize gangs as a collective subculture. However, gang members may not view themselves as a subculture nor consider themselves as belonging to a subculture community.

By examining the function of culture – in this case, the gang culture – as it conflicts with society at large, one may better able to develop an action plan that emphasize identities, cultures, and values rather than crime and punishment. Also, it may help shed light on how the various stakeholders (i.e. the gangs, law enforcements, and the community) perceive the conflict, which may assist researcher to develop a comprehensive and holistic approach toward intervention. Finally, implementing a culturally based gang violence intervention may reduce cost.

This research is unique in that it analyzes the function of gang violence in relation to the society-at-large. Also, the research addresses the issue as to how the various stakeholders interpret the “gang problem.” Finally, this research is innovative in that it employs news articles as units of analysis rather than the traditional qualitative interviews or quantitative surveys.

The idea that relational processes are central to knowledge creation and knowledge sharing is an idea in good currency (Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004; Brown & Duguid, 1996; Wenger, 1998). Rather than considering knowledge as a commodity that can be transferred from one mind to another, when knowledge is viewed as a relational practice, it resides in social interactions and is actualized in common practices that evolve within a particular community of practice (Sternberg & Horvath, 1999; Van Looy, Debackere, & Bouwen, 2000). Thus, knowledge is both embedded and emergent — subject to change as participants in a community interact with one another. To understand what is known, it becomes necessary to study how members of an organizational community interact and how their knowledge shifts over time.

A conference on the history of heterodox economics in the twentieth century was held during October 3–5, 2002 at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The conference organizers were Frederic S. Lee and John King. Several papers presented at the conference are published below, several in significantly revised and/or expanded form, together with one paper distributed at but not formally presented at the conference. Malcolm Rutherford’s paper, “On the Economic Frontier: Walton Hamilton, Institutional Economics, and Education,” will be published in History of Political Economy. All of the papers published here have been reviewed.