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Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in its many forms accounts for a large proportion of plastics production and packaging in Western Europe. Its applications and fitness for purpose as a food packaging are outlined, together with an analysis of the energy and materials required and by‐products made in its production. Methods of production are outlined, noting the environmental and health hazards. Problems associated with its disposal are described.

An introduction and review of food and packaging policies employed by retailers; and an objective evaluation of Gateway′s new approach. The review highlights key issues arising and gives social and economic background to Gateway′s innovative policies.

The hegemony of neoliberal rhetoric in Western societies places an increasing emphasis on an individual’s ability to negotiate risk. The purpose of this chapter is to better understand how – within this cultural context – voluntary risk-takers think about the significance of their potentially dangerous practices. My specific focus is the Chicago parkour community. Parkour is a new lifestyle sport in which practitioners use features of the urban environment (e.g., stairwells and retaining walls) as obstacles on which to climb, jump, run and vault.

Data for this project were derived from four years of participant-observation within the Chicago parkour community and semi-structured interviews with 40 participants.

I argue that the dangers encountered while practicing parkour are given social significance through the interplay of what I call rites of risk and rituals of symbolic safety. These rites and rituals provide a meaningful framework for activities that represent a threat to the self (e.g., performing a jump in which a mistake could be fatal). Further, I contrast my findings with the notion of edgework (which highlights the death-defying aspects of an activity). Members of the Chicago parkour community often downplayed the physical perils involved in their sport to highlight safety protocols. In this sense, parkour practitioners are less like “edgeworkers” and more like “hedgeworkers” – symbolically demonstrating protections taken against uncertainly (i.e., hedging one’s bets).

Like all ethnographic studies of a single field site, there are limits to generalizability. Future research should explore the connections between hedgework and other voluntary risk-taking activities (in and outside of lifestyle sports).

This paper aims to report on a recent study that investigated the distance learner's voice in relationship to their “lived experiences” of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including new media, for teaching and learning. The study reported on here sought to understand how distance learners are using new technology for teaching and learning in a world that increasingly uses and relies on these technologies.

This qualitative study took a phenomenological approach to investigating the students' experiences with ICTs. Participants were purposively selected to represent a variety of undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as a diverse range of distance learning experiences. A number of strategies for collecting the student voice were utilised, including the Day Experience Method (DEM), Charting the Week's Activities (CWA) and focus group discussions.

The study found that learners vary widely in their use of new media. However, there is emerging evidence that distance learners of all ages are beginning to appropriate new media to support a more mobile and connected learning experience.

These findings suggest that students' learning preferences are changing. This study provides the basis for further studies in this area and the need for institutions to consider how these changing preferences might be considered in relation to policy and practice in the provision of education for distance learners.

A study carried out by the Gateway supermarket chain and Landbank Environmental Consultancy partnership into environmental damage caused by the production, distribution and disposal of packaging materials produced a report providing Gateway′s packaging strategy for the 1990s. The report is summarised, identifying those packaging materials or systems which offer the clearest environmental benefits, noting the principal environmental problems associated with particular packaging materials, and setting a target for reducing energy consumption in their production. The principles of an environmental approach to packaging materials are also defined.

THE catalogue, as a library appliance of importance, has had more attention devoted to it than, perhaps, any other method or factor of librarianship. Its construction, materials, rules for compilation and other aspects have all been considered at great length, and in every conceivable manner, so that little remains for exposition save some points in the policy of the catalogue, and its effects on progress and methods. In the early days of the municipal library movement, when methods were somewhat crude, and hedged round with restrictions of many kinds, the catalogue, even in the primitive form it then assumed, was the only key to the book‐wealth of a library, and as such its value was duly recognized. As time went on, and the vogue of the printed catalogue was consolidated, its importance as an appliance became more and more established, and when the first Newcastle catalogue appeared and received such an unusual amount of journalistic notice, the idea of the printed catalogue as the indispensable library tool was enormously enhanced from that time till quite recently. One undoubted result of this devotion to the catalogue has been to stereotype methods to a great extent, leading in the end to stagnation, and there are places even now where every department of the library is made to revolve round the catalogue. Whether it is altogether wise to subordinate everything in library work to the cult of the catalogue has been questioned by several librarians during the past few years, and it is because there is so much to be said against this policy that the following reflections are submitted.

The Reformation, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains, which redefined the relationship between the individual and God as a personal one, “took pains to regulate the relationship of man to alcohol,” and in so doing laid “an essential foundation¦…¦for the development of capitalism.” In the earlier Rabelaisian world, the Church constituted the major site of popular culture. Virtually all work was seasonal in character punctuated by carnivalesque church feasts that numbered over one hundred yearly. Although generally accepted as a safe means to vent communal anxieties, drink comprised an essential element of these festivals, with drunkenness the socially acceptable outcome.¹⁶ However, as the Reformation progressed and new modes of aristocratic behavior developed, reformative efforts to separate the secular and the sacred within the church resulted in attempts to abandon the popular culture of the lower classes. A broad consensus emerged that too much drunkenness amounted to social evil, and that alehouses represented an “increasingly dangerous force in popular society.”¹⁷ As the influence of the Church declined in the early eighteenth century, Carnival resurfaced in the form of gregarious carnivalesque village and town feasts: “the grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized” and writers such as Swift and Pope “perpetually identif[ied] the scene of writing with the fairground and the carnival.”¹⁸ Conversely, in keeping with the symmetrical component inherent in the Carnival/Lent theme, Lent transmuted into organizations such as The Society for the Reformation of Manners, which attempted to reduce drunkenness, cursing, swearing and whoring – all tropes of carnivalesque gregariousness. So, during this period, a contradictory cultural dissonance was being enacted. On the one hand, we find a resurgence of Carnival, but on the other hand, we see “a conservative desire on the part of the upper classes to separate themselves more clearly and distinctly from these popular activities.”¹⁹

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meso-level social forces that influence moderate drinking in young women’s friendship groups through the application of social capital theory.

A qualitative inquiry was undertaken utilising peer-paired and small focus groups to explore young women’s drinking choices within their existing friendship groups. Guided by emic and etic perspectives, friendship groups were analysed to inform archetypical representations that illustrate group-level social capital exchanges.

The approach led to identifying four social capital and drinking archetypes. These archetypes indicate social capital-led “influencers” and “followers” and highlight the displays of capital practised by young women in alcohol consumption contexts.

The social marketing insight drawn from this study of young women’s drinking behaviours will inform social marketers on future strategic directions about how they can use alternative methods to segment the social market of young female drinkers and develop value propositions that will motivate them towards adopting or maintaining moderate drinking practices.

This study contributes to social marketing theory by demonstrating the worth of social capital theory as an alternative lens for social marketers to apply in explorations of group influences that shape behaviour. The research findings in the paper demonstrate how deeper theorisation provides rich insight into the meso-level, complex behavioural influence which effect young women’s alcohol consumption.