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This paper describes work undertaken in Pakistan within a project to strengthen the health planning system, aimed at improving the capacity of the planning cells to identify priorities and develop broad strategic guidelines. The work starts from the premise that identification of priorities requires two stages. In the first stage, problems must be structured and defined in a way that is accepted by all major stakeholders in the planning process. In the second stage, a transparent process of decision making must exist which will provide the means for the planning group to establish priorities and time‐scales. The tools chosen in this instance were selected in relation to the characteristics of the local environment, and the paper describes these.

WE are pleased to devote this Special Number of THE LIBRARY WORLD to a discussion of Irish libraries and librarianship. Our contributors are all distinguished members of the profession in Ireland, none more so than Dermot Foley, to whom we are greatly indebted for having convened this issue.

ALL activities in children's libraries are designed to increase the use and knowledge of books, so that children will learn to read for enjoyment and so that books will help the child's development and education. Libraries are in a privileged position and their activities should be directed in such a way that they are not merely an extension of the school curriculum, nor only recreational. This can be achieved by other media not related to books or knowledge.

A foundational tenet of psychiatric nursing is person-centered care. Research suggests person-centered care requires a therapeutic relationship based on partnerships; this partnership is integral to service users’ recovery. The purpose of this paper is to describe the integration of the concept map within a tidal/recovery framework. The integration may assist psychiatric nursing students to effectively apply recovery principles to their individual nursing practices.

This paper outlines the Tidal Model (TM) of Recovery and Reclamation philosophy, concept maps, and how these elements integrate into the psychiatric nursing practice education. Second-year psychiatric nursing students were asked to use the TM with concept mapping while working with service users in practice education settings.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model that the authors, psychiatric nursing educators, designed to help psychiatric students integrate the recovery principles with the service user’s care plan. Future directions include devising a research study to examine the effectiveness of the TM concept map. The authors did not conduct a research study.

Applying recovery principles improved person-centered care and enhanced the collaboration between service users and nursing students, and prepared students to practice from a collaborative perspective.

In the assessment of student nurses, there is limited research exploring why the contributions of people with lived experience (LE) have an impact on learning. The purpose of this paper is to compare the nature of feedback provided to students by people who have both worked in and used mental health services.

To explore the nature of qualitative student feedback generated from an assessment involving people who have experience of using and working in mental health services. Therefore, an inductive content analysis conducted on the formative written feedback provided to students following a simulated assessment.

The results demonstrate significant similarities in the feedback provided by those with LE of using and working within mental health services, suggesting a shared conceptualisation of professionalism.

The research indicates the potential socialisation of professionals and service users to not only the assessment process but also the professional expectations of mental health nurses. These findings resonate with Barker et al.’s (1999) description of the “pseudo ordinary me” and emphasise the principles and importance of person-centred care.

The paper highlights that assessment approaches which incorporate feedback from people with LE offer a vehicle to demonstrate and explore how attributes, subjectively associated with professionalism, can be recognised and developed by student mental health nurses.

The studies of school size undertaken by the Midwest Psychological Field Station at the University of Kansas indicated that while students in large schools were exposed to a larger number of school activities and the best of them achieved standards in many activities that were unequalled by students in the small schools, students in the small schools participated in more activities, their versatility and performance scores were consistently higher, they reported more and “better” satisfactions and displayed stronger motivation in all areas of school activity. Although there has long been evidence from industrial psychology that the larger and more bureaucratically efficient the organization the greater the degradation of the individual, this knowledge has had little influence upon schools, and the widespread concern for the organization man has not been accompanied by a similar concern for the organization child.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

This paper aims to examine the nature of academic engagement with policy and the (lack of) responsiveness by policymakers to the scientific community through the development of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation Trustees’ Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting (IFRS Foundation, 2020).

The 577 submissions to the IFRS Foundation consultation were reviewed, and 39 were identified as being submitted by academics. These 39 included collectively 104 academic signatories from 74 organisations or networks and 20 countries. They were analysed using NVivo. Drawing on the literature on techniques used to discredit or credit arguments, we examine the academic responses to the consultation questions, particularly those concerning: the role of the IFRS Foundation; perceptions of the “investor perspective”; the audience for reporting; the definition of materiality; and a climate first approach.

The majority (72%) of academic submissions were opposed to the IFRS Foundation Trustees’ proposals on key issues. This dissenting majority collectively have substantial research records in sustainability reporting and its outcomes. Those supportive were significantly less likely to reference research or state their credentials and, despite being supportive, nevertheless raised concerns with the proposals.

Senior academics undertaking research in the field have engaged, in unusually high numbers, with a policy development they believe will not work and maybe counter to achieving sustainable development. The findings underscore the importance of highlighting the discrediting strategies and tactics used in this discursive “battle”. The findings have implications for the legitimacy of policymakers on sustainability-related initiatives which are not engaging with the relevant scientific community.

Policy initiatives that are judged as potentially harmful to sustainable development attract more intense, activist and sustained engagement supported by research evidence.

The paper identifies the importance of evidence-based academic engagement and highlights strategies that engaging academics need to persist over. It highlights the collective view of academics in the field on the IFRS Foundation consultation paper.

Like many operations research models, ambulance location models suffer from lack of practical implementation by those who could benefit from them. A major obstacle to adoption of such models is the emphasis their developers place on abstract mathematical principles, which overshadow the functional purpose of the models. This focus leads to impracticality in the presentation and usage of models, owing to such attributes as complex computer interfaces, cumbersome input and output procedures, and non‐intuitive presentation of results. Suggests a solution to these problems, in the form of a graphical interface system called ALIAS (Ambulance Location Identification and Analysis System).