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Comprehensive primary health care (PHC) models are seldom implemented in high income countries, in part due to their contested legitimacy in neoliberal policy environments. This article explores how merging affected the perceived legitimacy of independent community health organisations in Victoria, Australia, in providing comprehensive PHC services.

A longitudinal follow-up study (2–3 years post-merger) of two amalgamations among independent community health organisations from the state of Victoria, Australia, was conducted. This article explores the perceived effects of merging on (1) the pragmatic, normative and cognitive legitimacy of studied organisations and (2) the collective legitimacy of these organisations in Victoria's health care system. Data were collected through 19 semi-structured interviews with key informants and subjected to template and thematic analyses.

Merging enabled individual organisations to gain greater overall legitimacy as regional providers of comprehensive PHC services and thus retain some capacity to operationalise a social model of health. Normative legitimacy was most enhanced by merging, through acquisition of a large organisational size and adoption of business practices favoured by neoliberal norms. However, mergers may have destabilised the already contested cognitive legitimacy of community health services as a group of organisations and as a comprehensible state-wide platform of service delivery.

Over-reliance on individual organisational behaviour to maintain the legitimacy of comprehensive PHC as a model of organising health and social care could lead to inequities in access to such models across communities.

This study shows that organisations can manage their perceived legitimacy in order to ensure the survival of their preferred model of service delivery.

The retail food market has been wracked by traumatic changes for more than a decade. In the 1970s A & P, the largest chain at that time, was well on the way to oblivion until rescued in a foreign takeover by the West German firm of Tengleman. Safeway, the 1986 market share leader nationally, chose a leveraged buyout rather than a takeover and currently has many divisions in the U.S. up for sale. Within a year or two, Safeway will be a pale shadow of its former self, because it failed to adapt to intense competition. Kroger, the current industry leader, has already begun closing stores in many major markets. In the meantime, the strong regionals such as Food Lion, Shaw's, Hannaford Bros., Randall's, Smith's, Bruno's, Weiss, Albertsons, Publix, Giant Food, Pueblo International, H. E. Butt, and Hughes, are challenging the largest national chains for market share in carefully chosen fields of battle. Overall, the supermarket industry experienced an after tax return on net worth of 14 percent in 1986.

Conducting research with children and youth has become increasingly challenging in recent years. At times these difficulties come in the form of restrictions by Institutional Review Boards, funding agencies, and parents. Additionally, changes in youth culture and behavior, specifically regarding online activities and digitally mediated communications, impact the access that researchers have to children and youth communities in significant ways. In this chapter, I propose that the use of an emerging methodological technique, digital ethnography, may provide researchers with new data sources on children and youth culture. Digital ethnography combines ethnographic techniques of observation, participation, and interview with content analysis to collect rich data about online behavior, norms, expectations, and interactions. This technique not only provides researchers with sources of data that allow insight into youth culture by acknowledging the increasing importance of online and digital interactions in youth culture but may also address some of the concerns raised by IRBs and other interested parties about conducting research with children and teens. This chapter provides practical and ethical considerations of this method, as well as a discussion of limitations of data collection and access as it highlights new ways of studying youth culture, using emerging data collection techniques in innovative research projects.

Describes the background to publishing in Scotland and outlines the nature and range of current Scottish publishing houses. Sets Scottish publishing within its UK and European context and indicates a number of major trends. Presents broad statistics of current Scottish publishing. Describes the nature, activities and achievements of 30 Scottish publishing houses, from large to small and from general to specialist.

HARROGATE will be notable as the venue of the Conference in one or two ways that distinctive. The Association Year is now to begin on January 1st and not in September as heretofore; and, in consequence, there will be no election of president or of new council until the end of the year. The Association's annual election is to take place in November, and the advantages of this arrangement must be apparent to everyone who considers the matter. Until now the nominations have been sent out at a time when members have been scattered to all parts of the country on holiday, and committees of the Council have been elected often without the full consideration that could be given in the more suitable winter time. In the circumstances, at Harrogate the Chair will still be occupied by Sir Henry Miers, who has won from all librarians and those interested in libraries a fuller measure of admiration, if that were possible, than he possessed before he undertook the presidency. There will be no presidential address in the ordinary sense, although Sir Henry Miers will make a speech in the nature of an address from the Chair at one of the meetings. What is usually understood by the presidential address will be an inaugural address which it is hoped will be given by Lord Irwin. The new arrangement must bring about a new state of affairs in regard to the inaugural addresses. We take it that in future there will be what will be called a presidential address at the Annual Meeting nine months after the President takes office. He will certainly then be in the position to review the facts of his year with some knowledge of events; he may chronicle as well as prophesy.

This is the tenth article on science, technology and medicine (STM) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles will appear in the next two issues of this journal, one covering social sciences, humanities, news and general (SSH) (Online & CDROM Review, vol. 21, no. 5) and the other covering business and law (BSL) (Online & CDROM Review, vol. 21, no. 6). These articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).

The Student Christian Movement (SCM) arose from the formal integration in one unit of a number of different strands of student‐run evangelical religion in British Universities(1). The Jesus Lane Sunday School in Cambridge, staffed by students, had been open since 1827. David Livingstone's visit to Cambridge in 1858 inspired the Church Missionary Union and in the same period Cambridge students began a Daily Prayer Meeting. In 1877, the students brought their various efforts together into the Cambridge Inter‐Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU). Similar movements were developing in other colleges. The first major links were created by the “Cambridge Seven”. Even at the end of the period of the “Saints” (as Wilberforce and his fellow evangelicals were known), more than three‐quarters of the men who volunteered for foreign missions were artisans, shop‐boys, labourers and apprentices(2).