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This study, conducted in 1997, aimed to explore in depth the views and experiences of women with breast cancer concerning diseaserelated mass media information. Three age‐stratified, unstructured focus group discussions were convened with thirty women with breast cancer (n = 11, 12 and 7). The discussions were audiotaped and transcribed in full and the transcripts were analysed using theme analysis. A number of themes concerning mass media breast cancer information were identified. Women sought and paid attention to information from a variety of mass media sources, including medical books and journals, leaflets, videotapes, women’s magazines, newspapers and television programmes. Mass media information was thought to possess a number of advantages. In particular, participants viewed mass media sources such as magazines and television as helpful in raising breast cancer awareness in the general population. Mass media information, however, was also viewed as having a number of disadvantages. For example, once diagnosed, participants thought that mass media sources such as magazines were frightening and depressing owing to their often negative and sensationalised nature. This finding was particularly worrying as women with breast cancer looked for and were often ‘drawn’ to such communication vehicles. To conclude, mass media information has advantages and disadvantages and its impact upon individuals may depend on their disease status. It is important that editors of mass media sources such as women’s magazines are aware of this dichotomy and are prepared to provide accurate, factual and less dramatised breast cancer information.

This study aimed to evaluate the quality of Internet information on smoking cessation using a cross‐sectional survey design. The characteristics and content of 89 Web sites containing smoking cessation information were evaluated. The quality of these sites were measured by the information quality tool (IQT), quality scale (QS) and DISCERN. The most widely reported types of information were the risks of smoking (65.2 per cent of sites) and nicotine replacement therapy (77.8 per cent of sites). Most (59.7 per cent) of the sites containing treatment information were evidence‐based. The Web sites were of variable quality and the quality of sites produced by non‐commercial organisations (e.g. universities) was significantly higher than those produced by commercial organisations (e.g. pharmaceutical companies) and private practices. Sites containing some evidence‐based information had significantly higher quality scores than sites containing no evidence‐based information. These findings have implications for practice and further research and these are discussed in the paper.

This paper aims to explore how opportunities for learning clinical skills are negotiated within bedside teaching encounters (BTEs). Bedside teaching, within the medical workplace, is considered essential for helping students develop their clinical skills.

An audio and/or video observational study examining seven general practice BTEs was undertaken. Additionally, audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants. All data were transcribed. Data analysis comprised Framework Analysis informed by Engeström’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory.

BTEs can be seen to offer many learning opportunities for clinical skills. Learning opportunities are negotiated by the participants in each BTE, with patients, doctors and students playing different roles within and across the BTEs. Tensions emerged within and between nodes and across two activity systems.

Negotiation of clinical skills learning opportunities involved shifts in the use of artefacts, roles and rules of participation, which were tacit, dynamic and changing. That learning is constituted in the activity implies that students and teachers cannot be fully prepared for BTEs due to their emergent properties. Engaging doctors, students and patients in reflecting on tensions experienced and the factors that influence judgements in BTEs may be a useful first step in helping them better manage the roles and responsibilities therein.

The paper makes an original contribution to the literature by highlighting the tensions inherent in BTEs and how the negotiation of roles and division of labour whilst juggling two interacting activity systems create or inhibit opportunities for clinical skills learning. This has significant implications for how BTEs are conceptualised.

This chapter examines the tensions inherent in conceptions of social justice as they relate to educational administrator preparation programs. In order to determine how social justice is conceptualized in K-12 administrator preparation in Ontario, Canada, we conduct a document analysis of publicly available information related to provincial leadership preparation programs. We identify an ideological bias toward managerial and transformational leadership paradigms which favor externally mandated outcomes that unintentionally reinstate hierarchical management paradigms and democratic forms of racism (Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, 2000). Drawing on critical democratic and antiracist literature and our own research and practice, we propose an approach to leadership preparation that can support diversity and transformative praxis while working within a mandated transformational paradigm.

Current approaches to measuring family business performance have limitations: failing to acknowledge the entire family business holistically, and lacking recognition of the idiosyncratic nature of family business goals. By applying organizational effectiveness and the achievement of desired organizational outcomes, the purpose of this paper is to develop a scale to measure performance based on a family business’ idiosyncratic goals.

This study applies mixed methods, including qualitative research, two surveys and structural equation modeling.

The authors develop a scale employing 21 items, representing six goal dimensions, to measure the family business performance.

The family business performance measurement scale from this study responds to multiple calls for a scale gauging family business performance in a manner including both financial and non-financial outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay of organizational humorous teasing and workplace bullying in hospital work life in order to investigate how workplace bullying can emerge from doctors and nurses experiences of what, at first, appears as “innocent” humorous interactions.

Based on an ethnographic field study among doctors and nurses at Rigshospitalet (University Hospital of Copenhagen, Denmark) field notes, transcriptions from two focus groups and six in-depth interviews were analyzed using a cross-sectional thematic analysis.

This study demonstrates how bullying may emerge out of a distinctive joking practice, in which doctors and nurses continually relate to one another with a pronounced degree of derogatory teasing. The all-encompassing and omnipresent teasing entails that the positions of perpetrator and target persistently change, thereby excluding the position of bystander. Doctors and nurses report that they experience the humiliating teasing as detrimental, although they feel continuously forced to participate because of the fear of otherwise being socially excluded. Consequently, a concept of “fluctuate bullying” is suggested wherein nurses and doctors feel trapped in a “double bind” position, being constrained to bully in order to avoid being bullied themselves.

The present study add to bullying research by exploring and demonstrating how workplace bullying can emerge from informal social power struggles embedded and performed within ubiquitous humorous teasing interactions.

So far as the law is concerned, the Medical Officer of Health has only the slenderest connection with the execution of the Adulteration Acts. He is simply a person who may, in common with the Sanitary Inspector and the police constable, purchase samples under the Acts and submit them to the Public Analyst. Having done this, he is entitled to receive a certificate of analysis just like any other purchaser who may submit a sample under the provisions of the Acts, and there the matter ends.