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Is it realistic to expect caterers to provide meals in line with current dietary guidelines? Can caterers become nutrition educators and still stay in business? Christina Maudsley, nutritionist with Manchester City Catering Organisation, discusses these questions

If the deliverance of NACNE and COMA have done anything to the British public, they have added to their vocabulary words including ‘polyunsaturates’, ‘cholesterol’ and ‘polysaccharide’. Many people have adequately grasped the crash course in dietetics sufficiently to increase their consumption of wholemeal bread, low fat spreads, skimmed milk, and fish. Others are confused by the resultant flood of information that at times seems to be conflicting and certainly inconclusive. Nutritionists never seem to agree amongst themselves, food manufacturers strive to exonerate all blame from their products and many a grandparent of three score years and ten will claim a diet of dripping and stodge never did them any harm.

Government report says fat is a killer … canned food a source of food poisoning … cling film wrap could be cancerous …

Nurses working in acute mental-health services are vulnerable to occupational stress. One stressor identified is the challenging behaviour of some service users (Jenkins and Elliott, 2004). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the discourses drawn on by nurses to understand challenging behaviour and talk about its management.

Nurses working on acute and psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) wards were interviewed, and data were analysed using discourse analysis.

Biomedical and systemic discourses were found to be dominant. Alternative psychosocial and emotional discourses were drawn on by some participants but marginalised by the dominant biomedical construction of challenging behaviour.

Existing studies have not considered how discourses socially construct challenging behaviour and its management in inpatient mental-health services.

Effective leadership is important to performance in both organisational and sporting arenas. The authors theorised that follower personality would influence perceptions of leadership, and that perceived effective leadership would be associated with performance. The authors drew on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), Transformational Leadership and personality theory to develop a research model designed to assess leadership effectiveness and performance. The purpose of this paper is to test the research model in a sporting context.

The context of the research was a round the world sailing race, a ten-month competitive circumnavigation with ten identical boats. Quantitative data were gathered concerning participants’ personality, their perceptions of transformational leadership and boat performance. Qualitative data on transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness were gathered from a subsample of crew members.

Results showed that transformational leadership was associated with leadership effectiveness and performance. Personality influenced perceptions of leadership and, for moderate performing boats, there were associations between perceptions of leadership and performance.

The data have implications for the extension of transformational leadership theory. Further consideration of follower personality could enhance leadership effectiveness. A limitation is the relatively small scale of the study.

The main implication is that leaders should take follower personality into account, and adapt their leadership style accordingly. Doing so has consequences for performance.

This novel study examined personality, leadership, and performance and has implications for enhancing leadership and performance in sports and business.

This article describes the National Social Inclusion Programme's Communities of Influence workstream, the premises on which it was founded, the innovative social inclusion practice it proposed, what was learned and how the work will be taken forwards in the future.