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Increasingly, customers expect suppliers to deliver a high standard of service before and after purchase, and in a competitive market this can mean the difference between success and failure. Explores the role of employees in providing customer satisfaction, and ways in which management can support and motivate them. Concludes by offering hints to help leaders achieve this.

Here are three contributions from mental health service users who feel very positive about the help and support they have received. David is from Kent and works with the Shaw Trust, who believe in releasing the potential of disabled people. John and Nettie work with Restore, ‘a creative mental rehabilitation service’ in Oxford.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect upon the use of the term accountability in the twenty‐first century and its role in “remaking the world in favour of the most powerful” using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan.

The paper examines the notion of accountability by analyzing a case study of the hostile takeover of Manchester United Football Club by the Glazer family. The field of football presents an interesting arena in which to study accountability because of its extremely interested and active fans who search for information on every aspect of their clubs. Lacanian theory is drawn upon to add to understanding of the psychopathology which the demands for accountability and transparency place on individuals. Bourdieu's work on illusio is drawn upon to understand the motivations of the field of football.

The paper finds that calls to “hold the most powerful to account” in practice lack political force. Thus the case study demonstrates the common (mis)recognition of the term of accountability. The ability to correct the abuses of the most powerful requires power.

The conflation of Bourdieu and Lacan adds to understanding of accountability as an empty cipher with performative power.

Children's Book Week, which occurs during the last week of November, was first inspired by a speech delivered by E.W. Mumford of the Penn Publishing Company at the American Booksellers Association (ABA) annual convention in 1912. Mumford regarded reading as an act of habituation. He said that a child raised on trashy novels will grow up to read such fare, but that a child instilled with a taste for better books will ultimately develop mature and catholic reading interests.

THIS number of THE LIBRARY WORLD closes one of the most distinguished years in the history of libraries. The opening of the National Central Library by the King on November 7th was undoubtedly the most important public happening in this country, not only of that particular day, but for a very long period. For the first time the highest personage in the land gave his countenance and approval to the work of the public library through the National Central Library which is its natural crown. In describing the Library as “a university which all may join and which none may ever leave,” His Majesty added a memorable phrase to library literature, and gave a new impulse to library activity.

In my preliminary thesis studies of social media, in the wake of the killings of women such as Natalie Connolly, there was a seeming widespread agreement, that if a man could get a relatively minor sentence for ending the life of a woman, using the purportedly ‘erotic’ context of the death as a legal means, then something in the judiciary was going wrong. Traditional feminists and many sex freedomists appeared to concur, in a rare moment of overlap on contemporary sexual ethics from these often scrummaging political groups. However, this ostensible concurring mystifies a more fundamental set of antagonisms that has plagued what we occasionally understand as the rhizomes of the ‘progressive left’, not least in the difficult relationship between political feminism and the sexual freedom movement, or indeed ‘sex positive feminism’. This latter ‘choice’ feminism seemingly elided with sexual freedom and jettisoned the hang ups of radical, Marxist and some branches of equality feminism, still persisting but indicative of what we broadly call ‘the second wave’. This elision between feminism and sexual freedom situates women as individuals with identities that signify an inexhaustible will, not as a casted and economized subjectivity embedded in a historical moment. This move sought to overcome the stalemate between sexual liberation, and women’s liberation. But did it? If we ask questions such as: what should legal practice and policy privilege in its functioning, the protection of individual sexual choices, or defence of the physical safety of women made vulnerable to violence by sexually oppressive cultures? – we may uncover the more profound ethical and epistemological contentions at stake. I want to frame the disputes between sexual freedomists and feminists that still persist, despite our contemporary liberal feminist vernacular, in relation to this theoretical shift in what is understood as ‘choice’, using the issues that satellite ‘the rough sex defence’ (BDSM, porn, violence, consent) in order to illuminate this tension. I want to use a materialist feminist analysis that retraces the concept of ‘choice’ in the feminist canon in order to analyse this elision in the context of the antagonisms between women’s liberation and sexual liberation. In tracing this ethical history I hope to contribute to an untangling of these unwieldy political notions in order to better confront the crystallized divisions in progressive sexual politics that contextualize the underlying disputes that frame the ‘the rough sex defence’. Doing so is necessary if we are to manage a more open, lucid conversation about what the role of the law is, or should be, in dealing with sex and violence in twenty-first century Britain.