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It was initially the attraction of very cheap terminals (then around £150 each) which led John Menzies in 1974 to install a Wavetek audio response system for data collection. This paper, delivered at the OnLine conference on Retail Data for Management in June, outlines the application.

Changes in the macroeconomy, combined with changes in bank lending practices, have created a more difficult financing environment for small businesses in the UK in the 1990s. Notes increasing encouragement for small businesses to seek venture capital as an alternative, but points out evidence both of a lack of venture capital for firms seeking less than £500,000 and a belief that small firms are unwilling to seek venture capital. Challenges these views and points out the advantages to the banks of an informal venture capital market. Considers ways for banks to encourage such activity.

Concern about the equity gap in the UK has existed for more than 60 years. Despite various government measures and institutional responses (e.g. the development of a venture capital industry) an equity gap still persists. Current debate has recognized the role of the informal venture capital market as a source of risk capital for SMEs. Argues that this market is both inefficient and underdeveloped, due largely to information deficiencies which hinder contact between potential investors and entrepreneurs seeking finance. Against this background, identifies the role of business angel networks (BANs) as a key means of stimulating the flow of informational venture capital in the UK. In particular, a government scheme to provide pump‐priming assistance to establish five local BAN demonstration projects is shown to have achieved impressive results. However, with the recent emergence of a number of private sector BANs, the continued role of government is now being questioned. Further demonstrates that public sector BANs, operating on a local scale, are filling a different market niche from that of private sector BANs, which operate predominantly on a national scale. Concludes that the top priority for policy is to ensure that all parts of the UK are served by local BANs. An appropriate way forward might be to build on experimental networking arrangements between local, public sector BANs and national, privately operated BANs.

This chapter provides the context for understanding how English widening participation (WP) policy has interacted with the development of a marketised and expanding higher education (HE) system (the ‘dual imperative’ highlighted in the introductory chapter of this volume). It traces the intensification of market approaches in HE since 1997, examining how these interact with and become intertwined with evolving national WP policy concerns. Since 1997, WP for under-represented groups as a national policy aim has become firmly embedded in the activities undertaken by higher education providers (HEPs). Policy initiatives have moved between incentive and risk to encourage HEPs to address national and local inequalities of access and (later) student success and differential graduate outcomes. This chapter gives an overview of the key policy moments in this period and argues for how they have shaped the way in which the business of WP is enacted throughout the sector. It highlights how the business of WP drawn widely has become simultaneously a regulatory requirement, a way for institutions to differentiate themselves in the HE market and a key marker of institutional civic or social responsibilities. Situating this alongside the increasing focus on students and applicants as consumers, this chapter also begins to problematise the issues of collaboration and competition this creates.

The pressure on higher education providers (HEPs) and national programme partnerships to evaluate the impact of widening participation (WP) interventions has intensified as a result of wider changes in higher education (HE) policy and regulation, including the imposition of market forces. This chapter describes how policy stakeholder assumptions about how evaluation works and the outcomes it delivers have evolved over the last two decades. It shows how regulatory emphasis has shifted from a focus on monitoring and tracking, through to a call for return-on-investment analysis, before falling back on a pragmatic theory-informed approach. This chapter goes on to locate WP evaluation in the middle of a paradigm war, caught between proponents of a medicalised trial-based conception of evaluation methodology, and a practitioner-led position, which points to the complex contextual character of WP activities. It continues by exploring some of the many practical challenges faced by WP evaluators and argues that these have contributed to the sector’s perceived failure to deliver robust evidence of the impact of fair access activity. This chapter concludes with a look at the expanding market for WP evaluation products and services, which emerged in response to new flows of WP investment created by the 2012 increase in tuition fees.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

The aim of this article is an analysis of the links between race and psychotic illness, psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, as well as psychiatric, police and prison violence against people with mental health problems. The analysis focuses on Black men who are more frequently diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders and who face more brutal treatment than other people with such diagnoses. We have adopted a multidisciplinary approach which draws insights from psychiatry, psychology, and sociology and challenges the biologistic interpretation of “mental illness.” We take into account the United States and Britain – two countries with large Black minorities and an established tradition of research on these groups. Among the crucial findings of this study are the facts that racial bias and stereotypes heavily influence the way Black men with a diagnosis of psychotic illness are treated by the psychiatric system, police and prison staff, and that the dominant approach to psychosis masks the connections between racism and mental health.

Birding, the active seeking out and identification of birds, is a wide‐spread and fast growing avocation on this continent, and indeed throughout the world. Jon Rickert's A Guide to North American Bird Clubs lists 17 national/continental organizations for both professional ornithologists and amateur birders and 844 state, provincial, and local associations. In addition, there are those legions of “unorganized” bird watchers and occasional, inquisitive discoverers of backyard birds. Members of this diverse congregation of birders have at least one thing in common — the need for a reliable identification tool enabling them to correctly label the just‐seen, unfamiliar bird. A field guide is just such a tool.

The architects of institutional policy are rarely those tasked with operationalising it. This can create gaps between what is set out in policy and what happens on the ground. This is an under-researched area and one this chapter will shed a light on. This chapter examines the role that widening participation (WP) practitioners play in operationalising policy. Focusing upon the implementational level of the policy enactment staircase, it examines the roles of individuals working at the coalface in enacting WP policy. Drawing upon research conducted by the author in 2016–2017 with higher education providers (HEPs) in England (Rainford, 2019), it supplements this with data from a sector-wide survey conducted by the editors of this book in 2021. In drawing together these two data sets, it offers a rich picture of who works in WP within HEPs in England. It examines the multitude of roles undertaken by these practitioners and how this varies across the sector both in HEPs and collaborative Uni Connect partnerships. This chapter also highlights how practitioners can shift the focus of how policy is operationalised. In doing so, it examines some of the challenges faced by practitioners and the extent to which they are given the tools to carry out this essential work. While this chapter argues that practitioners have a level of agency in the work they do, this can be constrained by both national and institutional policies. It argues that these constraints are often shaped by competing imperatives of both social justice and economic drivers.