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The purpose of this monograph is to present the first English translation of a unique French colonial report on women living under colonial rule in West Africa.

The issue begins with a discussion of the contribution this report makes to the history of social development policy in Africa, and how it serves the on‐going critique of colonisation. This is followed by the English translation of the original report held in the National Archives of Senegal. The translation is accompanied by explanatory notes, translator’s comments, a glossary of African and technical terms, and a bibliography.

The discussion highlights contemporary social development policies and practices which featured in identical or similar forms in French colonial social policy.

As the report demonstrates, access to basic education and improving maternal/infant health care have dominated the social development agenda for women in sub‐Saharan Africa for over a century, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future in the Millennium Development Goals which define the international community’s agenda for social development to 2015. The parallels between colonial and post‐colonial social policies in Africa raise questions about the philosophical and cultural foundations of contemporary social development policy in Africa and the direction policy is following in the 21st century.

Though the discussion adopts a consciously postcolonial perspective, the report that follows presents a consciously colonial view of the “Other”. Given the parallels identified here between contemporary and colonial policy‐making, this can only add to the value of the document in exploring the values that underpin contemporary social development practice.

A self‐help guide to achieving success in business. Directed more towards the self‐employed, it is relevant to other managers in organizations. Divided into clear sections on creativity and dealing with change; importance of clear goal setting; developing winning business and marketing strategies; negotiating skills; leadership; financial skills; and time management.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

THAT ONE SHOULD do in Rome as the Romans do is sound advice. It never does to stand out in a crowd. At the turn of the Century many Jews fled from the pogroms in Hungary, Romania, Poland and much of Eastern Europe. They asked no favours, did not insist on retaining anything other than their own religion.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

This paper aims to conceptualize and illustrate how some island societies – in spite of their apparent openness, vibrant tourist economies and generally welcoming disposition – develop exclusionary attitudes to a range of immigrants, resulting in effective limits to their much vaunted hospitality culture.

In the context of a global review, the paper reports a qualitative study of immigrant experiences and perceptions from 2005 empirical survey data, as well as the personal observations of the author on Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest and only fully island province.

While the bonding social capital of island communities tends to be strong, their bridging social capital tends to be weak. Other aspects of island life – including perceptions of smallness, affirmation of island identity, high population density, gentrification, the threat of invasion and the fear of the other – impact on the interaction of the “come heres” with the “from heres”. The paper shows divisions in islander attitudes between (short‐term stay) tourists and (longer‐term stay) immigrants in sharp relief.

This analysis queries research assumptions about service, hospitality and tourism and provides a conceptual framework for the dynamics of visitation to island destinations.

These findings critique service quality, relationship management and attitudes to potential clients.

The paper connects immigration research to attitudes to tourism, using an island studies lens as its analytical tool and provides an insightful view of the contested dynamics of place, notions of hospitality and exclusion.

The Italian case can be defined by means of the image of the three-sided revolution: from draft to AVF, from national to international oriented military, from all-male to mixed military. These great changes have given rise to a professional military with a lifelong career with frequent deployments abroad and formed by soldiers who are not single males anymore. Because of the rapid process of routinization of abroad deployments and the growing number of military families, the Italian military institution has been caught relatively unprepared, and it has been able to offer a kind of emergency psychological support in case of dramatic events, but less able to give rise to routine forms of family support for those situations where problems are much less tragic but anyway stressing for the private life of families affected by the professional activity of deployed soldiers. In this chapter, results from a qualitative inquiry are presented about military family situation, mainly as far as problems arising because of international deployments are concerned. Research observations have been taken from families where one member (usually the husband) belongs to units where deployment is a continuous problem to live with, but where the socio-cultural area where the unit is settled is different. Due to the country morphological structure, the territorial distribution of units gives rise to two different types of territorial family situation: a strong majority of deployable units are settled in the North of the country, whereas the large majority of soldiers comes from southern regions, that is from 500 or 1,000 kilometers of distance; but some units are on the contrary settled in the southern regions, and in these cases soldiers are really “locals.” This means that in the first type of unit, military families are often similar to migrant families, where both spouses come from far away and are cut off from their social and parental networks, or the young soldier gets married to a “local” girl and the new family can take advantage from the presence of parental and friendships ties of one of the two partners; in the second type, families and soldiers are locals, and they can maintain their basic social integration, their parental and friendship networks. This variety permits to understand to what extent deployment affects family life in situations where primary social support can be a solution, or it is absent and should be provided by the institution itself or by the society at large. Because of this variety, a number of different solutions can be tested to support military families, so that they can choose according to their true needs.

The research on Black underachievement is well documented. But the explanations posited as causes for this failure are problematic. They are reductive and fail to explain adequately the reasons for Black children’s underperformance. The wealth of research into Black underachievement is not matched by research into Black achievement, and explanations for this are equally flawed, as are policies designed to curtail underperformance. I argue in this paper that underachievement is the product of social and cultural forces, and success is dependent on all concerned in the educational development of the child, including the child, overcoming those forces and accommodating each other in order to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success.

This chapter maps the political economy characteristics of Icelandic society in the post-war period. It shows how the period of statism from the early part of the 20th century, with a strong legacy of protectionism and clientelism, changed up to the present. A major turning point came with a shift towards more liberal mixed economy in 1960, which progressed through the 1980s. That was a period of very high growth rates in an egalitarian society. During the 1990s the political economy became significantly more influenced by neoliberal policies, which can be associated with the buildup of an excessive bubble economy in the 2000s. A new policy emphasis in a new environment of globalized finance, of which Iceland became an active part from 1995, in conjunction with a generally lax attitude of laissez faire in public administration, seems to have made possible rather unusual excesses in speculation and debt accumulation. That eventually led to the dramatic collapse of Iceland's financial system in October 2008. In the wake followed a deep recession. The chapter sets this long-term development into a broad societal context, taking account of political power constellations and changes in politics, the labour market and living conditions.