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The purpose of this paper is to describe the conceptual basis and development of Prosper: an emerging and evolving self-directed network and movement for people with lived experience of mental health problems in South West London.

The conceptual principles from which Prosper emerged – co-production, recovery and social movement approaches – are outlined. The ways in which these ideas were translated into action, the guiding principles and operation of Prosper are then described.

An evolving self-directed network and movement has been developed that comprises around 150 “members” and a wider network of 20 service user groups across South West London. As well as open forums, collective actions fall under the themes of “create” (peer support, outreach, campaigns, training) and “collaborate” (partnership working with user-led organisations and a Recovery College, peer support networks, supporting the development of personal health budgets and local commissioning, and consultancy). This network has initially been funded by South West London and St George's Mental Health Trust with a view to it becoming an independent entity.

The innovative and evolving social network and movement for people with lived experience of mental health problems that is continuously influenced and changed by the skills, ideas and energy of its growing and developing membership could act as a useful model for others to follow.

The basic family unit is an important institution whose scope and function has changed greatly over the past one hundred years. The contemporary form of the family is understood as “conjugal and nuclear.” This implies a greater emphasis than previously on individual roles and relationships within the private sphere of the contemporary family. Additionally, the family is understood to have lost many of its former functions, further separating itself from the external world. The separation has further stripped the family from many of the roles it once had, with traditional familial functions performed by other institutions.

The paper aims to discuss a new design methodology for multi-fingered robotic grippers.

Optimization of the compliant mechanism with underactuation.

A new robotic gripper principle without active control.

Design of multi-fingered robotic gripper as a monolithic structure without joints.

The essence of the conceptual design is getting the innovative projects or ideas to ensure the products with best performance. It has been proved that the theory of inventive problem solution (TRIZ) is a systematic methodology for innovation. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the design of an adaptive robotic gripper as an engineering example to show the significance and approaches of applying TRIZ in getting the creative conceptual design ideas.

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shapes and surfaces is a very challenging task. The requirement for new adaptive grippers is the ability to detect and recognize objects in their environments.

The main aim of this work is to show a systematic methodology for innovation as an effective procedure to enhance the capability of developing innovative products and to overcome the main design problems. The TRIZ method will be utilized in order to eliminate the technical contradictions which appear in the passively adaptive compliant robotic gripper.

The design of an adaptive robotic gripper as an engineering example is illustrated in this paper to show the significance and approaches of applying TRIZ in getting the creative conceptual design ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of digital platforms on the contemporary visual art market. Drawing on the theoretical insights of the technology acceptance model, the meaning transfer model and arts marketing literature, the authors conceptualise the role of user participation in creating the meaning and value of contemporary artworks in the online art market.

The authors conduct a qualitative study of Saatchi Art as an instrumental case for theorising. It is an online platform for trading visual artworks created by young and emerging artists. The data for this study were collected through direct observation and documentary reviews, as well as user comments and buyer reviews from Saatchi Art. The authors reviewed 319 buyer comments Art and 30 user comments. The collected data are supplemented with various secondary sources such as newspapers, magazines, social media texts and videos.

The growth of digital art platforms such as Saatchi Art provides efficiency and accessibility of information to users while helping them overcome the impediments of physical galleries such as geographical constraints and intimidating psychological environments, thereby attracting novice collectors. However, users’ involvement in the process of valuing artworks is limited and still guided by curatorial direction.

The first limitation of this research is that the data in this research cannot capture interactions between users, though users’ intention to use Saatchi Art is affected by the social influence of other users. Second, this research has not examined artists as users of digital art platforms and their interactions with other types of users. Artists’ intention to use the online platform might be underlined by enhancing their status in the peer group or seeking legitimacy in the field by following other artists and getting recommendations from important referents.

The outcomes of this research suggest that newcomers in the online art market should acknowledge that users’ intention to use the online art platform is determined by not only technological usefulness of the website but also the symbolic capital of the information provider.

User participation in the online art market is guided by curatorial direction rather than social influence. This confirms re-intermediation of marketing relationships, highlighting the role of new intermediaries such as digital platforms in arts marketing.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how rural teachers provided a PLC by leveraging virtual technologies to connect educators of like subject disciplines from several schools, foreign and domestic.

A phenomenological case study-based approach was leveraged to investigate established vPLCs at schools (Creswell, 2013; Stake, 2010). Qualitative data were collected from multiple sources to obtain rural teacher perceptions on the impact vPLCs had on their practice (Creswell, 2013).

Teacher collaborative teams build relationships comparable to teams that met face to face as part of a similar PLC and PD experience. Participant reflections in this investigation showed that rural educators favored face-to-face meetings; however, vPLCs provided similar teacher experiences to that of the face-to-face PBL model. Results indicated that educators recognized virtual collaboration just as valuable a tool for enabling PLCs than face-to-face collaborations while still offering similarities to improved teacher practice.

The research was limited to teachers in rural settings in the USA (Texas) and in the Dominican Republic. The research was limited to teacher perceptions of change, and observed changes as part of their participation in a research-based virtual PLC model. The research was limited to the school setting over an academic year.

The findings from this study have practical implications for rural teachers and school implementation of a professional learning community model.

The promise provided by this study is that vPLCs may provide opportunity for rural schools to provide a job-embedded professional development model (Croft et al., 2010) for otherwise isolated teachers (Barrett et al., 2015).

This paper aims to present the findings of a government-initiated project that sought to explore the possibility of incorporating cultural connections to land within the federal national accounting system using the United Nations Systems of Environmental-Economic Accounting (UN-SEEA) framework as a basis.

Adopting a critical dialogic approach and responding to the calls for critical accountants to engage with stakeholders, the authors worked with two Indigenous groups of Australia to develop a system of accounts that incorporates their cultural connections to “Country”. The two groups were clans from the Mungguy Country in the Kakadu region of Northern Territory and the Ewamian Aboriginal Corporation of Northern Queensland. Conducting two-day workshops on separate occasions with both groups, the authors attempted to meld the Indigenous worldviews with the worldviews embodied within national accounting systems and the UN-SEEA framework.

The models developed highlight significant differences between the ontological foundations of Indigenous and Western-worldviews and the authors reflect on the tensions created between these competing worldviews. The authors also offer pragmatic solutions that could be implemented by the Indigenous Traditional Owners and the government in terms of developing such an accounting system that incorporates connections to Country.

The paper contributes to providing a contemporary case study of engagement with Indigenous peoples in the co-development of a system of accounting for and by Indigenous peoples; it also contributes to the ongoing debate on bridging the divide between critique and praxis; and finally, the paper delves into an area that is largely unexplored within accounting research which is national accounting.