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“My Story” is based on a life story approach. This study aims to facilitate therapeutic alliances by providing a format for older and younger people to interact.

Three pairings were studied to explore the experiences of the older and younger person using “My Story”. The focus of the case studies was on how and if any therapeutic alliance emerged.

This study found that in the two of the pairings, “My Story” helped to create a bond and mutual benefit for the participants’ central to a therapeutic alliance. This led one of the pairings to develop into an intergenerational friendship and potentially help with loneliness.

As this was an exploratory and small pilot, more cases and research are required to fully assess if “My Story” is a useful approach to develop intergenerational befriending.

Intergenerational befriending may be one solution that could help with loneliness and social isolation through forming a therapeutic alliance to make the befriending successful.

Loneliness and social isolation for older people remain a problem.

An original pilot was undertaken to test the approach by bringing together older people identified as lonely by a voluntary sector provider and pairing these with a student volunteer. The students visited the older person over six weeks to discuss their life story and create an artefact based on the story for the older person.

Over the past year in particular, ICT courses have been going from strength to strength, with ever increasing attendance and interest in the topical subject areas offered.

Describes a bonus card system and examines the results of an analysis of bonus card transactions giving key customer segments. Looks at retention and acquisition strategies and emphasizes the importance of keeping pace with customer expectations.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of uses and gratifications theory to social media. By applying uses and gratifications theory, this paper will explore and discuss the uses and gratifications that consumer receive from using social media. This paper seeks to provide a better and more comprehensive understanding of why consumers use social media.

Exploratory study was conducted. 25 in‐depth interviews were conducted with individuals who use social media.

This study identified ten uses and gratifications for using social media. The ten uses and gratifications are: social interaction, information seeking, pass time, entertainment, relaxation, communicatory utility, convenience utility, expression of opinion, information sharing, and surveillance/knowledge about others.

Limitations are small sample size. Research implications are that uses and gratifications theory has specific relevance to social media and should be given more prominence. Uses and gratifications theory helps explain the many and varied reasons why consumers use social media.

This paper helps organizations to understand why consumers use social media and what gratifications they receive from social media.

This paper makes the contribution that uses and gratifications theory has specific relevance and should be given more prominence within the area of social media. This paper also provides a rich and vivid understanding of why consumers use social media.

This year, for the first time, the ICT held its Northern Symposium in Edinburgh. Hitherto, Newcastle had been the venue for this event which had proved to be an undeniable success each time it was held there. The number of delegates attending from Scotland had encouraged the ICT's Council to consider an alternative location and this was one of the reasons behind the change.

The 7th Annual Symposium of the Institute was held this year on Wednesday and Thursday, the 6th and 7th of May to avoid clashing with the Second Printed Circuit World Convention scheduled to be held in Munich during June.

Leeds Polytechnic has been in the vanguard of Teaching Company Initiatives over a number of years. More recently the Polytechnic has employed a small firms adviser to encourage further SME participation in the scheme. This article describes the main criteria necessary to set up a teaching company programme.

To explore the implications of internationalisation for guanxi and wasta and the role of trust, family and favours in underpinning these traditional models of networking. The paper also draws some implications for management development professionals and trainers.

The argument is based on relevant literature and cases, and the authors' own knowledge acquired through research in China over 8 years and the Arab World over 25 years. The Chinese research involved analysis of company reports, informal conversations and semi‐structured interviews conducted with almost 100 interviewees including Western expatriate managers and local Chinese managers between 1998 and 2005 in Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou and Wuxi. The Arab research also involved analysis of company reports and informal conversations, as well as interviews and surveys conducted throughout the Middle Eastern region, including the GCC states, Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Palestine and Yemen.

The research finds differences in the continuing relevance of guanxi and wasta and suggests that while guanxi is adapting to internationalisation, wasta remains traditional in its influence on business and social life.

The paper suggests the need for increased training of international managers to adjust to culture‐specific networking in China and the Arab World and provides some practical guidelines to managers to assist their intercultural effectiveness in these two regions of the world.

The research is important in that it extends knowledge of traditional networking practices in exploring the Arab World which is hitherto under‐researched and in undertaking comparative examination of China and the Arab World which is also a new area of research.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the successful management of creative employees in organisations that rely extensively on the development of intellectual capital must incorporate new thinking to manage the inevitable paradoxical situations that arise in such contexts.

The article explores and highlights conjunctions in several areas of current interest in management and global business, including social capital and intellectual capital, creativity and innovation, and arts firms and aesthetic management. Specifically, it links the development and maintenance of intellectual capital in large knowledge‐forming organisations to the successful management of paradox.

The article highlights numerous areas where managing creative employees often clashes with traditional management practices. These areas include crossing organisational boundaries, rules around the use of personal and organisational time and space, locus of authority, and freedom to think.

The article suggests that managing paradox requires special knowledge and skills, key of which are reflexive knowledge, trust of those who are out of sight, acceptance of ambiguity in thought and action, and pattern thinking.