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This paper aims to tell something of the story of the “Hawkspur Experiment” (1936–1941), a therapeutic camp organised early in the modern history of therapeutic community as an intervention into the lives of young men who were viewed to be at risk of delinquency (Wills, 1967). Although it was to have a remarkable influence on group and therapeutic community practice and theory, the authors argue that its influence is not as well-remembered nor incorporated into contemporary therapeutic understanding and discussion as it should be.

This paper is a historical reflection based on systematic examination of the clinical and administrative records of Hawkspur Camp for men, and supporting documents held in the Planned Environment Therapy Archive. In addition, the authors use published primary and secondary sources.

Hawkspur Camp was a cross-disciplinary enterprise which brought together psychoanalytic thinking, social work, an interest in groups, political activism, a concern with the dynamics and working of democracy and the application of emergent social science methods. It was overtly an intervention into the criminal justice system but was also an intentional exploration of the therapeutic benefits of community living and of a “pioneering” lifestyle; a rigorous experiment in how psychoanalytic ideas might be used in group residential settings; and a politically grounded exploration of participative democracy as a fundamental therapeutic principle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents the first findings from a systematic study of the records of Hawkspur Camp.

This letter to David R. Maines celebrates our friendship over the last 35 years. I read his voice in emails, handwritten letters, and recollected phone conversations to display the meaningful exchanges of our scholarly friendship. I thank Dave for teaching me how to retire from the academy and grow older with purpose and grace. Highlighting his expert mentoring of my book Friendship Matters (1992), I recall how his suggested revisions for the chapters on aging anticipated a poignant array of our own experiences as friends in our later years. Finally, I appreciate his cultivated interests in drawing, writing poetry, and playing guitar, and thank him for encouraging my music. I am grateful for his dedication to esthetic endeavors, which warmly shaped our friendship during our later years.

This article reconstructs the conditions under which displaced persons are integrated into their workplaces with their hosts. It identifies the characteristics of this pathway and provides guidance on the support that should be provided to these people. This support is part of social responsibility. Theories on professional integration/labour market integration (LMI) have been categorised and then arranged in a logical order to determine the stages of this integration. Theories on professional integration support for refugees were also reviewed and examined in relation to this categorisation. Six stages characterise professional integration: getting a job, its sustainability and its wage adequacy, its security and sustainability, career continuity and employability, the fact of being a full and equal participant and being an integrated part of the workforce and the meaningfulness of that job. The level of professional integration marks the quality of this integration. Each level encompasses the previous levels. Displaced persons should be supported throughout their careers to go beyond technical and behavioural skills and take a more holistic view of their tasks to find meaning in their work. While most research focuses on getting a job as a characteristic of occupational integration, this study found five other characteristics that were ordered. It also links vocational integration with social responsibility and provides guidance on how to help displaced people reach the final stage of this integration.

The paper is a proof of concept (PoC) intervention study aimed for developing performance management (PM) practices in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the longer-term aim enabling the SMEs to improve their productivity. The intervention was designed and deployed by a collaborative quartet of academics, management consultants, accountancy firm and a commercial bank manager.

The paper firstly musters a set of initialising PM practices aligned to productivity improvement. These are utilised to design a knowledge transfer intervention for deployment with a set of manufacturing SMEs incorporating some associated productivity tools. The evaluation of the intervention utilised a case study approach founded on a logic model of the intervention to assess the development of the PM practices.

The intervention contributed to a partial development of the mustered practices and the productivity diagnostic based on the multi-factor productivity (MFP) abstraction and a data extraction protocol had the strongest impact. The study revealed the importance of the three interlaced factors: Depth of engagement, feedback opportunities and the intervention gradient (the increase of independent action from the participating SME's and the diminishment of the external intervention effort).

The case study is based on a limited number of individual SME's, and within just the manufacturing sector.

SME businesses will require a more sustained programme of interventions than this pilot to develop PM capability, and depth of engagement within the SME is critical. Professional stakeholders can be utilised in recruitment of firms for intervention programmes. Business can start developing PM capability prior to PMS implementation using the tools from this programme.

The productivity diagnostic tool, based on a synthesis of MFP and the performance pyramid, an array of potential initialising practices for PM capability and discovery of potential mechanisms for PM practice development.

Overconfidence bias is considered to be a very influential decision-making bias in the business environment. This paper aims to identify the susceptibility of management accountants to overconfidence-related overplacement bias and to determine its pervasiveness among these professionals.

Two international samples of management accountants were surveyed using overplacement bias elicitation questions. The hypothesis that bias susceptibility varies between management accountants in different hierarchical employment positions was tested employing binary logistic regression.

Management accountants are found to be susceptible to overplacement bias, yet its pervasiveness among the samples is similar to other sample populations in comparable studies. Management accountants in the position of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) were found to be more susceptible to overplacement bias than their colleagues in other management accountant and business management positions.

The use of convenience sampling represents a limitation of the research.

The findings confirm that there is a need for syllabi and continual professional development projects to educate management accountants on this bias. CFOs are especially at risk of being overconfident, which may not be in the best interest of the business.

This is the first paper to assess overplacement bias in management accountants as a group of decision-makers, especially within the context of their increasing involvement in business decision-making.