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This paper considers the experience of developing and implementing a community‐based multidisciplinary rehabilitation service in the City of Wolverhampton. It outlines the process of defining and agreeing the service parameters, objectives and methods of service delivery and includes the main points from an initial evaluation of the team. The article concludes with key messages for consideration by others setting up a similar service.

The purpose of this paper is to present information about a team‐teaching course on sustainable development (SD) for educators in an institution of higher education, Monterrey Campus of ITESM in México.

Four faculty members were invited to work together with the Sustainable Campus Programme coordinator in the process of developing the “Educate‐the‐Educator's” SD course. The course was structured using lectures, readings, class role play activities, homework, and general discussion. Additionally, a workshop‐format was woven throughout the course; its function was to help the educators incorporate SD issues within their own courses.

It was found that a multi‐disciplinarily developed and delivered course is an effective vehicle for educating educators on SD. Documentation of some facets of the learning process further helped the “students” and the course leaders to better understand the whole learning process.

The paper's value rests on the interconnected structure, showing resonance with the triple bottom line, as well as many other dimensions linked with sustainable development. This structure increased the course participants' comprehension of sustainability. Furthermore, the use of concept maps and digraph theory to evaluate “faculty participants'” comprehension of the interconnections and dimensions of SD proved to be a successful innovation.

This paper examines the sources of stress likely to be encountered by emergency managers when responding to a disaster. Stressors relating to environmental (e.g. time pressure, level of risk, heat), organisational (e.g. bureaucracy, appropriateness of information, decision support and management systems) and operational (e.g. incident command, decision making, interagency liaison, team and media management) demands are considered. The mediating role of personality and transient states of physical (e.g. fitness and fatigue) and psychological (e.g. high levels of occupational stress) states are reviewed in terms of their influence on stress, judgement and decision making. Strategies for identifying which of these potential stress factors can be controlled or reduced and for training emergency managers to deal with the others are discussed.

Prime contractors spent a substantial part of their turnover on purchasing. The management of the purchasing function therefore has a large influence on the overall performance of a prime contractor. The more developed the purchasing function is, the greater its contribution to success of the companies. The purpose of this paper is to measure and explain the development in maturity of the purchasing function in construction firms.

Based on a literature review, a theoretical framework for the assessment of purchasing maturity is provided first. Then a longitudinal multiple case study is executed in order to assess the maturity development of the purchasing function in seven construction companies. Results are compared with a historical baseline assessment.

The results demonstrate an increase in the maturity of the purchasing function in general and in particular in the management of strategic relations. The case companies have reached a maturity in which they start to coordinate activities in their supply chains. Increased use of IT solutions enables a more integrated approach of the construction process.

IT and in particular Building Information Modelling pave the path towards an integrated supply chain, which in turn enables the reduction of waste in the processes. Nevertheless, companies still struggle with the tension between project-based flexibility and long-term relations with suppliers.

The development of purchasing maturity was measured in a baseline measurement and in a second assessment performed five years later by using the exact same model and exact same case companies.

Bid management is an important presales process that involves not just pricing but also determining requirement fit and managing ambiguities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the challenges of coordinating bid activities across the engineering–commercial interface from the systems thinking, contingency, coordination and engineering perspectives.

A thematic analysis of an internal survey and four embedded case studies were conducted on multiple affiliated business units across diverse product segments and geographic markets in the electronic manufacturing services (EMS) industry.

The results show that challenges in any EMS bid can be distilled into the inter-related categories of price/cost, quote lead time, cost-accuracy, coordination and technical knowledge/capability. Moreover, the embedded cases suggest that engineering-based solutions, such as quality function deployment, target costing and value engineering, can be useful if suitably applied, but fulfilling diverse bid requests using generic processes can hinder effective bid management.

The authors propose three principles in a framework for EMS bid management, namely (1) bid management can be modelled as an open system; (2) process focus and integration mechanisms are structural requirements in effective bid systems; and (3) a contingency approach can help alleviate the increasing complexity of bids.

This study contributes to the literature by proposing a contingency model of engineering-based approaches according to product archetype and a practical framework for bid management to drive intra-organisational coordination and competitive bids in the EMS industry.

The workplace is a context of increasing interest in information literacy research, if not necessarily the most visible (Cheuk, 2017). Several studies have described contextual, relationship-based experiences of this subjective, knowledge-development focussed phenomenon (Forster, 2017b). What research contexts and methods are likely to be most effective, especially in workplaces which contain professions of widely differing ontologies and epistemological realities? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An analysis and description of the value and validity of a “qualitative mixed methods” approach in which the thematic form of phenomenography is contextualised ethnographically.

This paper describes a new research design for investigation into information literacy in the workplace, and discusses key issues around sampling, data collection and analysis, suggesting solutions to predictable problems. Such an approach would be centred on thematic phenomenographic data from semi-structured interviews, contextualised by additional ethnographic methods of data collection. The latter’s findings are analysed in light of the interview data to contextualise that data and facilitate a workplace-wide analysis of information literacy and the information culture it creates.

Insights from recent research studies into information literacy in the workplace have suggested the possibility of an epistemologically justifiable, qualitative mixed methods design involving an ethnographic contextualisation of a thematic phenomenographic analysis of the information culture of an ontologically varied and complex workplace – with the potential for descriptive contextualisation, categorisation and generalisability.

This qualitative study examined the views of clinical governance leads in South West England on the development of clinical governance, and its relationship to education in primary care. Information was obtained from semi‐structured interviews with clinical governance leads, and supplementary methods were used to confirm key findings. Four principal themes emerged: education, support, barriers, and evolution. Education is central to achieving the clinical governance agenda. There is a range of educational needs within primary care and these must be integrated into practice professional development plans, which will be shaped by national and local priorities. A need for PCG clinical governance tutors to support this process emerged. A range of supporting mechanisms was identified, as were barriers: principally inadequate resources and a rigid agenda imposed from above. Existing educationalists will need to change their role within the new structures, and this should be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process.

Looks at the implementation of total productive maintenance (TPM) at one South African mill and attempts to establish the influence that this journey has had on productivity, employee development, quality improvement and organisational change within the manufacturing unit. A literature survey was undertaken into the methodologies, including a look at the so‐called “soft issues” or people issues to evaluate the benefits of adopting a TPM strategy. Questionnaires were also sent out to a sample of selected people at all levels of the organisation to find out their views on the methodology being used. Concludes that this journey has been successful in spite of the difficulties specific to South Africa. The final objective of this research was to establish whether the implementation of this process had resulted in change within the mill. Increases in productivity, quality and a reduction in the cost of producing the product resulted in the mill winning a gold award from the National Productivity Institute.

Vocational Education and Training (VET) prepares citizens to participate in the labour market, but requires continuous development to adapt to the impacts of global trends, to become more attractive and relevant, to support lifelong learning, to encourage creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and to become more inclusive. European legislation and structural funds improved VET for people with SEN and/or disabilities, for example in the case of the European qualifications framework (EQF) and the national qualifications frameworks (NQFs). NQFs often lead to the development of a national qualifications catalogue, specifying training standards for all, including people with SEN/disabilities, yet with the challenge to achieve the right balance between the flexibility and the standardisation requirements of programmes and procedures. A recent European Agency project investigated the key aspects of VET programmes for learners with SEN and/or disabilities in 26 European countries and identified success factors that contributed to auspicious VET and transition to employment for learners with SEN and/or disabilities. These factors will finalise this chapter showing, in an inclusive design perspective, that they benefit all learners.