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Describes a management development programme for women, run by Cranfield School of Management for British Telecom. Focuses on four main themes: values and philosophy underpinning the work carried out by the tutors, context in which BT asked the authors to develop the programme, how the programme works and formal evaluation. Based around bioenergetics the programme had greatest impact on delegates′ personal development, career planning and managerial effectiveness.

This study aims to fill a distinct gap in the literature on disability-assistance animals (disability-AAs) and inclusive employment by investigating human resource (HR) practitioners’ perceptions of disability-AAs in the staffing process and workplace. HR practitioners play a critical role in accommodation and inclusion, yet their experiences and insights have been largely ignored in prior research.

This study used a phenomenological approach, drawing on signaling theory and employability constructs, to explore insights from 17 HR practitioners’ experiences with assistance animals in the workplace.

The potential for unconscious bias in employment practices was found, as well as a significant percentage of practitioners who were unprepared to handle animal accommodations. First, the potential development of a positive stereotype bias suggests all genuine assistance animals are high functioning. Second, the assumption that employees’ assistance animal requests for invisible disabilities without previous disclosure are presumed fraudulent until proven valid.

As a qualitative study, findings from this study are not generalizable to a larger population but may be transferable to similar employment contexts.

This study extends knowledge from previous studies, which focused predominately on insights from disabled individuals, animal trainers and therapists, to the HR practitioner domain in creating a more inclusive work environment. Findings from this study suggest the need to improve education about disability-AAs and the potential for unconscious bias for HR practitioners and hiring managers when accommodating requests, particularly when those assistance animals are not described as high functioning.

Improving hospital care for people with dementia is a well-established priority. There is limited research evidence to guide nursing staff in delivering person-centred care, particularly under conditions where patients are emotionally distressed. Misunderstood distress has negative implications for patient well-being and hospital resources. The purpose of this study is to use the expertise of nurses to recommend ways to care for the emotional well-being of patients with dementia that are achievable within the current hospital setting.

A qualitative study was conducted in two long-stay wards providing dementia care in a UK hospital. Nursing staff (n = 12) were asked about facilitators and barriers to providing emotion-focused care. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Nursing staff said that resources existed within the ward team, including ways to gather and present personal information about patients, share multidisciplinary and personal approaches, work around routine hospital tasks and agree an ethos of being connected with patients in their experience. Staff said these did not incur financial cost and did not depend upon staffing numbers but did take an emotional toll. Examples are given within each of these broader themes.

The outcome is a short-list of recommended staff actions that hospital staff say could improve the emotional well-being of people with dementia when in hospital. These support and develop previous research.

In this paper, frontline nurses describe ways to improve person-centred hospital care for people with dementia.

Describes an empirical research study focusing on a specific form of personal development for managers – the use of the outdoors. This development activity is believed to enhance managers′ understanding of themselves and the ways in which they interact with others, enabling them to operate more effectively in today′s turbulent business environment. Four outcome hypotheses were tested: increased self‐awareness, increased ability to “learn how to learn”, positive changes to individual′s self‐concept and increased use of “openness” behaviours. Both qualitative and quantitative data were used in testing the hypotheses. Although discrepancies arose between the qualitative and quantitative results, they do indicate that participants in the programme realized higher levels of self‐esteem and reported increased use of “openness” behaviours six months after the end of the programme.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the challenges to women’s authentic leadership identities contribute to their decisions to abandon leadership positions mid-career. It examines the critical career moments and underlying themes behind these women’s decisions to leave.

This paper is based on semi-structured interviews (n = 9) with women between the ages of 32-53 who had opted-out of mid-level corporate leadership positions.

The study found that work–life balance was not the primary factor in women’s decisions to leave. Instead, the women in the study reflected on their inability to be themselves and contribute perceived value to the organization as triggering their decisions to leave.

There are limitations in using a small sample of women selected through the researchers’ social media networks resulting in limited cultural and racial diversity.

Misconceptions about women’s decisions to leave corporate leadership mid-career misleads human resource (HR) practices and initiatives focused on retaining female talent. Organizations need to recognize and reshape the organizational environment to support women to be their authentic self and make the value of their contributions more transparent.

The paper is original in that it examines opt-out from the lens of women’s leadership identities in corporate contexts. There are limited studies that have examined the connections between identity and women’s career decisions beyond work–ife balance. It provides practical value to HR practitioners and organizations focused on retaining female talent.

In recent years, librarians, as a profession, have attempted to identify individual users' needs. Librarians in the past have served their communities with people, rather than the storage of books and materials, as their top priority; however, in library and information science literature, user‐centered theory is new. It offers a psychological/sociological depth that the practical literature, as late as 1990, fails to touch.

Questioning gender is about taking an active, critical role in the technological design of our daily behaviour. It is a deconstruction of the oppositions that exist in the discourses of Ambient Intelligence designers, the ICT industry and computer scientists. What underlies the assumption that Ambient Intelligence will, by disappearing into our environment, bring humans both an easy and entertaining life? The gender perspective can uncover power relations within the promotion and realisation of Ambient Intelligence that satisfy an obvious wish for a technological heaven. The deconstruction of the promise of progress and a better life reveals what is overvalued, what is undervalued and what is ignored. This paper is a deconstruction of the view, currently prevalent in the discourses of Ambient Intelligence; a view of humans and the way they live. A view that will influence the way women and men will be allowed to construct their lives.