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Suggests which valuation approaches should be adopted for appraising properties that are already treated or intended for development. Considers questions of ill‐informed market evidence, continuing liabilities, comparison of long‐term and short‐term advantages, grants and planning gain. Concludes that many in the property business will have to become more conversant with the mysteries of contamination.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of “Roma health and wellbeing” as a focus of attention in European research and in policy and the possible detrimental consequences of action founded on a generic representation of “Roma health.”

Based on discussions with and research conducted by scholars who work directly with Roma communities across European regions from a wide range of academic disciplines it suggests how future research might inform: a more nuanced understanding of the causes of poor health and wellbeing among diverse Roma populations and; actions that may have greater potential to improve the health and wellbeing among these populations.

In summary, the authors promote three types of research: first critical analyses that unpick the implications of current and past representations of “Roma” and “Roma health.” Second, applied participatory research that meaningfully involves people from specific self-defined Roma populations to identify important issues for their health and wellbeing. Third, learning about processes that might impact on the health and wellbeing of Roma populations from research with other populations in similarly excluded situations.

The authors provide a multidisciplinary perspective to inform research that does not perpetuate further alienation and prejudice, but promotes urgent action to redress the social and health injustices experienced by diverse Roma populations across Europe.

This paper aims to explore patient to care provider reverse exchanges to improve the care processes and service supply chain using an online feedback platform. This paper demonstrates how a better understanding of timely and unsolicited feedback (“voice of the patient as a customer”) stimulates local interventions to improve service delivery and enact the essential characteristics of highly reliable organisations (HRO).

A realist approach involving an exploratory hospital case study using user feedback from an IT patient feedback platform. The methodology included interviews, secondary data and access to thousands of patient feedback narratives.

The findings show that a systems approach to the supply chain, using real-time feedback to enact process improvement is beneficial and a fruitful source of innovation for professional services staff. The setting of the improvement focusses on a true “voice of the customer” rather than attempting to improve arbitrarily internal process efficiency has major benefits for staff and their engagement with the right interventions to support higher performance.

The findings show major positive benefits for the adaptation and constant reflection of staff on the service provided to patients. The approach provides a means of reflecting as to whether the current supply chain and service provision are fit for purpose, as well as reliable, efficient and of value to the consumer.

This study is one of a few that adopt the consumer orientation needed to fully exploit the concepts of patient-centric improvement by including dynamic feedback in the supply chain and systems approach to care.

From earliest times the land and all it produced to feed and sustain those who dwelt on it was mankind's greatest asset. From the Biblical “land of milk and honey”, down through history to the “country of farmers” visualised by the American colonists when they severed the links with the mother country, those who had all their needs met by the land were blessed — they still are! The inevitable change brought about by the fast‐growing populations caused them to turn to industry; Britain introduced the “machine age” to the world; the USA the concept of mass production — and the troubles and problems of man increased to the present chaos of to‐day. There remained areas which depended on an agri‐economy — the granary countries, as the vast open spaces of pre‐War Russia; now the great plains of North America, to supply grain for the bread of the peoples of the dense industrial conurbations, which no longer produced anything like enough to feed themselves.

To investigate ethnographically how patient experience data, as a named category in healthcare organisations, is actively “made” through the co-creative interactions of data, people and meanings in English hospitals.

The authors draw on fieldnotes, interview recordings and transcripts produced from 13 months (2016–2017) of ethnographic research on patient experience data work at five acute English National Health Service (NHS) hospitals, including observation, chats, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Research sites were selected based on performance in a national Adult Inpatient Survey, location, size, willingness to participate and research burden. Using an analytical approach inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), the authors examine how data acquired meanings and were made to act by clinical and administrative staff during a type of meeting called a “learning session” at one of the hospital study sites.

The authors found that the processes of systematisation in healthcare organisations to act on patient feedback to improve to the quality of care, and involving frontline healthcare staff and their senior managers, produced shifting understandings of what counts as “data” and how to make changes in response to it. Their interactions produced multiple definitions of “experience”, “data” and “improvement” which came to co-exist in the same systematised encounter.

The article's distinctive contribution is to analyse how patient experience data gain particular attributes. It suggests that healthcare organisations and researchers should recognise that acting on data in standardised ways will constantly create new definitions and possibilities of such data, escaping organisational and scholarly attempts at mastery.

The focus of this paper is a survey of web‐mining research related to areas of societal benefit. The article aims to focus particularly on web mining which may benefit societal areas by extracting new knowledge, providing support for decision making and empowering the effective management of societal issues.

E‐commerce and e‐business are two fields that have been empowered by web mining, having many applications for increasing online sales and doing intelligent business. Have areas of social interest also been empowered by web mining applications? What are the current ongoing research and trends in e‐services fields such as e‐learning, e‐government, e‐politics and e‐democracy? What other areas of social interest can benefit from web mining? This work will try to provide the answers by reviewing the literature for the applications and methods applied to the above fields.

There is a growing interest in applications of web mining that are of social interest. This reveals that one of the current trends of web mining is toward the connection between intelligent web services and societal benefit applications, which denotes the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from various fields.

On the one hand, this work presents to the web‐mining community an overview of research opportunities in societal benefit areas. On the other hand, it presents to web researchers from various disciplines an approach for improving their web studies by considering web mining as a powerful research tool.

Mental toughness describes a set of attributes relating to how individuals deal with challenges, stressors, and pressure. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between mental toughness and perceived stress in police and fire officers.

The participants were 247 police officers and 130 fire fighters. Participants completed questionnaire measures of mental toughness and perceived stress, and provided information about their age, rank, and length of service within the force.

Mental toughness was found to be significantly related to perceived stress, with control of emotion, control of life, and confidence in abilities being particularly important. There was no consistent relationship of age, rank, or length of service with mental toughness and perceived stress. However, police officers reported lower levels of mental toughness and higher levels of perceived stress than fire officers.

The results suggest that assessing police and fire officers on a measure of mental toughness could provide a means of identifying individuals more likely to suffer from stress and stress-related physical and psychological illness. In addition, interventions that may enhance mental toughness could have beneficial effects within this population.

This is the first study to examine mental toughness and perceived stress within this population, and the findings have important implications for the management of stress.

For most people, especially those with fixed incomes, household budgets have to be balanced and sometimes the balance is precarious. With price rises of foods, there is a switch to a cheaper substitute within the group, or if it is a food for which there is no real substitute, reduced purchases follow. The annual and quarterly reviews of the National Food Survey over the years have shown this to be so; with carcase meat, where one meat is highly priced, housewives switch to a cheaper joint, and this is mainly the reason for the great increase in consumption of poultry; when recently the price of butter rose sharply, there was a switch to margarine. NFS statistics did not show any lessening of consumer preference for butter, but in most households, with budgets on a tight string, margarine had to be used for many purposes for which butter had previously been used. With those foods which have no substitute, and bread (also milk) is a classic example, to keep the sum spent on the food each week about the same, the amount purchased is correspondingly reduced. Again, NFS statistics show this to be the case, a practice which has been responsible for the small annual reductions in the amount of bread consumed per person per week over the last fifteen years or so; very small, a matter of an ounce or two, but adequate to maintain the balance of price/quantity since price rises have been relatively small, if fairly frequent. This artifice to absorb small price rises will not work, however, when price rises follow on one another rapidly and together are large. Bread is a case in point.

This paper aims to investigate the influencing dynamics of culture (national and organizational), employee characteristics, employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment in determining the organizational performances of firms in the retail banking sector in a developing country such as Ghana.

A conceptual framework linking national and organizational cultures to employees’ job satisfaction, job characteristics, organizational commitment and organizational performance was developed, and their measurement scales were adapted to guide the empirical investigation. Data were collected using a questionnaire filled in by 300 employees in nine retail banks in Ghana. The results were first analyzed by carrying out data reduction of the measured scales by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences-based factor analysis approach. The reduced data obtained from the factor analysis were then analyzed for model goodness fit by using the Analysis of Moment Structures-based structural equation modeling approach.

Effective organizational performance of retail banks in Ghana is directly influenced by the relationships among organizational culture, employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

The study sample was drawn from a single sub-sector of the Ghanaian economy. Replications and extensions of the study in different sectors that are experiencing high growth will help test the robustness and generalizability of the findings.

The study provides empirical knowledge that could be used to understand the influencing interrelationships among organizational culture, employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment on the organizational performances of retail banking firms in a developing country context.

The study adds to the literature as one of the most comprehensive studies of the links between culture, job satisfaction, employee characteristics and organizational commitment toward organizational performance within the banking sector in Ghana to date.