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Family life can be seriously disrupted when a mother is imprisoned. The separation changes and often reduces the type, frequency and quality of contact that can be achieved between family members, and especially for children when their mothers were their primary carers and living with them before her imprisonment. In England and Wales, prisoners are permitted contact with children and families through prison visits, telephone contact and letter-writing through the post, and in some prisons via email. Despite the recent policy interest in supporting prisoners' family ties, research has highlighted the challenges that families and prisoners face using these communicative mechanisms. Building on this, the chapter contributes new knowledge by shifting the lens to explore how family members construct and adjust their practices to promote mother–child contact during maternal imprisonment.

The empirical study draws on semistructured interviews with mothers in prison and family members (caregivers) to children of female prisoners. Guided by a ‘family practices’ theoretical framework (Morgan, 2011), the findings show innovative adjustments, a willingness to make sacrifices and alternative routes to improve contact utilised by mothers and caregivers to prioritise mother–child contact. We see the strength, resilience and autonomy shown by family members to promote their relationships in spite of communicative barriers. There are important lessons to be learned from the families' lived experience for policy and practice, which, without due and genuine consideration, might further hinder opportunities for mother–child contact during maternal imprisonment.

This chapter illuminates the central role of kin networks and the routines they construct to maintain family ties and support young fathers in jail. Recent research demonstrates variation in incarcerated fathers’ contact with children. There is less focus on variation in contact with extended kin networks and how kin networks contribute to father–child contact during an incarceration period. Forty-three incarcerated young fathers (ages 19–26) in three Southern California jails, 79% of whom self-identified as Latino, were interviewed to explore fathers’ descriptions of family contact during jail. Incarcerated young fathers rely on kin networks to coordinate routines for contact during jail, including father–child contact. Father inclusion in family life during jail depends not only on the mother of the child but – perhaps integrally – extended paternal kin. Available paternal kin can facilitate connectedness between children and incarcerated fathers in family contexts of complicated parental circumstances (e.g., parental relationship dissolution). Family members mitigate family challenges to maintain ties despite carceral policies meant to isolate fathers from families and children. A continued focus on kin networks and their role in maintaining family connectedness is crucial to understanding and reducing the collateral consequences to family members and incarcerated persons following release from jail.

There is little published literature about the number of home visits provided to patients within forensic intellectual disability units, and there is no published data on variables that affect home visits. There is a need for a baseline audit that can formulate standards for future practice. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper describes the home visit programme within a forensic intellectual disability service, and a baseline audit of the programme. The audit measured the number of home visits, any factors that adversely affect home visits, and the extent of family contact. The authors propose audit standards for evaluation of good practice in this area.

The audit involved 63 patients over a one-year period. In total, 81 per cent of patients had some form of family contact and 54 per cent of patients at least one home visit. However, 19 per cent of patients had no contact with their family due to a variety of reasons. There were no significant differences in the number of home visits between men and women, patients on civil vs criminal sections or those treated “within area” or “out of area”. Patients in rehabilitation wards had significantly more visits than those in low or medium secure.

Conventional wisdom is that reduced family contact is the direct result of patients being placed “out of area”. The results of this audit suggest that, at least in this group, the reasons may be much more nuanced and that the current definition of “out of area” has to be improved to incorporate the actual distance between the patient’s current family home and the service. Audit standards have been proposed to monitor family contact and home visits. Future work should focus on the relationship between family contact and treatment outcomes.

For contemporary American young adults (aged 18–29), coresidence with parents is now the most common living arrangement. Recent research on residential transitions out of and back into the parental home shows that residential independence is still common, meaning that many young adults coreside with parents after first leaving the nest. The timing of residential independence and subsequent coresidence is often tied to other life-course outcomes, such as relationships and employment, as well as characteristics of the family context, such as family structure and financial resources. A small body of research also demonstrates that residential transitions are common following criminal justice contact experiences such as arrests and periods of incarceration. While this association does not appear to be explained by the family context, the current study argues there are several reasons to anticipate heterogeneity in coresidence patterns based on the childhood family context. Drawing on data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that criminal justice contact is associated with coresidence with parents during young adulthood in a fairly consistent manner across different dimensions of family context (although parental education may play a role). These findings demonstrate the power of the criminal justice system in directing or redirecting residential trajectories and have implications for both individuals with contact and their families.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how both offenders and their families perceived their interactions with police and whether there were negative consequences of the offender-focused strategy that was implemented in a hot spots policing experiment.

Data from interviews of 32 offenders and 29 family members are examined qualitatively for themes to evaluate how the strategy was carried out and how it impacted offenders’ behavior and both groups’ perceptions of the police detectives and the strategy overall.

The results show that there was overwhelming agreement by both offenders and their family members that the police detectives who contacted them treated both groups with dignity and respect. After the contact was over, the offenders appeared to commit less crime, followed probation more closely, and had positive feelings about what the police detectives were trying to do. Improvement of the offenders’ relationships with their families was an unanticipated finding indicating a diffusion of benefits of the strategy.

The results suggest that when procedural justice principles are used in an offender-focused police intervention, positive impact can be achieved without negative consequences.

This is a rare example of an in-depth evaluation of the perceptions of offenders and family members contacted through a hot spots policing offender-focused strategy.

The title of this chapter was inspired by Martin, a prisoner the author met while conducting fieldwork. Martin remarked that, despite the common rhetoric around prisoners ‘maintaining’ their family ties, the reality was that during imprisonment it became more about trying to cling on to them. Imprisonment is perhaps one of the most brutal disruptions a family can undergo, leaving them little choice but to adapt to this enforced transition. Immediately, the spaces where family life can happen narrow severely and become dictated by the prison environment and the plethora of rules that regulate it. The immediate physical separation, onerous restrictions on physical contact and the heavily surveilled nature of family contact during imprisonment constricts space for emotional expression, often rendering romantic relationships clandestine and fatherhood attenuated. Further, the temporal space for family is reduced as limited opportunities for visits lead prisoners to eschew contact with wider family members and prioritise their ‘nuclear’ family. Drawing on empirical research conducted at two male prisons in England and Wales, this chapter then, will detail the complexities of how families navigate this transition and the limitations on what family can mean in the prison environment. The chapter will conclude with the implications of these restrictions for the ultimate transition when prisoners return ‘home’.

The small size of female founded and owned businesses is discussed as a weakness towards business survival and growth and also as a solid foundation for sustainable innovation (SI) through maintaining stronger ties with suppliers and customers. In smaller businesses, the closeness to the key stakeholders facilitates knowledge transfer and internalisation of knowledge which leads to faster decision making and creating SI. This paper aims to examine networking strategies of established female entrepreneurs and to develop better insights into the extent of social dialogue, collaboration and cooperation maintained between the entrepreneur and her network contacts towards SI and value generation. Successful business sustainability strategies and subsequent outcomes of established female entrepreneurs are also examined. This paper presents the findings from quantitative survey-based research conducted with 240 established female entrepreneurs from the UK and Turkey (120 from each). The respondents were selected on the basis of business survival and success. National culture is used to identify the established authoritative guidelines for social behaviour. Hofstede’s Culture Model is applied to the case countries to describe the sociocultural institutional context. From the business sustainability strategies (BSS) perspective, the findings show that the studied elements of established female entrepreneurs vary between two different cultural environments. And yet, the both group reported a high level of social dialogue, collaboration and cooperation with their network contacts although they demonstrated fundamentally different networking patterns within the context of type of contact; networking motivation; frequency of contact; and helpfulness of contact. Also established female entrepreneurs’ business sustainability strategies show significant differences between the case countries linked to the level of power distance, individualism and uncertainty avoidance culture dimensions. The paper generates valuable insights into internationalisation strategies for female entrepreneurs and possible areas for facilitation for policy makers.

This paper aims to investigate the internationalisation inducement in family firms with domestic capital operating in a specific industry in a transition country. Examining the effect of entrepreneur-, firm- and context- specific factors, it provides an insight into the start of internationalisation via exporting and its initiating features.

The study uses a qualitative research approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews from informants with conclusive decision-making power and analysed using a combination of inductive and deductive coding.

The findings show that the sample firms internationalise early exhibiting mostly proactive behaviour in finding international clients. Owner-manager international orientation and commitment combined with contacts in his or her social spaces lead to early export inducement despite the fusion of ownership and control, and regardless of transition context volatility and inefficiency.

The limitations include the sample size and its industry embeddedness limiting generalisability. The key implications are that family firms need support to develop their social spaces through encouraging and enabling linkages between socio-economic actors that can expand the bounded sociality of the firm.

The owner-manager orientation, objectives, commitment and characteristics, coupled with the straightforward decision-making process that is safeguarded by full family ownership, can abate the dissuading role of the perceived lack of institutional support for small and medium-sized enterprise internationalisation in a transition context.

A questionnaire was used to collect data from 1676 undergraduate and postgraduate students randomly selected from three major Nigerian universities to understand how media gratification and constraints motivated their use of text messaging to meet educational needs. Sixty‐five (65 per cent) and 63 per cent of the respondents reported using the technology for contacting peers and lecturers for educational matters while less than 40 per cent have used technology to contact lecturers and others respectively. Generally, closeness to mothers and education of parents influence use of the technology for educational contact. The instrumental gratifications of SMS capability to enable students escape face to face communication, convenience and low cost also explain use of SMS to make educational contact although this activity is constrained by the difficulty to decipher the intention of the messages and by the confusion that often arises due mainly to unclear acronyms.

The purpose of this paper is to look at immigrant family business through the framework of social capital by investigating how the social capital of immigrant family business owners helps them obtain network benefits and improve business performance.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of 170 immigrant family business owners. The authors examine social capital as a multidimensional construct and focus on two attributes of social capital: structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness. In addition, this study examines how social capital influences business performance through the mediating effect of network benefits. Finally, the constructs of family capital and immigrant community capacity are also investigated.

The results suggest that the two attributes of social capital differed in their effects on network benefits, and that network benefits mediated the influence of social capital attributes on family business performance. Specifically, relational social capital influenced access to resources and information, and structural social capital influenced access to resources. Family ties affected network benefits and business performance, and immigrant community capacity had the predicted moderating effect on the relationship between immigrant community ties and network benefits.

This investigation has the potential to advance understanding of immigrant family businesses by assessing how the overall social capital of the family business owner influences business performance. The study also furthers the understanding of family capital and immigrant community capacity. In addition, these results serve practitioners by helping identify avenues to increase immigrant family business performance, an issue that is increasingly important today given the contribution of such businesses to the economic vitality of societies.