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This article examines the history of social work research within the UK from a perspective of evidence‐based practice, as originally advocated in the 1990s. It reviews the progress made to date in relation to the use of experimental studies in the field of children and families, and the reasons why this remains limited. It sets this in the broader context of evidence‐based practice and the education and training of qualifying and post‐qualifying social workers, including postgraduate training.

This article describes the background to the What Works initiative launched by Barnardo's in the early 1990s, with a focus on the What Works for Children series of reports published from 1995 onwards. The author describes the intellectual and social context of the initiative, the approach taken, and some of the barriers to and levers for the adoption of research in practice are identified. The article describes more briefly the ways in which those in the Research and Development (R&D) team at Barnardo's worked towards knowledge transfer, both inside and outside the organisation. The article concludes with reflections on the impact of Barnardo's initiatives, the journey still to be travelled to strengthen the knowledge base of those providing services to children in education, health and social work, and the need for further work both to strengthen the evidence base and to increase synergies between research, policy and practice.

Examines the methodological issues that arise in generating standardised transaction data for use in analysing the determinants of retail rents. Looks at the issues raised by the use of comparative information and the existence of widely accepted conventions for adjusting comparative evidence to allow for the specific physical and legal characteristics of individual properties. Concludes by questioning the need to test valuation convention against market evidence and the notion of open market value is reassessed.

Privacy is a highly valued ideal in western societies and the researcher is usually expected to protect the privacy of the researched. However, real world fieldwork experiences are highly complex and the researcher can often find their private life encroached upon. The chapter uses the authors’ own field experiences to discuss this complexity. Lee-Treweek focuses upon her research experience with disabled children living in rural England and Bourne-Day on projects with refugee and asylum seekers in Staffordshire, England. Their discussions reveal that more often than not, privacy issues in the field often interconnect researcher and the researched.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understand the role of the statutory auditing profession in France. The study is theoretically based on distinctions between a functionalist view of professions and a neo-weberian view. Prior research, conducted in Anglo-American countries has shown that the auditing profession has focussed primarily on protecting the private interests of the profession. Hence, there is a need to conduct research on this topic in a code law country where the state is expected to play a significant role in protecting the public interest.

The methodology involves a content analysis of 148 disciplinary decisions issued against statutory auditors in France from 1989 to 2006. This analysis identified 21 types of violations grouped into public interest or private interest offences. Because visible offences are public and are more likely to threaten the reputation of the profession, these types of decisions are also studied with respect to their visibility.

The results reveal that in a code law country such as France the auditing profession tends to defend both the public interest as well as its private interests. The results also support the “visibility” effect.

The written disciplinary decisions have been anonymized so that the names of the auditors and the clients cannot be identified.

This paper differs from previous studies conducted in the Anglo-American context which show an emphasis on protecting the private interests of the auditing profession. Moreover, this study reveals the existence of “mixed” offences and underlines that a profession primarily focusses on these cases. Thus, the work reconciles in part the functionalist and neo-weberian perspectives. Lastly, this paper confirms the importance of the visibility effect.

Innovation and sustainability are two key factors for retailers seeking a competitive advantage. However, the way in which the joint effect of both of these variables impacts consumer satisfaction is still unknown. To address this gap, based on the concept of sustainability-oriented service innovation (SOSI), the authors introduce a new construct named sustainability-oriented commerce innovation (SOCI) in the context of the retail sector.

The relationships between the variables defined in this research were examined using a structural equations model for 510 customers of grocery retail establishments.

The authors find support for a direct positive impact of SOCI on customer satisfaction and an indirect impact through store equity. These chained effects are modified according to the client participation in the development of sustainable and innovative initiatives.

This research analyses the joint effect of innovation and sustainability in the retail context by introducing a new concept – SOCI – and a scale for its measurement whose psychometric properties are validated.

Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the twenty-first century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This chapter foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers’ struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. Drawing upon the findings of the volume’s six chapters spanning five countries (the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India) and two gender-typed sectors (domestic work and construction), this chapter explores how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers’ movements, why gender is addressed, and to what end. Across countries and sectors, informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. They expose the forgotten reality that class structures not only represent classification struggles around work, but also around social identities, such as gender, race, and migration status. However, these organizing efforts are not fighting to transform the gendered division of labor or embarking on revolutionary struggles to overturn private ownership and liberalized markets. Nonetheless, these struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women’s leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also radicalizing hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and even gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing a deep assault stemming from the pressures of transnational production and globalizing markets.

This chapter takes a look at the Social Web. Humanities scholars are, by and large, a fairly social group. Attend any of the Modern Language Association conferences and you will be inundated with invitations to attend events hosted by publishers, groups within MLA, universities, and alumni organizations. The way we now include apps as an inherent part of our socialization, however, is changing and evolving as a result of some of the tools that are to be associated with the digital humanities, albeit not necessarily as apparently so as some others. This chapter explores the familiar players like Facebook™, Google+™, Twitter™, and others and discusses how they are being used by those in the field, contextualizing them within a variety of disciplines in the humanities through case studies while situating the category alongside theories that make sense of their use. Not as commonly used in academic social networks are vlogging applications along with student blog sites, which are also examined in this chapter. It is in this and subsequent chapters where augmented reality enhancements will be used. Please follow the directions at the beginning of Chapter 2 to access these additions.