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Asks the question: how can we enhance corporate governance practices in East Asia? To address this question, reviews recent research findings that have greatly enhanced our understanding of corporate governance practices in East Asian jurisdictions. Concludes by examining three areas of reform. First, investor protection may require radical changes to law and the enforcement of such laws. Second, market‐based changes, which do not require legal reform per se. Finally, observes that corporate governance may be enhanced through the use of mid‐1990s techniques of strategic management in national planning for capital market development.

Testicular cancer affects approximately 550 men in Australia each year. Early intervention, with the potential to reduce the burden of this serious disease, requires a strong understanding of the factors that influence help‐seeking. In the current qualitative retrospective study, the symptom‐recognition and help‐seeking experiences of 11 men aged between 28‐44 years who had undergone treatment for testicular cancer were examined. Analysis of the semistructured telephone interview data indicated that most men sought help early, and were treated promptly. A few men, however, described prolonged help‐seeking delays. The factors implicated in help‐seeking delays included lack of knowledge about testicular cancer; initial misattribution of symptoms; slowly progressing or low‐severity symptoms; a busy lifestyle; embarrassment about having a genital examination; and a fear of orchidectomy and its potential threat to masculinity. Further research using quantitative methodology is required to determine the relative importance of these various factors on help‐seeking delays.

GORDON WALKER'S removal from the Department of Education and Science is sad but inevitable. Perhaps the greyest, certainly the most accident‐prone of this administration's executives, he will not be missed. His appointment showed the brittleness of the Government's commitment to education and his ruthless elimination confirmed it. Much of his apparent ineptitude was the fault of financial factors beyond his control, and many avoidable blunders were made on faulty advice. All we can do is to wish him a long and happy retirement.

On 21 February the ILEA will debate (or, by the time we are at press, will have debated) the present proposals for comprehensive reorganization in the city. Their conclusions will be predictable, the small‐voice arguments of the opposition acrimonious, and the proposals as prejudiced and ill‐conceived as we said they were last November. One thing only will have changed. This time the Conservative majority will rightly be able to claim that it is Mr Gordon Walker and not Mr Chataway who has nailed the coffin of true reorganization over the next few years. Indeed Mr Chataway stands, on his latest statements, in a much more favourable position than he did four months ago. He still holds to the belief that selection and total entry can exist side by side, and Mrs Townsend (ILEA vice‐chairman) will still steer through measures that are counter‐productive and in some areas socially vicious. None of this can comfort the Labour group.

That there is no defence for the educational cuts announced in January is evident from what Ministers say about them. Education must be cut because every sector of Government expenditure is being cut, regardless of importance. Mr Gordon Walker keeps saying that there are no cuts — just a “slowing up in the planned rate of growth”. But the children who entered secondary schools this academic year would have had a compulsory school life lasting until 16. Now it is 15. Is that not a cut ? When challenged about the peculiar idiocy of not raising the age Ministers have no answer but to ask for other suggestions. They even claim that picking on the leaving age avoids cuts elsewhere when, as we shall see, it actually causes them. The cuts in education, like the rest of the “package”, rest on no principle or consistency. They are the antithesis of planning, conceived in haste and announced in muddle.

Qualitative research is very often concerned with uncovering the basic structure or essence of whatever is being examined so that conclusions can be drawn and principles developed. Postmodernism with its focus on language and with people interacting with one another in the construction of their worlds provides a strong challenge to this. This has particular implications for a construct such as ‘self’. The post‐modern position is that ideas of the self are formed through social interaction in particular social contexts and are therefore not within the individual but within the space between people. This article explores the concept of ‘self’ as understood by recent writers and examines the implications for our understandings of the self gained through interview based research.

It has been the month of the Conferences, especially of the National Union of Teachers, the National Association of Schoolmasters and the National Union of Students. All have paraded themselves, warts and all, for public inspection; an inspection, in some instances, that would have been best denied. It has also seen the demise of Mr Gordon Walker, the arrival of Mr Short; and the new book on the Risinghill affair.

The Secretary of State for Education and Science, Mr Patrick Gordon Walker, has now presented to Parliament the Report of the Council for Scientific Policy on ‘The Flow of Candidates in Science and Technology into Higher Education’. This has been published as a Blue Book (Cmnd. 3541).

IGNORING the distemper affecting Mr Gordon Walker's student audience at Manchester last month, they would have done well to allow him to complete his exposition on the function of the proposed polytechnics. For it goes a long way to clarifying the official view on the subject — clarification that would have done much more good for the students than for the mini‐audience of senior academics to whom it was eventually delivered.