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The purpose of the paper is to investigate the consequences of using national celebrities, local celebrities and disaster victims as spokespersons in a public service radio announcement (PSA) soliciting contributions for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Subjects were exposed to one of three public service announcements and were then asked to report their reactions to the messages. Differences in the self‐reported reactions of subjects were used to test a series of hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of the three different types of spokespersons.

The paper finds that the hurricane victim was the most credible and believable spokesperson. The national celebrity, Ashlee Simpson, was the least credible and the least believable. The local celebrity was more credible and believable than the national celebrity, but no more so than the hurricane victim.

In this paper a small student sample was used in an experimental setting involving one set of stimuli and one set of spokespersons. It cannot be said that the results would generalize to other celebrities, non‐celebrities, video formats, or non‐experimental settings.

The paper shows that nonprofit agencies considering using celebrity spokespersons in PSAs should do so with caution. There is no evidence that they increase their effectiveness and, at least in the case of the national celebrity, the use of national celebrities may reduce the effectiveness of the PSA.

The paper applies the concepts developed in the study of celebrity spokespersons in advertising and applies them to PSAs. The effects of celebrity spokespersons in PSAs are not the same as in conventional advertising messages.

Relational autonomy proposes that persons are socially embedded, with decisions being made within social relationships. Through this theoretical lens, this article explores how the healthcare professional–patient relationship can affect pregnant women’s decisions to accept pertussis and influenza vaccines.

Hackney was chosen as the study site as it has very low vaccine uptake rates. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 pregnant and recently pregnant women, as well as 10 healthcare professionals. Interviews explored experiences of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) health care and views towards vaccination in pregnancy. An observation of a consultation between a pregnant patient and her General Practitioners (GPs) was also conducted in order to understand how the vaccination discussion takes place.

The findings of this study indicate that advice from friends and family can greatly influence a pregnant woman’s vaccination decisions. The patient’s social context, including influences on her decisions, must be understood by healthcare professionals, so that discussions about concerns can take place. If close relationships with patients are formed, healthcare professional advice is more likely to be trusted. With support from healthcare professionals, patients feel competent, empowered to make the right decision for them, and are more likely to vaccinate.

This research will help to inform contextualised policies aimed at increasing vaccination acceptance and reducing inequality in access to vaccination during pregnancy in Hackney.

To the author’s knowledge, this chapter is the first to apply the theory of relational autonomy to views towards maternal vaccination and decision making. It provides valuable insights into how healthcare professionals’ interactions with their pregnant patients can influence vaccination acceptance. The chapter contains advice on how both healthcare professionals and policy-makers can include mothers in vaccine decision-making processes in more personalised ways, by adopting a dialogue that appreciates and understands the social processes around vaccination concerns.

The paper discusses the potential impact of videoconferencing on practices and processes within the construction industry, based on analyses carried out on its use and impact in the healthcare sector – which like construction involves technology‐intensive processes which are dependent upon cross‐professional and cross‐disciplinary relationships and communications, operate within an increasingly regulatory and litigious climate, and involve organizationally fluid, virtual, teams spanning several subindustries. Recently published research evidence from the healthcare sector suggests that whilst videoconferencing and other advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) have pervasive capabilities, successes in their application may be shortlived and modest in achievement. In use, their actual uptake and application have been found to be fundamentally affected by a range of social and operational issues, such as fears over a new formalization and trackability of previously informal conversations; a rebalancing of power relationships (between professionals using the ICTs as well as between doctor and patient); pressures on social/cultural and procedural alignment between participants; and personal and corporate attitudes to the technologies (including simply disliking the ICT). There is also evidence from the healthcare sector to suggest that ICTs increase the complexity of the delivering healthcare, and that the limitations of the technologies emphasise an existing dependency of communications and processes on tacit knowledge which is not readily formalized for communication via ICTs. However, the paper also notes an increasing pressure on the construction industry to respond to the globalizing potential that ICTs offer for the supply and delivery of knowledge‐based services, and discusses the implications of the issues found in the healthcare sector for the use and potential abuse of ICTs in the construction industry that will have to be successfully addressed in order to avoid ICTs being perceived as threatening and to allow their use to help organizations address the globalising marketplace.

This paper seeks to provide a timely review of developments to the theory of constraints (TOC) body of knowledge, particularly the TOC thinking processes as reported in the public domain peer‐reviewed literature, and to present an analysis of the nature of the thinking processes (TPs), and their methodological and applicatory evolution.

Research reported in the public domain from 1994 to early 2006, as peer‐reviewed journal articles or as papers published in refereed conference proceedings, was reviewed to summarize key research issues that have been studied and to suggest future research. The literature is categorized along several dimensions and according to several emergent and self‐defined clusters that relate to application area, methodology and epistemology.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the TP literature, identifies specific publication and research gaps as they relate to the defined classification and also provides some future research topics.

The review addresses only the peer‐reviewed literature spanning a limited period from 1994 to the time of the current work in early 2006 – that is the period since the publication of Goldratt's It's Not Luck. In doing so, the review complements the work of others for the period to 2000, extends previous reviews beyond 2000, whilst providing an additional focus on the TPs.

This paper provides useful insights about the development of the TOC body of knowledge, especially as it relates to the development and reported use of the TPs as stand‐alone tools or in tandem with other tools or methods. It provides a valuable summary, for academics and practitioners, of the developing TOC body of knowledge that has been reported in the peer‐reviewed literature.

The development of the TOC body of knowledge has been largely practice‐led, manifested not only in the diverse nature of application areas and in the diverse use of TOC tools, but also in the broader evolution of TOC methodology, methods and tools. Earlier reviews of the literature in this journal preceded many of the developments documented here. This paper will help position the many TOC methods and tools in relation to one another, as well as capturing developments in multi‐methodological usage across several domains.