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This paper seeks to illuminate how the emphasis on quality dimensions differs in service firms dependent on the size of their back‐room activity. It examines how that emphasis differs with Quality Certification (QCert). The research examines the relative importance attached by the chief executives of 93 large service organisations to both internal and external dimensions of quality. It analyses the relationship of these quality dimensions to the importance placed on the possession of QCert. The effect of process structure is explored by categorising service firms as being in front‐room versus back‐room dominant industrial sectors. The research findings provide empirical evidence that service firms who rate the possession of QCert as important, place much more emphasis on quality, and have a balanced perspective where internal and external quality are both emphasised. In contrast, service firms that do not promote QCert, emphasise quality less. In the absence of QCert, we find clear differentiation in how quality is conceptualised in front‐room versus back‐room dominant industrial sectors.

The article examines the usage and relative importance of quality measurements in the UK’s largest service companies. The authors analyse the relationship of both internal and customer‐based quality measurements to the importance placed on accreditation to an ISO 9000 standard. The effect of process structure is explored by categorising the service firms as being in front‐room or back‐room dominant service sectors. The authors find that the service firms, which consider accreditation to be important, have a different emphasis on quality than other service firms do. Significantly, their emphasis shifts from one that is in line with their process structure to a more balanced one, where both internal and customer‐based quality measurements receive similar attention. This leads them to conclude that accreditation to an ISO 9000 standard can make a profound difference to the way quality is perceived and measured in large service firms.

The cosmetic industry is a very lucrative, innovative, and fast paced industry where product innovation is the key to success. The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analytical (qualitative) study of cosmetic industry in the global marketplace with a focus on the four market leaders in this industry relative to their business and innovation strategies.

Business analyses include Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT), Porter's value chain and five forces, and financial applied to the four industry leaders.

Each of these cosmetic companies is unique. They each offer something different to the industry; selling method, marketing strategy, product line, and distribution channel.

The industry trends indicate that the future of cosmetics may move towards more joint ventures between drug companies, cosmetic companies and nutritional/food companies as cosmetic companies look for new ways to be innovative.

The research provides an in‐depth business analyses of cosmetic industry using SWOT, Porter's value chain and five forces and financial with results obtained that are generalizable to the entire cosmetic industry. Projections on the future of cosmetic industry are also presented.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

There is currently a focus on using networks to drive school and school system improvement. To achieve such benefits, however, requires school leaders actively support the mobilisation of networked-driven innovations. One promising yet under-researched approach to mobilisation is enabling distributed leadership to flourish. To provide further insight in this area, this paper explores how the leaders involved in one professional learning network (the Hampshire Research Learning Network) employed a distributed approach to mobilise networked learning activity in order to build professional capital.

A mixed methods approach was used to develop a case study of the Hampshire RLN . Fieldwork commenced with in-depth semi-structured interviews with all school leaders of schools participating in the network and other key participating teachers (12 interviews in total). A bespoke social network survey was then administered to schools (41 responses). The purpose of the survey was to explore types of RLN-related interaction undertaken by teachers and how teachers were using the innovations emerging from the RLN within their practice.

Data indicate that models of distributed leadership that actively involves staff in decisions about what innovations to adopt and how to adopt them are more successful in ensuring teachers across networks: (1) engage with innovations; (2) explore how new practices can be used to improve teaching and learning and (3) continue to use/refine practices in an ongoing way.

Correspondingly we argue these findings point to a promising approach to system improvement and add valuable insight to a relatively understudied area.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study using a systemic team formulation approach, in the context of supporting a women with intellectual disabilities with a history of trauma.

A reflective stance is used to describe the process of assessment, hypothesising, formulation and intervention in a single case study design.

Feedback from care staff suggests that they found a team formulation approach helpful to improve their understanding of the service user they support.

The paper discusses how systemic team formulation can draw on trauma-informed care principles in the context of supporting an individual with an intellectual disability. Future research should aim to replicate the approach for findings to be applied more broadly. COVID-19 has meant clinical working has had to be adapted, clinicians should carefully consider how collaborative and meaningful work can continue to be facilitated within the current parameters.

This case study contributes to the literature in the use of systemic team formulation interventions within an intellectual disability context, drawing on trauma-informed care principles and reflecting on adapted working within the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study proposes to examine whether tales from childhood influence the psyche and self of the adult in their professional role as a leader in a large organization. It is positioned within a social constructionist and postmodernist framework.

The methodology development was challenging; to capture the level of abstraction within which it was positioned. Using narrative inquiry allowed for a less rigid methodology, data collection and analysis. The data were collected using a non‐structured single interview with a known subject, the data analysed using an initial thematic analysis followed by an in‐depth analysis of the themes against the background of an Enid Blyton novel.

This research project has shown how all are products of their whole life experiences to date; thus the tales from childhood must also impact on adult lives. This project identified links between the adult professional self and the characters in the tales, which were read as children. Leadership can be read as an adventure story or fairy tale, a myth born out of the narratives and language often used to describe it, reflecting tales of quest and achievement.

The interpretations on offer are only one version; another reader or teller would experience a different interpretation; finding her own story, while constructing herself as a researcher, was unexpected and surprising. There are at least two stories running throughout predominantly: the subjects’ story and the story of the research.

There is a growing policy imperative to promote positive mental health as well as prevent the development of mental health problems in children. This paper summarises the findings of published systematic reviews evaluating such interventions. A search was undertaken of ten electronic databases using a combination of medical subject headings (MeSH) and free text searches. Systematic reviews covering mental health promotion or mental illness prevention interventions aimed at infants, children or young people up to age 19 were included. Reviews of drug and alcohol prevention programmes and programmes to prevent childhood abuse and neglect were excluded because these have been the subject of recent good quality reviews of reviews. A total of 27 systematic reviews were included. These targeted a range of risk and protective factors, and a range of populations (including parents and children). While many lacked methodological rigour, overall the evidence is strongly suggestive of the effectiveness of a range of interventions in promoting positive mental well‐being, and reducing key risk factors for mental illness in children. Based on this evidence, arguments are advanced for the preferential provision of early preventive programmes.

The aim of this article is to summarise the available evidence from systematic reviews about the effectiveness of interventions to prevent or treat child physical abuse and neglect. A computerised search was undertaken of major electronic databases up to December 2005 using key search terms. Only systematic reviews were included in which the primary studies evaluated the effectiveness of targeted or indicated interventions for child physical abuse or neglect. A total of 31 systematic reviews were identified and 15 met all the inclusion criteria. They covered a range of interventions/services, including home visiting, parenting programmes, multi‐component interventions, intensive family preservation services, family‐focused casework and multi‐systemic family therapy. There was limited evidence of the effectiveness of services in improving objective measures of abuse and neglect, due in part to methodological issues involved in their measurement, but good evidence of modest benefits in improving a range of outcomes that are associated with physical abuse and neglect, including parental and family functioning and child development. The results also showed some interventions (eg. media‐based and perinatal coaching) to be ineffective with high‐risk families. The evidence provided by these reviews has clear implications for children's services in the UK and other western developed countries.

AFTER the trenchant paper by Mr. A. O. Jennings, read at the Brighton meeting of the Library Association, and the very embarrassing resolution which was carried as a result, one can only approach the subject of the commonplace in fiction with fear and diffidence. It is generally considered a bold and dangerous thing to fly in the face of corporate opinion as expressed in solemn public resolutions, and when the weighty minds of librarianship have declared that novels must only be chosen on account of their literary, educational or moral qualities, one is almost reduced to a state of mental imbecility in trying to fathom the meaning and limits of such an astounding injunction. To begin with, every novel or tale, even if but a shilling Sunday‐school story of the Candle lighted by the Lord type is educational, inasmuch as something, however little, may be learnt from it. If, therefore, the word “educational” is taken to mean teaching, it will be found impossible to exclude any kind of fiction, because even the meanest novel can teach readers something they never knew before. The novels of Emma Jane Worboise and Mrs. Henry Wood would no doubt be banned as unliterary and uneducational by those apostles of the higher culture who would fain compel the British washerwoman to read Meredith instead of Rosa Carey, but to thousands of readers such books are both informing and recreative. A Scots or Irish reader unacquainted with life in English cathedral cities and the general religious life of England would find a mine of suggestive information in the novels of Worboise, Wood, Oliphant and many others. In similar fashion the stories of Annie Swan, the Findlaters, Miss Keddie, Miss Heddle, etc., are educational in every sense for the information they convey to English or American readers about Scots country, college, church and humble life. Yet these useful tales, because lacking in the elusive and mysterious quality of being highly “literary,” would not be allowed in a Public Library managed by a committee which had adopted the Brighton resolution, and felt able to “smell out” a high‐class literary, educational and moral novel on the spot. The “moral” novel is difficult to define, but one may assume it will be one which ends with a marriage or a death rather than with a birth ! There have been so many obstetrical novels published recently, in which doubtful parentage plays a chief part, that sexual morality has come to be recognized as the only kind of “moral” factor to be regarded by the modern fiction censor. Objection does not seem to be directed against novels which describe, and indirectly teach, financial immorality, or which libel public institutions—like municipal libraries, for example. There is nothing immoral, apparently, about spreading untruths about religious organizations or political and social ideals, but a novel which in any way suggests the employment of a midwife before certain ceremonial formalities have been executed at once becomes immoral in the eyes of every self‐elected censor. And it is extraordinary how opinion differs in regard to what constitutes an immoral or improper novel. From my own experience I quote two examples. One reader objected to Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets on the ground that the frequent use of the word “bloody” made it immoral and unfit for circulation. Another reader, of somewhat narrow views, who had not read a great deal, was absolutely horrified that such a painfully indecent book as Adam Bede should be provided out of the public rates for the destruction of the morals of youths and maidens!