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Working in mental health services has always been recognised as a stressful occupation and many studies have attested to the high levels of stress and burnout. This study examined comparative levels of stress among inpatient and community mental health staff across five European countries.Using a quasi experimental pre‐test post‐test design, data was collected from staff at baseline, six months and 12 months. This paper examines data from the baseline period. Staff working in acute inpatient wards and community mental health teams in Denmark (Aarhus, Storstrøm), Finland (Tampere), Norway (Bodo), Poland (Warsaw) and the UK (Cambridge), were asked to complete the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) (Maslach, & Jackson, 1986), the Mental Health Professional Stress Scale (Cushway, Tyler & Nolan, 1996) and a demographic questionnaire designed for this study. Results on the MBI are reported in this article. Both community and inpatient teams reported high levels of burnout. There was evidence to suggest that burnout differed by site but not by team type. The English teams scored highest in emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation. Relatively high levels of work‐related personal accomplishment were reported across all of the sites.

This paper aims to explore the effect of interlocking directorates on agency conflicts and corporate performance in the shipping industry.

The authors use social network analysis to discover central nodes in the network of personal and corporate connections in an international sample of 110 listed shipping companies.

Assessing network structure, the authors find that the network of corporate leaders is denser than the network of shipping companies. The network of shipping companies is populated with many isolated nodes; the network of shipping executives and directors is populated with many cohesive groups in which the longest distance between two corporate leaders is two companies. The authors find that interlocking corporate leadership can help resolve agency conflicts in the shipping industry, bearing a negative effect on the magnitude of agency costs. The extent of leadership overlaps is associated with board size, financial leverage and profitability. The relationship between profits and interlocks is bidirectional, implying that interlocking directorates bear a positive effect on asset returns.

The authors map the relational structures in the social networks of companies and company leaders in the shipping industry and discover the cross-sectional determinants of interlocks in the shipping industry. The finding about the effect of interlocks on profitability and agency costs bears policy implications for the design of corporate governance in the shipping industry.

This article presents a theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘subject’ or ‘subject matter’ in library and information science. Most conceptions of ‘subject’ in the literature are not explicit but implicit. Various indexing and classification theories, including automatic indexing and citation indexing, have their own more or less implicit concepts of subject. This fact puts the emphasis on making the implicit theories of ‘subject matter’ explicit as the first step. A very close connection exists between what subjects are, and how we are to know them. Those researchers who place the subjects in the minds of the users have a conception of ‘subject’ different to that possessed by those who regard the subject as a fixed property of the documents. The key to the definition of the concept of ‘subject’ lies in the epistemological investigation of how we are going to know what we need to know about documents in order to describe them in a way which facilitates information retrieval. The second step therefore is an analysis of the implicit epistemological conceptions in the major existing conceptions of ‘subject’. The different conceptions of ‘subject’ can therefore be classified into epistemological positions, e.g. ‘subjective idealism’ (or the empiric/positivistic viewpoint), ‘objective idealism’ (the rationalistic viewpoint), ‘pragmatism’ and ‘materialism/ realism’. The third and final step is to propose a new theory of subject matter based on an explicit theory of knowledge. In this article this is done from the point of view of a realistic/materialistic epistemology. From this standpoint the subject of a document is defined as the epistemological potentials of that document.