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Uses evidence from both quantitative and qualitative research carried out across Europe to show that, while the profile of high and low users of part‐time and short‐term employment is country specific, is concentrated in the service and public sectors and is correlated with growth and unionization, there is a link between these forms of flexibility and a strategic approach to human resources management. Proposes that previous commentators, who have argued that there is no such link, have often used unrealistically restrictive models of strategy formulation and that a more comprehensive view indicates that flexibility is being used strategically.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perception of university staff and students in implementing flexible working arrangements (FWA) to increase space efficiency, lower overheads and improve productivity at the Namibia University of Science and Technology.

Data was collected using questionnaires, interviews and document searches. A total of 253 university staff (academic and support) and students were surveyed to solicit their perceptions on the extent to which FWA could be implemented to ensure space optimisation, minimise property related costs and improve employee productivity.

The study confirms that the successful implementation of FWA needs coordinated institutional policy to effectively support and cater to university staff’s different needs while meeting those of the university. Implementing FWA may reduce demand on utilities resulting in lower overheads for the institution. Based on the findings, the study is inconclusive on whether FWA improves or reduces staff productivity.

In the era of austerity measures in institutions of higher education (IHE), with rapid advances in communication information technologies, FWA are not only a possibility but inevitable to ensure optimal use of space, lower operating costs and improved work productivity. This study provides a cursory understanding of the possibility to implementing FWA in higher education.

This study contributes to the FWA body of knowledge from the perspective of both academic, non-academic staff and students in IHE.

PETER LABDON, of the calibre of whose editorship of this organ during the past five years you should be thoroughly appreciative, is to become the Hon Treasurer of the Library Association in 1983; and, while none of us felt his ordinary membership of LA Council to have been in conflict with editing NLW, one of the principal honorary officerships of the LA obviously is. So, with a great deal of regret all round, and gratitude on my part for his achievements, Peter will be relinquishing the editorship at the end of this year.

This uses a framework of systemic change to understand the contextual factors including stakeholder, social, political, cultural and economic, which contribute to the social and environmental narratives of a conservation organisation that has and continues to undergo transformation.

The social and environmental disclosure annual report narratives for a 27-year period were coded to a framework of systemic change.

The end of apartheid in 1994 meant that South African society required transformation. This transformation impacts and drives the social and environmental accounting disclosures made by SANParks. The social and environmental disclosures coded against a framework of systemic change, fluctuated over the period of the study as the format of the annual reports changed. The systems view was the most frequently disclosed category. The political ecology subcategory which details the power relationships showed the most disclosures. However, 25 years after the end of apartheid, the transformation process remains incomplete. Although the evidence in the paper does not support Joseph and Reigelut (2010) contention that the framework of systemic change is an iterative process, it nevertheless provides a useful vehicle for analysing the rich annual report narratives of an organisation that has undergone and continues to undergo transformation.

This paper makes two primary contributions. First, to the limited developing country social and environmental accounting literature. Second, the development, refinement and application of a framework of systemic change to social and environmental disclosures.