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The 2011 Offender Personality Disorder Strategy promoted formulation-led approaches to offender management. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how formulation can inform partnership-working with women offenders, specifically those with complex needs including personality difficulties.

Learning from partnership case-work is shared to highlight a psychological understanding of the needs of one female offender, and the organisational system operating around her.

The paper describes the development of a “volcano metaphor” as a conceptual framework to assist workers, without psychological training, to better understand the complexity of a client’s intense emotional world. It also reflects the impact of an individualised formulation for through-the-gate working.

The challenges and advantages of “joined-up” inter-agency working are highlighted, including some ideas on how to promote consistency. These include the use of formulation as the basis for decision making and to help “contain” strong emotions attached to working with complex women offenders. Importance is attached to stable and appropriate housing for such women by anticipating their resettlement needs prior to points of transition, and coordinating provision through multi-agency public protection arrangements.

The paper’s originality lies with the development of the volcano diagram as an accessible format for considering individualised formulation and risk assessment. The paper also offers detailed reflections on wider systemic processes attached to working with complex women offenders. It is particularly relevant to psychological practitioners working within probation and prisons, and also to offender managers.

Positive professional attitudes towards personality‐disordered clients have been linked with extensive clinical and strategic benefits. The largest influences upon such attitudes are associated with staff training, supervision and support. This preliminary evaluation seeks to consider the effect of an introductory personality disorder awareness workshop upon trainees' attitudes towards personality disordered prisoners.

The attitude towards personality disorder questionnaire (APDQ) was administered to prison staff (predominantly prison officers) immediately before the workshop and then re‐tested, on average, two months later.

The study sample (n=26) showed significant improvements on the “security versus vulnerability” APDQ sub‐scale. The remaining four sub‐scales and overall APDQ scores showed no significant change.

The findings indicate that personality disorder awareness training should initially engage with trainees' perceptions of their personal security and vulnerability when working with this client group, rather than aiming to increase liking, enjoyment and acceptance of such offenders.

This study marks a preliminary analysis of a new personality disorder awareness training programme.

The concept of terroir is institutionalized through geographical indications (GIs) in large parts of the wine-producing world. GIs in wine are associated with certain taste characteristics. Mosel wine is said to be slender and fresh. However, external sources of pressure are recognized as challenging this notion. The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative construction of Mosel wine and how institutions, markets and climate are presented as having implications for its taste.

Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out over ten weeks during the fall of 2016, consisting of three weeks of participant observation and 12 in-depth interviews. Post-fieldwork, data were interpreted as collective narratives. Additionally, a wide range of written sources on Mosel wine has been analyzed.

It is found that a development toward big-bodied wines was considered a threat to the region’s stylistic image, in which light-bodied wines represented the cornerstone. Consequently, this had triggered introspection and greater discursive attentiveness to “lightness” to preserve the credibility and identity of Mosel as a GI. Findings show that these aesthetic controversies functioned to recreate and consolidate the notion of Mosel wine and its sense of terroir.

Focusing on how taste in wine is narratively produced, this paper utilizes an inductive approach rarely employed within terroir research.