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This article takes as its starting point the notion that information has to be customised for different user groups and shows how different types of programme specification might be created for different audiences. It describes three types of programme specification: a template version written for an academic audience; free format version written for a student audience; and a summary statement written for an employer audience. It also examines the potential for linking programme specification details to online course admission profiles. It concludes that programme specification has the potential to be a valuable aid to communication between academics, students and employers.

The article introduces the concept of benchmarking as a referencing process to support self‐regulation of quality and outcome standards in higher education programmes. It examines the potential for exploiting the product of programme specification to explain which institutional and external reference points or benchmarks have been used to inform the design of programmes. It provides practitioner commentary on the process of benchmarking based on the worked examples provided in the Quality Assurance Agency guidelines for preparing programme specifications and offers an emergent practice model. It concludes by identifying key development issues that will need to be addressed.

Preparation For Change. The Company I am the managing director of a business which distributes solid fuel, oil, lubricants and allied products. I own nearly half the shares, whilst my brother, a practising accountant who acts part time as our chairman, owns the rest.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Ineffective expatriate performance and premature returns have been found to relate primarily to an inability to adjust to the foreign environment rather than a lack of technical competence. Research has identified three dimensions of expatriate adjustment: adjustment to work, adjustment to interactions with people in the foreign country and general adjustment to the culture and living conditions. Five major factors that have been found to influence these dimensions of adjustment and research using these factors provides a framework to help international firms understand and take a more active role in facilitating expatriate adjustment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for conceptualizing the public sphere through the tools of network analysis.

To do so, this paper combines comparative historical analysis of the early modern expansion of the public sphere with a review of relevant literature and logical exposition.

The paper develops several hypotheses about the potential of the approach and areas that may require advances in methodology and additional theoretical development.

The paper encourages the development and use of formal approaches for the analysis and conceptualization of the public sphere.

RECENT investigation has led us to wonder if the remuneration of librarians has made anything like the progress which sanguine people are wont to say it has. Or, since it is always distasteful to harp on payment for work, we ask: has librarianship advanced, as shown in the salaries paid, in a manner commensurate with the services rendered? If the librarian were receiving the acknowledgment that his position, from its nature, ought to command, his salary should compare in some way with the salaries of his municipal colleagues. Does it? It is true the salaries of librarians have advanced, but does not the pre‐war ratio of difference between them and the salaries of the borough accountant, the medical officer, the borough engineer, remain constant? We believe it does. An example occurs to us, where the pre‐war salary of the town clerk was £1,000 and the borough engineer's was the same, while the medical officer received £800. The librarian had £400. To‐day the town clerk has £2,000, the doctor £1,300, and the engineer £1,750, but the librarian has £750. He is still in the same, if not in a worse, position, relatively, than he was before the war. And £750 is not a low salary, as library appointments go now‐a‐days. The simple truth is that municipalities do not, and frankly say they do not, regard librarians as professional men. So, in this line alone, much remains to be done.

The purpose of this paper is to present a qualitative analysis of the facilitators of recovery in in-patient psychiatric rehabilitation from the service users’ perspective.

Interviews with 31 in-patients were coded and analysed thematically at an interpretive level using an inductive approach.

The dominant themes identified were hope, agency, relationships and opportunity. Totally, 20 subthemes were identified. Agency was more important to men than women and agency, hope and relationships were all more important to detained patients.

Interview data were collected in writing rather than taped. The results may not be transferrable to patient populations with significantly different demographic or service factors.

Services need to target interventions at the areas identified by service users as important in their recovery. The findings suggest both environmental and relational aspects of care that may optimise recovery. Services also need to be able to measure the quality of the care they provide. A brief, culturally valid and psychometrically assessed instrument for measuring the recovery orientation of services is required.

As far as the authors are aware no qualitative work to date has examined the recovery experiences of psychiatric rehabilitation in-patient service users in order to understand what services require to do to enable recovery from their perspective. The conceptual framework identified in this paper can be used to develop a service user self-report measure of the recovery orientation of services.

Drawing upon Folkman and Lazarus’ (1984) coping framework and interdependence theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), the purpose of this paper is to investigate how expatriate spouses’ coping strategies (problem-focused and emotion-focused) affect expatriate spouse adjustment and expatriate adjustment. In addition, the authors also examine the mediating effect of expatriate adjustment on the spouse coping strategies-spouse adjustment relationship.

To test these relationships, the authors collected multi-source data from 191 expatriate spouses and their expatriate partners living in 37 countries.

The results revealed that problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies positively and negatively, respectively, influenced all types of spouse adjustment: personal, interaction, and cultural. Both forms of spouse coping also influenced expatriate adjustment. The authors also found that expatriate adjustment mediated the relationship between expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and spouse adjustment.

The results suggest that multinational organizations should pay equal attention to the adjustment of both their expatriates and their spouses. Both expatriates and their spouses should be included in the initial selection process and in pre-departure training to get well equipped before the international assignment. Training spouses to adopt problem-focused coping strategies would help to facilitate the effective adjustment of both spouses and expatriates.

The research provides one of the first examinations that investigate expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and their impact on expatriate and expatriate spouse adjustment. This research also highlights the interdependency of expatriates and their spouses.

Presents the findings of a study which examined the impact of automation on the job satisfaction among library staff of the Margaret Thatcher Library (MTL), Moi University, Kenya. With the exception of the university librarian, his deputy and the systems librarian who were interviewed face to face, questionnaires were distributed to all other library staff. An 80 percent response rate resulted and data were coded and analysed. It was established that there were myriad problems within the library regarding training and access to automated systems of interest. However, MTL staff members viewed automation as enrichment and a source of satisfaction to their jobs. For automation to boost the staff members’ job satisfaction, concrete plans for consistent structured in‐house training, free access to the available software, additional systems staff, and centralised databases, among others, must be implemented.