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The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical analysis of the pathways of female addicts within the Maltese context by highlighting the complex interrelatedness between substance abuse and victimisation. This paper proposes that female addiction and victimisation trajectories unfold in a non-linear fashion, heavily influenced by particular socio-psychological processes.

Guided by a career approach conceptual framework, this study was carried out through an in-depth exploration of the victimisation and addictive career trajectories of 12 women, who are either incarcerated or in a residential drug treatment facility. Data were gathered qualitatively through in-depth interviews and analysed using a grounded theory methodology.

The paper highlights how the victimisation and substance abuse trajectories of women initially unfold and develop over time. This includes an exploration of the strategies employed in order to negotiate gender-based victimisation experiences throughout their lifetime, such as through the development of a victim identity and the self-medication of trauma symptoms, a process that is facilitated by the influence of older, male peers. As the women’s addiction trajectories progress rapidly towards commitment, sex work and IPV feature and the victim identity is reinforced, motivating continued and increased drug use.

The paper includes implications for the development of a gender-responsive framework of intervention when working with women who were present for the treatment.

With a focus on women’s experiences, this study fills a lacuna within the literature by complementing and expanding upon quantitative analyses that examine these phenomena as distinct entities.

The purpose of this study is to explore and theorise about the desistance process of Maltese mothers who previously used drugs. The study unpacks how initial and continued desistance from high-risk drug use (HRDU) is impacted by being a mother within the Maltese context and identifies contingencies for desistance and examines how they are negotiated along the desistance pathways.

The study adopted a symbolic interactionist-inspired career framework and involved in-depth exploration of trajectories of mothering and desistance of eight Maltese women with a history of HRDU. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews and analysis used an evolved grounded theory methodology.

Four explanatory categories were identified in the interview data to document the role of mothering in the various pathways to desistance recounted by the women. These are: becoming a mother; differing pathways of desistance in relation to mothering; the lived experience; identity negotiation and transformation. This study highlights how identity fluidity and transformation is central to the desistance process.

The paper aims to inform policy and practice with mothers who use drugs and their families and has important implications for the development and delivery of gender transformative interventions.

This study challenges taken-for-granted beliefs about the influence of mothering on desistance and identifies the complexities involved.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key management skills for running a successful winery business, which in the Australian industry is predominately a small to medium sized business, and explores the existence of such skills within the industry.

The information was obtained through structured interviews with a range of winery owners and managers in the four main wine regions of Western Australia.

Whilst a set of universal management skills are identified by the industry participants, these are not universally held. The study examines skills and training issues highlighting the diversity of winery owners and managers.

The study was conducted using qualitative methodology in one state of Australia only.

The findings require further quantitative testing, but strongly imply that managerial skills in the wine industry are limited, and most managers are more focused on technical expertise than financial, strategic, marketing or HR planning and management.

The paper has benefit for the wine industry showing the strengths and weaknesses of its managers, and also for theorists who seek to understand management processes in a specific sector predominantly comprising small and medium sized enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of salary raises and employees’ perception of these salary raises on their intended retention and turnover. By using a survey data set from a representative American public university, this study investigates a novel hypothesis that faculty perceptions of salary raises, relative to their perceptions of other faculty members’ assessments of the raises, influence their intended labor supply.

Using both ordered probit and OLS modeling frameworks, the authors focus on the impact of salary raises and the relative perception of these raises on intended labor supply behavior. They explore a hypothesis that a mismatch between one’s ranking of the salary raise and the perception of others’ rankings causes dissatisfaction.

The results provide evidence that salary raises themselves are effective monetary tools to reduce intended turnover; however, the results also suggest that relative deprivation as a comparison of one’s own perceptions of a salary raise with others affects employee intended retention. The authors find that employees who have less favorable perceptions of salary adjustments, compared to what they believe their colleagues think, are more likely to consider another employer, holding their own perception of raises constant. Conversely, more favorable views of salary raises, compared to how faculty members think other’s perceived the salary raises, does not have a statistically significant impact on intended retention.

This is the first study that explores an employee’s satisfaction with salary raises relative to perceptions of other employees’ satisfaction with their own salary raises, and the resulting intended labor supply in an American university. The results indicate that monetary rewards in the form of salary raises do impact faculty intended retention; however, perception of fairness of these salary raises is more important than the actual raises. Given the high cost of job turnover, these findings suggest that employers may benefit from devoting resources toward ensuring that salary- and raise-determining procedures are generally perceived by the vast majority of employees as being fair.

An increase in the ageing UK population is leading to new ways of looking at how we deliver health and social care services in the UK. The use of assisted living technology (ALT) and telecare is already playing a part in these new models of care. Yet despite the current advances in the range of technology and networking capabilities in the home, ALT and telecare solutions have not been taken up as eagerly as might have been anticipated. The study reported here used scenario‐based focus groups with a wide variety of stakeholders in home care to identify the existing barriers to the successful uptake of ALTs and telecare in Scotland. Six focus group sessions were conducted with individual stakeholder groups (social care workers, policy makers, telecare installation technicians, older users, informal carers) and five conducted with mixed stakeholder groups. The focus groups used the same home care scenario to identify and categorise the different perceptions, attitudes, and expectations of the various stakeholders when discussing telecare implementation for a fictitious older couple. The emerging themes from the focus groups were analysed and categorised according to the Framework Analysis approach. We present a synthesised list of the current barriers to the uptake of ALTs and telecare ‐ and discuss how each of these barriers might be overcome. If these barriers are addressed, we believe telehealthcare technologies will be better designed, more usable, easier to prescribe effectively, more acceptable to more users in more contexts, and ultimately more common place in homes throughout the UK.

Uses ten case studies to illustrate technology transfer to Eastern Europe in the form of contractual joint ventures. Defines the basic concept of industrial co‐operation or contractual joint venture, providing a working definition and an internationally accepted definition. Investigates the expectations of companies embarking on this type of venture by means of interview results, comparing these.

Like many organisations, the Army is preparing itself for significant population changes in the 1990s. The demographic trough means that there will be something like 25% fewer 16–19 year olds in 1995 than there were in 1985. These statistics have a significant bearing on the recruiting environment for the Army, because it will continue to need large numbers of young men and women to consider the armed forces as a career choice throughout this period.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.

Time is the top priority. We now live in real time. It's no longer life in the fast lane because every lane is fast. The computer has changed the way we view time. We expect everything to occur at Pentium speed! A time lag causes stress since it is viewed as an unnecessary waste. This is not a matter of immediate gratification; rather delays—such as standing in line—are viewed as something being wrong with the system, and the company that allows it to happen is perceived as not being up to speed! (Graham, 1996, p. 4).