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Digital technologies allow people to change the workplace in a fundamental way. The connectivity enabled by these technologies has opened new opportunities for how, when, and where people work. Those opportunities, when exploited, can help organisations be more effective in their use of human capital. Capturing these opportunities requires a mind shift whereby corporate real estate professionals perceive things differently‐and then act differently. That mind shift should challenge established values and assumptions about where value gets created as well as where people work and how people connect with others. The mind shift should, in turn, lead workspace professionals to rethink their approaches to workplace design, and stimulate new organisational patterns for creating, justifying and continuously improving workplaces and enterprise‐wide workplace portfolios. Pioneering work by SunMicrosystems and Hewlett Packard is showing the way. Other workplace professionals can effectively follow if they harness the connective power of technology as an integral part of workplace design. That design should begin with the work that needs to be done; create the best package of physical and cyber space to do it; and evolve as work requirements change.

Aims to describes how UK bakery Bells of Lazonby teamed up with a housing association to create more affordable housing in its local community.

Uses information from the company's managing director, who chairs the Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency and is working to increase the number of affordable homes in the countryside as part of an initiative headed by the Prince of Wales.

Reveals how the initiative – which is not limited to Bells of Lazonby employees, but also covers potential owners either working in the village, with children attending the village primary school, or originally born in the village – has helped young people and those on lower incomes to settle in the area.

Through achieving a better balance between housing availability and the demand for housing, Bells of Lazonby benefits directly and indirectly from the retention of local talent and a local workforce that helps to create a productive “buzz” in the workplace.

Describes an innovative solution to a significant HR problem.

The objective of this paper is to give an overview of various reliability concepts that have been developed in the last decades. The paper first summarises various indicators that have been developed in order to measure the reliability of a network and then looks at techniques to calculate these indicators. The usefulness and limitations of the different indicators is discussed. The paper suggests that there is no single perfect indicator but that the choice of indicator and technique depends on several factors, including the viewpoint of the analyst and the type and range of interventions being considered. In order to assess the impact of incidents the authors propose to distinguish between three types of intervention, namely “benevolent”, “neutral” or random, and “malevolent”. Also discussed is why the provision of up-to-date information to the traveller has a central role to play when trying to minimise the impact of an incident.

This paper describes and extends the game theoretic approach to network vulnerability assessment. The basic idea is to set up a game between the network users who are trying to minimise their expected travel time by choice of route and a network tester who is trying to penalise the users most by degrading a link through capacity reduction leading to congestion. The method therefore finds the worst possible location for a link degradation, taking re-routing options into account (an upper, lower bound of impact). The original game identifies the weakest link for routes between an OD pair in the network. Two variations are introduced in this paper in order to determine the weak links for a specific origin or a specific destination and for the whole network. All three game variations are tested on a small network in Leicester and the results are presented.

Robert J. Antonio is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA. His e-mail address is anto@falcon.cc.ukans.eduArmando Bartra is a Sociologist, Historian, and President of the Instituto Maya, in Mexico City, Mexico. The Instituto Maya has worked for the past 30 years with peasant and indigenous groups on leadership, capacity building, micro-credit, and related rural development projects. His e-mail address is circo@laneta.apc.orgMichael Mayerfeld Bell is Associate Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, and Collaborating Associate Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. His e-mail address is michaelbell@wisc.eduGisela Landázuri Benı́tez teaches Rural Development at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco, Mexico City, Mexico. Her e-mail address is giselalb@prodigy.net.mxAlessandro Bonanno is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Sociology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, USA. His e-mail address is soc_aab@shsu.eduLawrence Busch is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA. He is also Director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards, and a Past President of the Rural Sociological Society. His e-mail address is Lawrence.Busch@ssc.msu.eduJorge Calbucura is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. His e-mail address is Jorge.Calbucura@soc.uu.seMaria del Mar Delgado is Assistant Professor of Rural Development at the Department of Economics, Sociology, and Agriculture Policy, University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain. She is a member of the Rural Development Team at the University of Cordoba. Her e-mail address is mmdelgado@uco.esCornelia Butler Flora is Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. She is also Director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development and a Past President of the Rural Sociological Society. Her e-mail address is cflora@iastate.eduRosemary Elizabeth Gali is the coordinator of the Sociology Module of the Master’s Program in Development Management sponsored by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the University of Torino, Italy. She has worked as a consultant for most of the major development agencies and was an adviser to the government of Mozambique during the 1990s. Her e-mail address is gallirose@hotmail.comFred T. Hendricks is Professor and Head of Department at the Department of Sociology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He is also Managing Editor of the African Sociological Review. His e-mail address is f.hendricks@ru.ac.zaSusie Jacobs is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology of Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom. She is co-director of the Institute of Global Studies there. Her e-mail address is s.jacobs@mmu.ac.ukThomas A. Lyson is Professor in the Department of Rural Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. He is also Director of Cornell’s Community, Food, and Agriculture Program, and a past editor of the journal Development Sociology. His e-mail address is tal2@cornell.eduLois Wright Morton is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA. Her e-mail address is lwmorton@iastate.eduEduardo Ramos is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Sociology, and Agriculture Policy, University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain. He is also Head of the Co-operation for Development Chair. He is a member of the Rural Development Team at the University of Cordoba. His e-mail address is eduardo.ramos@uco.es

Why would rural sociologists in particular have an interest in democracy? To begin with, rural sociologists have had a long standing concern with issues of community. During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of community within rural sociology came under criticism as a simple-minded repetition of hoary stereotypes about fellow-feeling and neighborliness in small towns and villages, in contrast to the anomie of the city. But the disciplinary interest in how and when people get along and mobilize for the collective good (if we may reduce the concern for community to that base) remained. The study of rural democracy seemed a more sophisticated way of studying these issues without resorting to the old gemeinschaft-gesellschaft distinction. Several of the contributions to this book thus retain a focus on small associations of people, as the classic gemeinschaft literature did, but now with the analytic tools of the rural sociology of democracy.

Bell and Hendricks’ Walking Towards Justice is the first volume in the post-Schwarzweller era of Research in Rural Sociology and Development. Harry Schwarzweller – a Past President of both the Rural Sociological Society and the International Rural Sociology Association, and now Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Michigan State University – was the ideal person to mould and nurture Research in Rural Sociology and Development (RRSD) into becoming one of the world’s foremost publications in the fields of rural sociology and development studies. Harry had broad interests in rural sociology and development and a strong commitment to rural sociology as an internationally relevant enterprise. Schwarzweller was not only the Series Editor from the inception of RRSD in the mid-1980s, but he was editor or co-editor of seven of the eight volumes of RRSD that had been published as of 2000. The rural sociological community the world over owes Harry Schwarzweller its gratitude for paving this way for this important research publication.