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This paper aims to explore the reasons for and the subsequent longer-term impact of the closure of the Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU).

The paper is both descriptive, providing an overview of the work of the BSU, and conceptual in that it argues that the limits of “prisoner rehabilitation” are observed in the closure of the BSU, which sounds a warning for other penal therapeutic communities and what it means to operate effectively.

The BSU which assisted long-term, difficult and violent prisoners moderate their prison behaviour and then to live non-offending lives, lost the confidence of government ministers and officials, as well as senior prison managers and, seemingly, the public, so closed after being in operation for 21 years. The impact of this has been that the Scottish Prison Service has not introduced, or attempted to introduce, a similar regime for managing and treating violent and disruptive prisoners.

There are important lessons to be learned from the BSU experience for all who manage and work in specialist, prison therapeutic units or within prison therapeutic regimes. This includes balancing the therapeutic elements of the regime, which may involve engaging in practices which are outside the norm for custodial establishments, with those establishments’ security and operational requirements, so as to not to create a disconnect between addressing offending behaviour and maintaining expected standards of wider prison conduct.

While there have been previous evaluations of the BSU, the longer-term impact has neither been previously considered and nor has the unit’s closure been considered from a penal philosophical perspective.

The evolution of firm level practices over time has always been a keen area of interest for management scholars. However, in comparison to other social scientists, particularly economists, the relative dearth of firm level panel data sets has restricted the methodological options for exploring inter-temporal changes.

This paper applies a pseudo panel methodology to investigate the evolution of training spend at the firm level over time.

The analysis is framed within a varieties of capitalism lens and by adopting a more meaningful approach to examining changes over time it leads us to question some of the “truisms” linked to firms expected behaviours within different national institutional frameworks.

As with any large-scale quantitative analysis, it would always benefits from a larger number of observations and/or a longer time period, in this instance access to annual data rather than 4 or 5 year intervals would have been helpful.

By adopting a different, and more appropriate, approach to analysing existing cross-sectional data over time this empirical research helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the complex issues that influence decision making at the firm level.

At the firm level, in line with the practical implications above, this will enable decision makers to achieve a deeper understanding of the evolution of the external context in which they operate and the likely influence of that evolution within their own organisation.

This approach enables a more meaningful exploration of inter-temporal changes in situations where longitudinal data does not exist.

–The purpose of this paper is to report on doctoral research that is addressing how strategic partnerships are rethinking their approach to tackling domestic abuse in Manchester, UK, and creating a new Public Service Reform Commissioning Framework, involving a significant programme of collaboration across sectors, including local authorities, Greater Manchester Police, the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner and voluntary not-for-profit agencies.

The methodological approach is a case study strategy (Yin, 1994). It is mainly qualitative, with multi-method data collection and analysis. The paper is a commentary on the research, rather than a research paper.

The paper explores the extent to which an innovative new public leadership approach (Brookes and Grint, 2010) to the strategy and governance framework has been adopted, and whether the partnership is succeeding in creating create public value (Moore, 1995). It will discuss how a more collaborative approach based on a community model can add greater engagement across the sectors.

Although there is a substantial body of literature about domestic abuse, there is an absence of research from a business and management perspective. The literature review identified that there is little about leadership approaches in tackling domestic abuse, or analysis of partnership approaches from a business and management perspective.

The aim of this study is to comment upon the relatively straightforward but often misunderstood role of gearing (or leverage) on the potential equity return of a property investment portfolio.

This education briefing is an explanation of the how the addition of individual assets to a portfolio can, with gearing, impact upon the portfolio return.

Although, this case study is relatively straightforward, it shows how portfolios can be geared to give enhanced returns at differing, aggregate and levels of risk.

The process of borrowing at a bank rate below the return rate on an investment project can increase the equity return of the project as long as all incomes and discount rate remain at appropriate levels.

This is a review of existing models.

The International Business Unit is part of the Department of Management Sciences in the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. It grew out of a research programme which started eight years ago, and has been undertaken in collaboration with the European Institute of Business Administration at Fontainebleau. The research is now supported by the Social Science Research Council. A small team are investigating various aspects of the decision‐making process in the multinational firm. This article is based on evidence already in the possession of the Unit.

HMP Grendon operates as a series of therapeutic communities (TCs), one of which is for sex offenders who have committed very serious sexual offences, many against children and young adults. Prison officers, who form a significant part of the multidisciplinary staff team, have both therapeutic and discipline responsibilities. It is therefore essential that processes are in place to enable these officers to manage emotions evoked from hearing unpleasant material of a sexual nature and to prevent this exposure negatively impacting upon the way their custodial duties are performed. This paper outlines the different support mechanisms available to prison officers and their views on these arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the design of skin surface electrodes for functional electrical stimulation using an isotropic single layered model of the skin and underlying tissue. A concentric ring electrode geometry was analysed and compared with a conventional configuration, specifically to localise and maximise the activation at depth and minimise the peak current density at the skin surface.

The mathematical formulation determines the spatial electric potential distribution in the tissue, using the solution to the Laplace equation in the lower half space subject to boundary conditions given by the complete electrode model and appropriate asymptotic decay. Hence, it is shown that the electric potential satisfies a weakly singular Fredholm integral equation of the second kind which is then solved numerically in MATLAB for a novel concentric ring electrode configuration and the conventional two disk side-by-side electrode configuration.

In both models, the electrode geometry can be optimised to obtain a higher activation and lower maximum current density. The concentric ring electrode configuration, however, provides improved performance over the traditional two disk side-by-side electrode configuration.

In this study, only a single layer of medium was investigated. A comparison with multilayer tissue models and in vivo validation of numerical simulations are required.

The developed mathematical approaches and simulations revealed the parameters that influence nerve activation and facilitated the theoretical comparison of the two electrode configurations. The concentric ring configuration potentially may have significant clinical advantages.