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The purpose of this paper is to examine the means by which one UK local authority obtained certification of its Bereavement Service against ISO9001, ISO14001, and ISO27001. It aims to explain the processes that were followed, highlight the problems that were encountered, and show how these were overcome.

The paper adopts a case study approach. The case study emerged from a broader grounded theory study which is outside the scope of this paper.

This paper demonstrates that ISO27001 can be fully integrated into a single management system with ISO9001 and ISO14001, and also illustrates that the various standards can be applied more flexibly than is often thought.

This study will be of significant benefit to bereavement professionals because it offers advice and guidance on addressing pitfalls that may be encountered when bereavement services wish to seek certification against international standards. It will also benefit quality, environmental, and information security professionals because it shows, in a practical way, how the three standards can be fully integrated.

The integration of ISO27001 into a comprehensive management system is an area which has previously been under‐researched. Furthermore, this paper takes an original perspective to information security, arguing that ISO27001 can be applied beyond an ICT environment, and this is demonstrated by considering the standard in the context of bereavement services.

Due to their pervasiveness in American society, cultural gender beliefs often organize workplaces and justify what jobs are suitable for men and for women (Ridgeway, 2009, 2011). When an occupation experiences feminization, jobs and occupations once considered “men’s work” must be “retyped” to justify and accommodate the movement of women into the occupation (Lincoln, 2010; Reskin & Roos, 1990). Using the case of funeral directing, this chapter explores the “retyping” of funeral directing, a formerly male-dominated, currently feminizing occupation by examining shifting gender narratives about funeral work in trade journals published between 1995 and 2013. Findings indicate multiple gender narratives involved in explaining the movement of women into funeral directing and the implications for gender inequality in feminizing occupations. Some narratives (old boy and gender essential) explain women’s entry and justify sex segregation by drawing on stereotypical gender differences in physical strength and emotional labor between men and women. While other narratives (gender blind and gender progressive) reject and challenge essentialism by impugning the notion that gender stereotypes are a reliable indicator of skill.

The archaeological record of small-scale societies is replete with examples of people expending considerable labor to craft both places and objects for communal rituals. Archaeologists often infer these efforts to have been the product of aspiring elites. This chapter focuses instead on the larger community responsible for the construction of places and objects, through a ritual economy analysis of the social logic people use to organize the production of ritual places and paraphernalia. A review of ethnographic and archaeological data suggests that the production of communal ritual places often involves the creation of sociograms, while the production of objects for use within these places encompasses a web of complementary and competitive relations. Two examples of large-scale communal ritual spaces, the early British Neolithic causewayed enclosures and the Ohio Hopewell geometric earthworks, are explored in light of these ethnographic and archaeological patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the service literature by investigating post-consumption evaluation in the context of unwanted services. In particular, it intends to delineate the main characteristics of funeral services.

Given the lack of substantive literature on funeral services, a qualitative exploratory design was used from in-depth interviews with ten managers of funeral services companies in Quebec (Canada).

The study shows that compared to other traditional services, funeral services are characterized by their strong emotiveness, non-recurrence, irreversibility, uncommonness, high level of symbolism and personalization and emotion control of the service provider. The study also argues that funeral services quality is strongly dependent on funeral houses’ integrated logistics, proximity and integrity.

Because of consumers’ lack of competency, funeral companies need to guide and educate consumers about the criteria they should use to evaluate the service quality. Because funeral consumers are strongly emotion-driven at the purchase time, funeral services providers should find the right balance of emotions to express. Thus, more staff training is needed.

Because funeral services are emotionally challenging and deal with grief and distressed clients, the present study contributes in shedding light on service quality assessment in the funeral industry. Although they have some characteristics of traditional services (intangibility, perishability and variability), funeral services are also different in many ways.

Cochlear's first product, the 22-channel Nucleus implant, was the result of a research programme that has been dated back to 1967, when Graeme Clark, an ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeon, commenced doctoral work on the electrical stimulation of the hearing nerve. Following the completion of his PhD in 1969, Clark was appointed the inaugural Chair in Otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne. When he joined the university in 1970, his primary objective was the practical application of his PhD research: namely, the development of a ‘bionic ear’, an electronic device that would stimulate the hearing nerve in the profoundly deaf. He realised early on that lack of resources would be one of his major impediments:across the road [from my office] the experimental research laboratory was in a disused hospital mortuary. When I looked at the mortuary my heart sank. It was dilapidated and bare. There was a stone table in the centre, but little else. The walls needed painting, and the light diffused poorly through the high windows. Anyway, I had no money to buy equipment even if the laboratory itself were satisfactory. (Clark, 2000, p. 54)

Compares the different types of local authorities within the United Kingdom and the various duties imposed on them by statute or morals. Outlines the history of emergency planning in general and shows how local authorities become involved. Reviews the facilities and support available to the emergency services from these authorities. Details these in departmental form, including Works and Services; Education; Welfare and Social Services; Libraries; Housing; and Environmental Health. Outlines the services provided: supply of transport, equipment, plant and personnel; the identification, designation and preparation of premises for use as survivor reception, rest, relatives, or media centres or as temporary mortuaries; and the provision of trauma and bereavement counselling and co‐ordination of volunteer services. Concludes with a discussion of the restoration phase: the setting up and management of trust funds; siting and erection of memorials; and re‐establishment of the incident site.

Starting from an event occurring in 2018, I consider burials of abortive remains as a battleground for reproductive governances. Public debate on pregnancy loss is often intertwined with the abortion debate. In Italy this association caused a considerable delay in implementing practices recommended by international guidelines on pregnancy loss. In this essay, I analyse burial regulations and the ways in which they are enforced asking what is at stake when the State, the regions, the Catholic Church, healthcare and cemetery professionals and women undergoing a termination or a pregnancy loss decide what to do with bodily remains. What is the meaning of these peculiar dead bodies? How are they publicly named? What are the effects of the actions performed on fetal remains over the lived experiences of women and couples with different reproductive histories? Who has the right to make decisions over these peculiar bodies and relationships?

Based on a long-term ethnography on abortion and pregnancy loss in Italy, I explore the inherent complexity of these questions, arguing that burial practices conflict with abortion rights when they signify the body unequivocally, separating it from social and intimate relationships, fixing its identity and determining the conditions for its recognition. Human flesh, sociologically understood (Memmi, 2014), is both material and symbolic: a fluctuating reality that takes on different meanings and affects over time within relationships.

Classical ethnographic research begins with the recognition that the observer starts as a stranger to the group being studied, a recognition as evident in the analysis of formal organizations as of gangs or tribes. From this position of difference the researcher must learn the themes and dynamics of a setting of otherness. The researcher begins as an outsider, a stance that creates initial challenges, yet permits the transmittal of novel information to external audiences. This is particularly true while studying organizational worlds that explicitly focus on occupational socialization. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This conceptual paper relies on the close reading and analysis of three major ethnographies of occupational socialization.

The reality that (many) ethnographers begin as strangers permits them to understand socialization processes while observing how group cultures change. The authors defines this as the “stranger paradigm.” This otherness is joined by the perspective of the scholar's discipline and awareness of comparable research that permits understanding of forces that are unrecognized by participants, but which can be profitably scrutinized by disciplinary colleagues within their own occupational worlds. The authors term this “ethnographic authority.”

To support the claim that distance and authority support the formulation of theoretical insights, the paper examines organizational ethnographies that examine the occupational socialization of doctors, morticians, and ministers.