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This commentary discusses the broader potential of student response systems (SRS) regarding their positive impact on student mental health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to draw on relevant literature to illustrate the wider social and intrapersonal benefits of SRS beyond its use as an educational tool.

Tenets of social information processing theory are used in conjunction with the literature from health, sociological and psychological disciplines to explicate the mental health benefits of SRS.

SRS can make a positive contribution students’ mental health and wellbeing, thus assisting the broader pastoral support and employability frameworks of higher education institutions.

An original perspective on the use of SRS in promoting the mental health and wellbeing of university students

An estimated 1.2 million students gamble, equating to approximately two in every three students. In the UK, university students have reached the legal age to gamble; many have received significant sums of financial support and will be responsible for managing their own finances. Some UK universities have acknowledged that students engage in gambling activity and the need to provide gambling-related support. However, more research is needed to better understand student gambling activities and how universities can optimise provision of support. The purpose of this study was to enhance this understanding.

A total of 210 university students completed an online survey to provide details of their gambling behaviour and views on the types of support that they felt would best support students.

Both gambling and non-gambling students reported a preference for specialised gambling-related support within student services without the requirement for gambling-focused workshops (p < 0.01). Follow-up analysis revealed a significantly greater proportion of females did not gamble (p < 0.01), that males spent more money when gambling (p < 0.01) and were higher risk gamblers than females (p < 0.01).

These results provide evidence for gambling support to feature overtly as part of university support and well-being services.

This study examines the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly ChatGPT, on higher education (HE). The ease with which content can be generated using GenAI has raised concerns across academia regarding its role in academic contexts, particularly regarding summative assessments. This research makes a unique contribution to the literature by examining university student and staff perceptions of current and future issues pertaining to the role of GenAI in universities.

A qualitative method involving five one-to-one semi-structured interviews with four students and a lecturer explored the ethical and practical issues of GenAI text generation in academia. An inductive thematic analysis was chosen as it provided nuanced insights aligned with the study’s goals.

Use of GenAI was discussed within the context of a range of topics, including perceptions of academic misconduct, authorial integrity and issues pertaining to university policies. Participants universally defined traditional classifications of academic misconduct but were unable to provide clear definitions where the use of GenAI was included for writing summative assessments. Students showed a more open engagement with GenAI, considering it a tool for overcoming obstacles rather than a means to plagiarise. Educators were generally more cautious and less optimistic about the academic role of GenAI. Lack of clear institutional policies surrounding such tools also contributed to ethical ambiguities.

The study highlights diverging perspectives between students and academics, which necessitate a forum for dialogue, ensuring the need to develop clear policies to steer the integration of GenAI in a manner that is beneficial for students and academics.

This review aims to provide an overview of research from different academic disciplines to chart some of the key developments in retail cryptocurrency trading against the backdrop of the wider trading landscape, and how it has evolved in recent years. The purpose of this review is to provide researchers with a broad perspective to highlight the complex range of factors that drive cryptocurrency trading among retail investors.

Peer-reviewed literature from the social sciences, economics, marketing and branding disciplines is synthesised to explicate influential factors among retail cryptocurrency investors.

Online retail trading communities can create narratives that ascribe value to cryptocurrencies leading to consumer herding behaviours. The principles that underpin emotional branding and Fear of Missing Out can promote trading behaviour driven by heuristic processing and cognitive biases. Concurrently, the tenets of controversial marketing and the anti-establishment nature of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies serve to bolster in-group out-group categorisations fostering continued investment and market volatility. Consequently, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading more broadly offer a powerful combination of excitement from risk-taking akin to gambling buffered by the sanctity of social inclusion.

A broader, unique perspective on retail cryptocurrency trading which assists in better understanding the complexities that underpin its appeal to retail investors.

The succession of the chief executive of any organisation is a critical event. In 1971 a study revealed that in the UK, management succession was almost equal to financial failure as the major cause of firms ceasing to exist as independent organisations. Dun and Bradstreet calculated that in the USA, 45% of all business failures are caused through the appointment of incompetent managers to chief executive positions.

This chapter examines why managed clinical networks are an appropriate approach to sustainable healthcare, and discusses the conditions for the effectiveness of these multi-stakeholder, clinician-led modes of organizing. It describes the development of a national clinical network to achieve system-wide improvement in the provision of publicly funded cardiac surgery services in New Zealand, and the subsequent evolution of a broader network encompassing the whole cardiac care patient pathway.

The case study of the two cardiac clinical networks focuses on the emergence and evolution of the networks over a four-year period from 2009. Data were collected from interviews with key stakeholders of both networks and from internal and published documentary evidence. Analysis of the case study is informed by network theory and prior studies of managed clinical networks.

Progress made towards the achievement of the goals of the initial cardiac surgery network encouraged a broadening of focus to the entire cardiac care pathway and the establishment of the national cardiac network. An important benefit has been the learning and increase in understanding among the different stakeholders involved. Both clinical networks have demonstrated the value of clinician engagement and leadership in improving the delivery of health services, and serve as a best practice model for the development of further clinical networks for health services that require a national population base.

The case study analysis of the two cardiac clinical networks identifies five mutually reinforcing themes that underpin network effectiveness: network structure, management and governance, and internal and external legitimation. These themes encompass a number of factors suggestive of successful managed clinical networks, and offer insights into the use of such networks in organizing for sustainable healthcare.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse role transition for professionals moving towards hybrid managerial roles. Specifically, the authors examine reforms to the national tax agency in the UK, focusing on attempts to shift hybrid managers away from a focus on tax compliance, to a greater customer focus. This extends understanding of the relationship between New Public Management (NPM) and the public professions, by offering greater insight into the dynamic between regulators and regulatees, as professionals are co-opted into management roles that encompass greater customer orientation.

The authors draw on documentary data relating to reform from 2003 to 2012 and 43 semi-structured interviews with senior tax inspectors co-opted into hybrid manager roles.

The findings support established accounts of the effect of NPM reform to public professions, as these professionals are co-opted into hybrid management roles. Some hybrid managers resist, others embrace the demands of the new role. Linked to a hitherto neglected aspect of analysis (the extent to which hybrid managers embrace a greater customer orientation) the findings also show a more novel third response: some hybrid managers leave the national tax agency for opportunities in the private sector. These public-to-private professionals the authors call “canny customers”. Canny customers are ideally placed to exploit aspects of NPM reform, and thereby accelerate changes in the governance of public agencies, but in a way that might undermine the function of the tax agency and tax professions.

In regulatory settings, policy reform to co-opt professionals into hybrid managerial roles may have mixed effects. In settings where a focal dynamic is the regulator-regulatee relationship, effective governance will require understanding of the labour market to temper excess influence by those hybrid managers who become canny customers, otherwise, in settings where it is easy for individuals to move from regulator to regulatee, the pace and consequences of reform will be harder to govern. This runs the danger of eroding professional values. The specific case of tax professionals reflects themes in the literature examining hybridisation for accountants, and provides novel insight into the dynamics of professionalism that extend to the case of accountants.

The contribution is to extend the literature on role transition of professionals. The authors focus on hybrid managers in the context of a regulatory agency: the UK national tax agency. Policy reforms associated with hybridisation emphasised customer orientation. The authors highlight labour market characteristics impacting the regulator-regulatee dynamic, and an as yet unexplored, unintended consequence of reform. The public professional who leaves for the private sector becomes a “canny customer” who can exploit and accelerate reform.

This chapter explores middle leadership identity through the real-world accounts of how two middle leaders construct and develop their leadership identity and how this impacts the way their middle leadership is practiced. Leadership identity, an internal narrative of oneself as a leader which is practised professionally in context, represents a concept that is best understood as being unique to an individual, enduring over time, and a consequence of human experiences. Middle leadership is often the first promotion for teachers from teacher to leader and, as such, how middle leaders perceive themselves as a leader and how this formative process of leadership identity underpins middle leaders’ practices can make a significant impact on a leader’s decision making, professional relationships, behaviours, and actions. This chapter is co-authored by two researchers and two middle leaders with the intention of understanding middle leader identity development and its influence on middle leadership practices. Using interviews, middle leaders’ stories of identity were co-composed and re-storied to construct each middle leader’s narrative. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the influences of identity for middle leaders and considerations for leadership development.

Since the early 1980s, breakaway training has been synonymous with many prevention and management of violence and aggression (PMVA) training programmes in social care and NHS settings. However, for almost three decades, this community has continued to accept a training approach that has been largely unsupported by a robust underpinning methodology or evidence base. The validity of this historical training approach will be examined in context with the available literature, and will seek to identify the fundamental flaws that have been inherent in the traditional system. This paper will conclude by making some practical suggestions on how the efficacy of personal protective training may be improved, based on the emerging findings from other scientific fields.