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The importance of ties between older people and their children has been widely documented as a fundamental component in the provision and receipt of support. While the reference to such support is usually made in a benign manner, it is overly simplistic to assume that support provided by family members will always and necessarily lead to positive outcomes for older people. A person's perception of the adequacy or quality of support is inevitably influenced by his or her expectation of the type, frequency and source of support preferred or required. Most existing British research on the family support of older people has concentrated on those from the white‐British majority with little cross‐group comparisons. This article reports on in‐depth qualitative research with 17 and 21 older people from white‐British and Asian‐Indian backgrounds respectively. It demonstrates how gender, ethnicity, migration history and a range of other factors interweave in complex manners to affect individuals' expectations for support from their adult children. The findings reveal commonalities and differences within and between groups and demonstrate that the association between expectations of support and resultant sense of well‐being is complicated and is often conditional. Stereotypes within and across groups need to be examined given the observation that while familial norms may be played out differently in different cultural contexts, individuals make sense of and rationalise their expectations for support to take into account the dynamics of changing structures and attitudes.

Peter Townsend is one of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century and best known for his pioneering research into poverty. This paper aims to revisit Townsend's early work discussing the measurement of poverty and attempts to operationalise his ideas for determining minimum income standards for healthy living.

The article is based upon a secondary analysis of data taken from the UK Expenditure and Food Survey, a continuous cross‐sectional survey of household income, expenditure, and food consumption. Here, the sample has been restricted to an older population and the authors observe the relationship between household income and a healthy standard of living (indicated by diet) for people aged 60 years and over.

Minimum income requirements for healthy living, for this population in the UK, are 37 per cent greater than the British state pension for single pensioners and 37 per cent for pensioner couples. It is also appreciably greater than the official minimum income safety net (after means testing), the pension credit guarantee.

Objective evidence‐based assessment of living standards are practicable but do not presently provide a basis for social policy in the UK or elsewhere apparently. Such assessment could provide a credible basis for helping to establish minimum income standards in official policy.

Recent developments in the design of a British social survey have made it possible to operationalise Townsend's ideas for establishing minimum income standards over half a century after he proposed them.

The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of pet ownership and its relationship to wellbeing in later life. In particular, the paper addresses the issue of pet ownership in communal residential settings for older people both now and in the past, comparing attitudes, policies, and practices in regard to pets in the late 1950s with the early years of the twenty‐first century.

Following a review of the research literature on older people and companion animals, the paper draws on new data derived from recent research conducted by the authors. It compares archived material on the residential homes for older people that Peter Townsend visited in the late 1950s as part of his classic study, The Last Refuge (1962), with findings from revisiting a sample of these homes 50 years later. The authors employed the same methods as Townsend (observation together with interviews with managers and residents).

The historical dimension of the research reveals ambivalence both in the past and in present times in respect of residents' pets in care homes. Top‐down controlling regimes in the past have been replaced by concerns about health and safety and the need to strike a balance between rights, risks, and responsibilities. The variations in current policy and practice in England and Wales seem to reflect the subjective views and experiences of care home managers and proprietors. The lesson seems to be that care home owners should be expected to have an explicit policy in regard to the keeping of companion animals, but one that is not dictated by law.

The longitudinal data drawn on in this paper add a new perspective to research on older people and pets in care homes.

Much is heard about children and families but less about the policy implications of the parenting task in today's society. I argue that the demands placed upon parents have increased but that this has yet to be reflected in broader‐based policies.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate cultural experience as a learning strategy for developing international managers.

Using an integrated framework, two quantitative studies, based on empirical methodology, are conducted. Study 1, with an undergraduate sample situated in the Asia Pacific, aimed to examine the relationship between cultural experience and intercultural capability (IC), an original theoretical construct representing the critical factors of international managers. Study 2, employing a more culturally experienced postgraduate sample from Ireland, sought to confirm the findings from study 1 and further test the relationship of cultural experience with the factor of cultural adaptation.

Results identify a U-curve relationship of cultural experience and cultural adaptation for inexperienced students (study 1). A more linear, but less significant relationship between the above two with a maximum level of adaptation for more experienced students was found in study 2. This implies that there is a relationship between cultural experience and IC, within the limitations of the sample. However, whilst cultural experience is a major variable in developing IC, findings are that universities and industry training managers need to use a blended learning approach when developing international managers, hence, combining cultural experience (experiential learning) with didactic methods.

This is an original theoretical construct representing the critical factors of international managers.

This paper seeks to address the important modern management issue of vision management. In particular, it attempts to provide examples of, and to differentiate between three different types of visionary who have been the focal points for the theorists working in this area. It presents a profile of the ‘ideal visionary’ as portrayed by theory and provides a checklist of generic visionary qualities to help those readers who need to assess a would‐be visionary, and predict the likelihood of his/her achieving success at the top of an organisation. Finally, the paper notes that the strengths of the visionary are often the sources of his/her eventual failure. These strengths‐come‐weaknesses have been identified along with more externally generated organisational performance reducers.

The repercussions for the exposed whistleblowing employee are not always as drastic as those for Stanley Adams or Karen Silkwood. Adams, an ex‐senior executive at Hoffman‐La Roche in Switzerland who, in 1973, reported his employer to the European Commissioner for Competition over the involvement of the company in anti‐competitive practices, suffered a series of dreadful consequences, including imprisonment as a punishment for the crime of ‘economic espionage’, contrary to the Swiss Penal Code. More recently, a police investigation has begun into the death, in July 1991, of Paul Scully, an ex‐copper broker at the American company DLT, who had attempted to blow the whistle on suspicious trading in the copper markets.

Limits may be placed on sociability through a sense of social superiority (middle‐class people separating themselves from working‐class on a housing estate), through strength of sociability within the nuclear family limiting outside contacts, or through placing a value on solitude and personal privacy. Inadequate attention has been paid to those who actually “choose” social isolation; in particular, the group formed by those who never marry but choose the single life and its attendant type of social isolation would be worth study, giving consideration to the reasons behind such choices.