Search results

A NOVEL and interesting method of lubrication has been developed by Menrow Pumps Limited of Essex Street, London, W.C.2.

The chapter discusses the question of social justice in social science research by problematizing the researcher-research content relationship and its guiding principle framework Science-Society-Me. With a focus on early career researchers, the author draws on her own PhD research experience to highlight the social justice tension inherent in the normative approaches and methods for selecting research topic, collecting data and relating with research participants, and analyzing and interpreting data especially in empirical research with fellow human beings. Drawing on the theory of affect, the chapter centralizes the position, biography and experience of the researcher, and the relationship between the researcher and the research participants to balance out the privileged (power) position of ‘science’ and ‘society’ in the current framework. To this end, I make two ontological and methodological adjustment recommendations: (1) Relocating the space of research from a fixed and exclusive ‘location’ of science theories, methods, concepts etc., to the space of daily life experience and interaction, requiring a compassionate approach to research, and thus the second recommendation; (2) Developing long-term, inclusive and equal relationships with research participants augmented by constant reflexivity – as including the biographies and experiences of the researcher and the research participant – as well as political reflexivity.

Many organisations recently instructed employees to work from home due to lockdowns and restrictions put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the unprecedented increase in intimate partner violence (IPV) during the same period have raised concerns about women’s risk of exposure to IPV when the home and workplace overlap during work-at-home instances. IPV is a global public health problem that negatively affects the health, safety, and productivity of victims and co-workers through various mechanisms. While IPV awareness and policies have developed slowly from an occupational health perspective, the workplace remains crucial in identifying, responding to, and offering support to victims. Thus, as part of preparing for future pandemics and considering that working at home has become the new normal, the overlap between home and the workplace cannot be ignored. This chapter discusses the role of employers and how existing guidelines about employers’ response to IPV can be applied when staff work from home.

In this chapter, we explore genre-blurring writing, where fiction meets theory, following the argument that texts in management and organisation studies suffer from the ‘textbook syndrome’. The stories that we tell through textbooks not only influence, but also set boundaries for, the way understandings are developed through the eyes of the reader. Often textbooks are written in a way that lead the reader into an idealised linear understanding of an organisation – far from the problems, dilemmas and messy everyday life that managers experience. Our discussion builds on previous literature on writing differently and our own experiences of writing a textbook by involving a professional novelist. Engaging in genre-blurring writing opens up how we think not only about writing, fiction and facts but also in our role as scientists. By situating ourselves, as researchers, at the intersection of fiction and the scientific work, not only new ways of writing, but also of thinking emerge. We discuss three aspects through which fiction challenge and develop our writing and thinking, namely to write with voice, resonance and an open end. Through genre-blurring writing, we create opportunities both to learn and to engage students in learning.

IT is very appropriate that this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD should be devoted to the subject of cataloguing. This has become current in a special degree owing to the activity of the A.L.A. and the L.A. committees on both sides of the Atlantic, who are engaged in reviewing the Anglo‐American Code of Cataloguing Rules. Cataloguing is a subject that figures more in the minds of candidates for examinations than it does in the average conversations of librarians, but there is no more important subject in the librarian's life and no more significant activity. Our readers may not accept the implications of the somewhat vigorous “Letters on Our Affairs” which appear in this number, but it could be urged that there are many things to consider in cataloguing which have immediate importance. The matter was a simple one in former days. Forty years ago every library in this country of any size found it possible to issue a printed catalogue of some sort or other. The objections to these printed catalogues are commonplace to‐day; they were expensive, their cost was not recovered by sales, and they were incomplete from the beginning. The point is that libraries somehow managed to publish them, and those libraries were, as our correspondent suggests, of as good service to literature in its best sense as are present libraries.

OUR readers need no apology from us for the attention given to Library Training in these pages. The amount of dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs, if it may be judged from the gossip and letters that reach us, is of some proportions. It is not to be supposed that complaints are necessarily justified. They may be made in the natural chagrin of disappointment by candidates who have failed. Alternatively, there may be reasons which have a disinterested origin. The record of passes and failures shows that in December there was a dêbacle in candidates in the subject of cataloguing, which at least merits thought. In earlier issues it has been suggested by our writers that examinations twice yearly encourage experiments in sitting. There has also been the suggestion that librarians place too much stress on qualifications for their juniors and urge them to struggle with subjects for which they cannot be ready. To pass in cataloguing a student must be able to catalogue anything from a novel to an academic thesis in Anglo‐Norman French on Phlogiston, supposing that to be possible!