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When my first article appeared in the July 1975 issue of Nutrition and Food Science, describing the research I had carried out into the problems involved in integrating a special diet into family meal patterns, I concluded that there was a deficiency in the services provided to cope with the problems that arise in adjusting to the diets. One of my suggestions to help improve the situation was for food concerns to increase their practical guidance. What could be more practical than to launch a range of convenience foods? Recently I was asked to try a new range of food mixes designed for those on certain exclusion diets and I am now more hopeful that people on special diets can look forward to more interesting meals.

Have your friends and relations made you feel just a little bit cranky as you brought out an ever increasing variety of beans and peas, crossed most saturated fats off your shopping list and ate only wholemeal bread and brown rice? Then Rita Greer's book, which sets out to provide a practical answer to what she calls ‘The British food fiasco’, is probably more for those who tease you than for you yourself.

Rita Greer describes her very successful, one woman research to produce attractive and appetising food for a gluten free diet. As an artist, her approach to the problem was unique. If an engraver can produce forgeries of bank notes, why, she asked herself, should not an artistic cook be able to produce forgeries of ordinary food to meet the needs of a special diet?

Explores the underlying behavioral processes influencing the clinical behavior of physicians toward their patients. Utilizing educational and social influence explanatory models as a baseline, we sought how each, through peer group settings, would affect clinical specific practice decisions. Focusing on family physicians in Israel who were engaged in ongoing professional peer group meetings, it is suggested that health decisions affecting clinical practice are not universal but particularistic and depend a great deal on the transfer of clinical knowledge through selective social networks. Health managers, utilizing these findings, can therefore intervene in the formation of clinical practice decisions. This can be done primarily through management policy to induce the formation of specific types of peer group social networks.

This chapter examines the impact of recent airline consolidations in the United States on the technical efficiencies of the airlines involved. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to assess the efficiencies, and the consolidations examined are those that occurred among major network carriers between 2005 and 2013. The airline production process is conceptualized as the transformation of labor, fuel, and fleet-wide seating capacity into available seat-miles, or, under an alternative model specification, into user value, as measured by the airline’s operating revenue. Efficiency is conceptualized in terms of minimizing the airline’s usage of the three inputs, given its output level. The analysis seeks to determine whether the airlines that consolidated were more efficient, post-consolidation, than they were prior to consolidation, compared to airlines that did not enter into consolidations. Although there are limitations owing to the small number of airlines in the dataset, the chapter finds no evidence that the consolidations enhanced the efficiencies of the airlines involved, relative to the efficiencies of the airlines that did not enter into consolidations.

Opioid agonist treatment (OAT) programmes in prisons play a significant role in preventing the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Despite its proven effectiveness, both the availability and coverage of prison OAT programmes remain low. This Indonesian study explores facilitators of, and barriers to, the delivery of methadone programmes in prisons using the social ecological model (SEM).

The study used a qualitative case study approach comprising two prisons with, and one prison without, methadone programmes. Purposive and snowball sampling was used to recruit study participants. In total, 57 in-depth interviews were conducted with prison governors, health-care staff, prison officers and prisoners. Data was analysed thematically.

The study findings identified facilitators of and barriers to the delivery of prison OAT programmes at all three levels of the SEM as follows: intrapersonal barriers including misperceptions relating to HIV transmission, the harm reduction role of OAT programmes, methadone dependency and withdrawal symptoms; interpersonal barriers such as inflexible OAT treatment processes and the wide availability of illicit drugs in prisons and; social-structural barriers, notably the general lack of resources.

The findings highlight the importance of and overlap between, organisational and inter-personal, as well as intrapersonal factors. Such an approach is particularly important in the context of the implementation and delivery of methadone programmes in low/middle income countries, where the lack of resources is so significant.

Three main strategies for improvement were suggested as follows: the development of comprehensive education and training programmes for prisoners and all prison staff; the re-assessment of practices relating to the delivery of methadone, and a comprehensive review of harm reduction strategy in prisons, that should consider the role of prisoners’ families to increase support for prisoner participation; the re-assessment of prison policies to support the delivery of methadone programmes in prisons.

The author suggests that ongoing international support and national drug policies are vital to the continuation and sustainability of methadone programmes in prisons.

This study contributes to the overall evidence base for OAT programmes in middle-income prison contexts.

This paper aims to examine the experience of women entrepreneurs and the challenges and issues they face in reconciling the work activities of the family sphere with those of the entrepreneurial sphere.

This study is based on a materialist feminist perspective and a theory of living work that take into account the visible and invisible dimensions of the real work performed by women entrepreneurs. The methodology is based on a qualitative research design involving individual and group interviews conducted with 70 women entrepreneurs.

The results show the various individual and collective strategies deployed by women entrepreneurs to reconcile the work activities of the family and entrepreneurial spheres.

One of the major findings emerging from the results of this study relates to the re-appropriation of the world of work and organization of work by women entrepreneurs and its emancipatory potential for the division of labour. Through the authority and autonomy they possessed as business owners, and with their employees’ cooperation, they integrated and internalized tasks related to the work activities of the family sphere into the organization of work itself. Thus, not only new forms of work organization and cooperation at work but also new ways of conceiving of entrepreneurship as serving women’s life choices and emancipation could be seen to be emerging.

This chapter focuses on the early history of feminist explorations in criminology in the UK in particular, but with reference to developments elsewhere. The chapter discusses the achievements of early feminist perspectives in criminology and assesses their impact in terms of ‘transforming and transgressing’ the criminological enterprise. In particular, the author focuses on the case for transformations in traditional research methodologies and looks at the different ways in which feminist writers in criminology grappled with the question of how to produce good quality knowledge. The chapter takes a chronological approach, identifying developments pre-1960s in a phase which might be described as an ‘awakening’ and then describing initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. The discovery that ‘woman’ was a conceptual term which could be incorporated into the criminological framework really took off in the 1970s with the publication of Carol Smart’s pioneering work. Notwithstanding faster developments in other disciplines, slowly, mainstream criminology took stock of feminism’s early claims.

Commentators have highlighted the growing political and research interest in user involvement, with particular reference to social policy (Kemshall & Littlechild, 2000). Beresford (2002) has noted the tendency to present it as a ‘good thing’ pointing out, however, that it has both liberatory but also regressive potential. At the same time, Barnes (2001) has illuminated the limitations of ‘mainstream’ theory and practice in user participation in their failure to accommodate emotional experience, storytelling and diverse debates, as well as to develop more creative ways of working.This paper describes elements of the above as part of a critical reflection on the experiences of working with older women from a range of communities in research. The focus is on the practicalities of setting up and carrying out the research, though implications for the process of policy‐making are also briefly highlighted.