Search results

The purpose of this paper is to apply Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to illustrate the individual identity issues that can arise as a result of institutional complexity in organizations. Using Baum’s text to tell the story of four faculty members seeking the city of Oz, which in our story is a university athletic department, reveals how individuals and organizational units deal with the tensions brought about by institutional complexity. In addition to providing an entertaining, perhaps infuriating account of the typical public university, this essay reveals the importance of understanding individual struggles to deal with organizational pluralism.

The authors use the well-established example of the university using Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in allegorical form to illustrate the tensions that emerge from organizational units that deal with contradicting external environments as well as the sensemaking and search processes that can emerge for individuals dealing with the identity issues that can result from such tensions.

Internal tensions can emerge within organizations when there are contradictions among the various pressures such organizations generate. These tensions have implications on individual identity.

Individuals (in this case individuals from academic units) risk having their occupational identities compromised by divergent organizational units as these units attempt to legitimate their existence within the organization. The authors illustrate how individuals deal with such risks by engaging in search processes that seek to construct their identities and develop meaning for their actions.

The purpose of the paper is to provide a profile of Robert Lawrence.

Robert provides a short background to his life and is then interviewed by Jerome.

Robert talks about the slow onset of his condition, his hospital admission and subsequent long journey of recovery.

Case studies are of course only one person’s story. The world of someone experiencing psychosis is so different that we can only really understand it fully through the accounts of sufferers like Robert.

Robert makes a number of points about how services could be improved, such as through quicker and better treatment and a commitment to promote positive mental health.

Robert talks about “benefits you can live off.” He notes that some governments have not fully appreciated the reality of mental suffering and its effects on trying to live a “normal” life.

Robert’s story has seen him embark on a long journey. He has now managed to study for a qualification which will hopefully bring him employment as a counsellor.

The main aim of this paper is to provide a living tribute of lived expert by experience and researcher Andrew Voyce.

Andrew provided the author with a list of names of people he might approach to write a tribute on his behalf.

The accounts describe the influence that Andrew has had both as an educator and as a trusted colleague for the people approached.

In many ways, the voices of people with mental health problems have been marginalised. Few mental health journals, with only some exceptions, encourage lived experience contributions.

The mental health agenda continues to be dominated by professional groups. The remarkable individuals who continually battle with serious mental illness are often lost in official discourses.

Despite the fact that the topic of mental health is now much more in the public domain, research tells us that the most effective anti-stigma strategy is contact with sufferers.

The archivist Dr Anna Sexton co-produced one of the few mental health archives that only featured people with lived experience. Andrew was one of the four people featured in it. This account “showcases” the work of this remarkable man.

Cognition has always been central to the popular way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs imagine a different future. They envision or discover new products or services. They perceive or recognize opportunities. They assess risk, and figure out how to profit from it. They identify possible new combinations of resources. Common to all of these is the individual’s use of their perceptual and reasoning skills, what we call cognition, a term borrowed from the psychologists’ lexicon.

A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block grant programs help states meet rural community development policy objectives? This information should be helpful to local, state, and national government policy makers as they ponder proposals to reorganize dramatically the funding and implementation of community and economic development resources. Perhaps most importantly, this study will also help policy makers understand the complexity of the federal-state-local partnership for rural community development.

A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block grant programs help states meet rural community development policy objectives? This information should be helpful to local, state, and national government policy makers as they ponder proposals to reorganize dramatically the funding and implementation of community and economic development resources. But maybe most importantly, this study will also help policy makers understand the complexity of the federal-state-local partnership for rural community development.

The need to maintain up-to-date technological skills despite an aging workforce makes it imperative that organizations increasingly focus on retraining older employees. This article develops an adult career model based on the acquisition of technological skills and gradual skill obsolescence. The model suggests the importance of retraining and provides practical implications to the development of retraining programs. Suggestions for future research are also offered.

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!