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Recent rapid changes in the LIS profession have forced realignment of organisational structures. Professional staff are no longer guaranteed opportunities for advancement, and the rate at which career plateaux are attained within LIS is accelerating. LIS professionals must, therefore, be proactive in seeking out continuing professional development. The Management of Library and Information Services programme offered via distance learning at the University of Wales Aberystwyth is the solution for many professionals to acquire both the skills and the academic credentials necessary to compete in the changing LIS marketplace.

Purpose – The goal of my study is to investigate women's tattooing in a phenomenological way, and to go in-depth into a “handful” of cases with the purpose of discussing tattooed women's daily lives and experiences. The main purpose of this study is to contribute to the scholarly literature on the sociology of the body, and particularly to women and tattoos.

Methodology/approach – Open-ended conversational interviews and feminist phenomenological methods together shed light on the possible connection between gendered attitudes about women's bodies and tattoos and tattooed women's personal feelings of beauty and femininity.

Findings – In this particular chapter, I describe the connections between women's tattoos: (1) personal or individual beauty and (2) femininity. Findings show that although women tend to think that tattooing goes against current societal beauty norms and ideas of femininity, many women feel that their tattoos make them more beautiful.

Originality/value of chapter – This study offers important insights into the social experiences of extensively tattooed women and, therefore, contributes to a more sociological and gender-specific glimpse of women's lives and tattooing. My discussion of and findings on tattooed women's lived experiences, however partial, should promote wider conceptualizations of the tattooing phenomenon, allow a wealth of tattoo meanings and experiences to come into the spotlight, and point to new ways to study tattoos and gendered bodies in the future.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how routine violence seeps into the interstices of social life. Routine violence is part of a continuum of violence that extends from intimate violence to large-scale wars. It is gendered/racialized/classed and it is often invisible because it is normalized in everyday life.

Using cases from India we illustrate facets of routine violence and then use the frame to discuss some examples from the United States.

We discuss the social implications of routine violence including the significant harm on large sections of people in today’s world.

We meld theoretical discussions about violence associated with states with scholarship on violence against women; we use Indian activists’ concepts of routine violence and examine routine violence in the United States.

Purpose – The broader aim of this research is twofold. First, we aim to better understand how the business computer was conceptualized and used within U.S. industry. Second, this research investigates the role of social factors such as relational structure, institutional entrepreneurs, and position in the formation of conceptualizations of new technologies.

Design/methodological/approach – This paper is theoretically motivated in the sense that it responds to the lack of attention to the failure of institutional entrepreneurs to change belief systems. Through detailed archival, network, and descriptive statistical analysis, the paper shows how the failed institutional entrepreneur fits conventional explanations for success. The paper then analyzes two matched cases, comparing the insurance industry's rejection of the institutional entrepreneur with manufacturing's acceptance, in order to identify what is missing in current explanations of institutional entrepreneurs.

Findings – Our analysis reveals that the role of the audience structure in interpreting the institutional entrepreneur's message influences the change outcome. In our case, the institutional entrepreneur's view of the computer as a brain that supported decision-oriented applications did not fit with views of the insurance groups who had centralized authority over interpreting the computer. Because manufacturing had less centralized control in its discourse around the computer, there were fewer constraints on assimilation, allowing the entrepreneur's views to resonate with some of the occupational groups.

Research limitations/implications – This paper develops a theoretical approach to institutional entrepreneurship that situates the entrepreneurial efforts of individual actors within a system characterized by the structure of its audience and subject to distinct historical macro-structural processes that present significant obstacles to the realization of their entrepreneurial projects.

One of the main things taught in business schools is managerial decision‐making. Often as a formal course of study, and always as an implication, students are taught that one of the main, if not major, responsibilities of a manager is to “guide the activities of the business”. Therefore, they are trained in reading the significance of events in the economic environment, and taught the intricacies of marketing, finance, production, and organising the work force. Much of this teaching presumes that the manager is a rational, cogent and calculating individual. He is taught that rules and theories govern business operations, and above all he is taught that he should use something called “scientific decision‐making”.