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Emergency shutdown (ESD) systems play a critical role in ensuring safety and availability of oil and gas production. The systems are operated in on-demand mode, and the detection and prediction of their failures is deemed challenging. The purpose of this paper is to develop a logical data-driven approach to enhance the understanding and detectability of ESD system failures.

The study was conducted in close collaboration with the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The study and analyses were supported by industrial data, failure data generated in a test facility in Norway and domain experts.

The paper demonstrated that there is a considerable potential to improve the decision process and to reduce the workload related to ESD systems by means of a logical data-driven approach. The results showed that the failure analysis process can be executed with more clarity and efficiency. Common cause failures could also be identified based on the suggested approach. The study further underlined the requirements regarding relevant data, new competence and technical supports in order to improve the current practice.

The paper leveraged the value of real-time data in identifying failures through mapping of the interrelationships between data, failure mechanisms and decisions. The failure analysis process was re-designed, and the understanding and decision making related to the system was improved as a result. The process developed for ESDs can further be adapted as a common practice for other low-demand systems.

This chapter focuses on the impact of generational differences between younger (Millennial) and older generations of frontline miners on team performance as one of the factors that compelled the mining teams to make a plan (planisa) at the rock-face down the mine. In this context, making a plan is a work strategy the mining teams adopted to offset the adverse impact of intergenerational conflict on their team performance and on their prospects of earning the production bonus. The chapter examines intergenerational conflict within the mining teams as a work and organisational phenomenon rather than simply from a birth cohort perspective. It locates the clash of older and younger generations of miners and their generational identities in the historical, national and social contexts shaping the employment relationship, managerial strategies, work practices and production culture of the apartheid and post-apartheid deep-level mining. This shows the impact that the society has in shaping the differences across generations. The chapter highlights work group dynamics that generated conflict between the older and younger generations of frontline mineworkers. The chapter argues that at the heart of the intergenerational conflict was their orientation towards work and management decisions.

This chapter examines the miners’ occupational culture of planisa at the level of supervisor–worker relations. The chapter presents a tale of two frontline production supervisors or shift-bosses as they were called on the mine – Jimmy and Lee. In this context, the ability of the production supervisor to make a plan in ways that enhance the social organisation of the production process and people management is crucial to the development of a reciprocal working relationship. The chapter argues that planisa also entails a valuable social organisational skill through which frontline supervisors could effectively use to manage work group dynamics and team performance associated with teamworking, intra-team conflict, effort-bargain and resistance.

The chapter reveals that by ‘getting on and getting by’ with his charges – going an extra mile to making plan for his mining teams wherever possible – Jimmy created a working environment that enabled his subordinates to achieve their production targets and increase their capacity to earn the much-desired productivity and safety bonuses. The case of Jimmy and his charges highlights the role of the frontline supervisor as a vital agent of workplace change that elicits worker cooperation and support for new work processes, not for the sake of pleasing management but in ways that benefit and make sense to them – going above and beyond organisational requirements to achieve the organisational performance goals at the point of production. On the contrary, the case of Lee, another frontline supervisor, demonstrates the opposite and highlights the harmfulness of poor supervisor–worker relations to the achievement of organisational, employee and team performance goals.

Further evidence was given on April 3 before the Select Committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into questions relating to the butter trade.

For migrant urban ethnographers who study their city of settlement, ethnography may have a double meaning, serving not only as an approach to understanding a city academically but also a pathway to connecting with a community more broadly and personally, a type of personal place making. This chapter uses the experiences of the author – an American working and living in Shanghai and Tokyo for over 20 years – to show how his evolving practice of the ethnography of the city relates to a slow process of coming to live purposefully in it. The chapter also details a migrant’s perspective on the ethnography of sexuality, nightlife and foodways in urban Asia. The insider-outsider relationship that the migrant ethnographer brings to the city may be viewed as both burden and asset. As transnational migrants, migrant ethnographers can perform as institutional mediaries who connect researchers across borders and as educational facilitators who help migrant students discover means of associating with an unfamiliar environment. In short, ethnography may be a way of living as well as learning.

LIBRARIES have come impressively into the public picture in the past year or two, and seldom with more effect than when Their Majesties the King and Queen opened the new Central Reference Library at Manchester on July 17th. In a time, which is nearly the end of a great depression, that the city which probably felt the depression more than any in the Kingdom should have proceeded with the building of a vast store‐house of learning is a fact of great social significance and a happy augury for libraries as a whole. His Majesty the King has been most felicitous in providing what we may call “slogans” for libraries. It will be remembered that in connection with the opening of the National Central Library, he suggested that it was a “University which all may join and which none need ever leave” —words which should be written in imperishable letters upon that library and be printed upon its stationery for ever. As Mr. J. D. Stewart said at the annual meeting of the National Central Library, it was a slogan which every public library would like to appropriate. At Manchester, His Majesty gave us another. He said: “To our urban population open libraries are as essential to health of mind, as open spaces to health of body.” This will be at the disposal of all of us for use. It is a wonderful thing that Manchester in these times has been able to provide a building costing £450,000 embodying all that is modern and all that is attractive in the design of libraries. The architect, Mr. Vincent Harris, and the successive librarians, Mr. Jast and Mr. Nowell, are to be congratulated upon the crown of their work.

The Library Campaign is still a force to be reckoned with. That was the message that came out of The Campaign's crisis meeting held in Birmingham on 23 September when over 50 supporters assembled to offer much needed help and expertise.

The idea of leader as host came to me very suddenly on 16 February 2003, during a seminar by Matthias Varga von Kibéd and Insa Sparrer. It seems to me that the metaphor of leader as host offers a view on leadership that is at once rooted in millennia of practice and at the same time is something new and timely.Such metaphors are very important in my view ‐ they offer a rich and broad set of ideas about leadership in a way that allows interpretation into many different real‐life situations. Rather than a prescription, such metaphors offer us a way to engage with often difficult situations and quickly alter our thinking to come from another place. Building on the existing ideas of heroic and servant leadership, I hope you will find inspiration of a very practical kind in the metaphor and practice of the host.