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The purpose of this paper is to address the barriers that Dutch housing associations encounter in implementing new procurement strategies.

Several aspects of purchasing, portfolio management, project delivery and supply management are discussed in relation to the changing role of housing associations as semi-public commissioning bodies in the Dutch construction industry, based on data derived from workshops with six Dutch housing associations.

Housing associations are adapting their procurement strategy towards a more integrative and performance-based approach to supply management. Due to the complexity of implementing this process, housing associations struggle especially with moving beyond pilot projects, increasing the maturity levels throughout the organisation and aligning new policies with daily practices at a tactical and an operational level.

Increased knowledge of change processes and seeing the potential of maturity models will be valuable for practitioners who are dealing with changes on the work floor.

Client organisations are considered one of the key drivers of change in the construction industry. Insights into these particular organisational change processes contribute to the potential of industry reform.

Most studies on collaboration and integration in the supply chain focus on the inter-organisational level or on the supply side, rather than the internal organisation of the client.

It should, we hope, by now be clear that neuroscience not simply warrants but perhaps demands attention from sociologists. However, to-date, debate around the ‘new brain sciences’ has been limited within sociology; it has mostly been ethicists who have opened up discussions on the normative and epistemological issues neuroscience raises. Of course, this is not to say that sociologists and other social scientists have been blind to the developments in the brain sciences; a variety of significant and nuanced analyses have begun to be advanced. There can be no doubt that a rich vein of creative and insightful scholarship in what might be called the social studies of the neurosciences is already in existence, and will surely widen. Yet, we can also see that much work remains to be done. It is our intention that this book will play an important role in the elaboration of scholarship in the field. To this end, we have sought and included a range of perspectives from (medical) sociologists and anthropologists, which vividly illustrate the varied social life of the neurosciences, and brightly illuminates the diverse conceptualisations, approaches and standpoints available to sociological analysts.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize some of the key findings and approaches used in documenting the authors’ longitudinal studies of mathematical learning and understanding. In particular, it focuses on “folding back,” a theoretical construct originally developed by Susan Pirie and Tom Kieren, to show how, over the last two decades, the authors have taken up, built-upon, and elaborated this construct in relation to Pirie and Kieren’s wider theorizing and in relation to classroom practice.

The paper documents the various methodologies and methods the authors have used to elaborate theory and contribute to extending teaching practice in a number of related research studies.

This paper describes the role of folding back in the growth of students’ mathematical understanding, initially at the level of the individual, more recently at that of the collective – and currently with a specific consideration of the role of the teacher. It notes that the longitudinal nature of the work has allowed it to respond to shifting perspectives in the field of mathematics education and to become a more nuanced and powerful analytic and teaching tool.

The paper discusses the significance of a longitudinal, shared program of research, deeply rooted in mathematics classrooms, that builds theory systematically and over an extended period of time.