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The rising demographics of people living with dementia amount to an estimated 821,8841 (Luengo‐Fernandez et al, 2010) The cost of providing care and treatment to these people is marked; the cost of long‐term care alone amounts to an estimated £9 billion per year in social care and health care costs are estimated to be about £1.2 billion ‐ of this, hospital inpatient admissions amount to 44% of the total (Luengo‐Fernandez et al, 2010, p7) These figures are expected to rise over the next 20 years and will, over this unfolding timeframe, pose significant challenges to those tasked with commissioning health and social care services within the public and private sectors. The nature of those challenges will be explored and discussed further in this short article.

SOCIAL responsibility is a phrase widely employed today. The mass media harps on it as much as it was prone to do about worker participation. Rarely, however, does anyone analyse it and explain in simple terms what it really means, whether it is desirable and how it can be achieved.

On 16th June Aslib held an Evening Meeting, attended by an audience of over 300 persons, at the Jarvis Hall of the Royal Institute of British Architects (W1). Mr Leslie Wilson, Director of Aslib, took the chair. At this meeting, Dr H.T. Hookway, Director of the new Office for Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Education and Science (part successor to the DSIR), defined the work and pattern of the Office. The substance of Dr Hookway's lecture appeared in Nature on Saturday 17th July 1965, pp. 234–6. The following is therefore a report of the discussion only, which took place after the lecture.

Computer‐based information services covering major disciplines of science have been developed recently from certain traditional abstracting and indexing services. A wide range of secondary information services is provided to satisfy the various information requirements generated by the present complexity of scientific and technological work. This development has caused radical changes in the administration structure, pricing policies and funding of the organizations providing information services.

Purpose – This chapter provides an overview of the policy implications of neuroscience and argues that research initiatives, individual use, and aggregate social consequences of unfolding knowledge about the brain and the accompanying applications require particularly close scrutiny because of the centrality of the brain to human behavior and thoughts.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter summarizes the technological context of interventions in the brain and discusses their policy implications. It then examines research findings, principally from neuroimaging studies, that relate to decision making and emotions and looks at their potential impact on frameworks of political decision making.

Findings – Research on brain structure and functioning raises difficult policy issues and necessitates a reevaluation of our assumptions concerning the policy process, itself.

Practical implications – Given the inevitability of expanded strategies for exploration and therapy of the brain and the concerns they raise, it is important that these issues surrounding their application be clarified and debated before such techniques fall into routine use.

Originality/value – The chapter provides original analysis of the policy ramifications of interventions in the brain and neuroscience in general and makes some observations about the brain and society.

“Corporate planning” is the term which, perhaps more than any other, epitomises the adoption of business management techniques by the public sector. In Britain, with massive local government reorganisation in 1974, many librarians were forced to come to terms with such techniques whether they liked it or not. Of course, in its purest sense corporate planning applies to the combined operation of an entire organisation be it local authority, university, government department or industrial firm. However, in this paper I do not intend discussing “the grand design” whereby the library is merely a component part of a greater body. Rather, it is my intention to view the library as the corporate body. It is a perfectly possible and very useful exercise to apply the principles of corporate planning, and the management techniques involved, to the running of a library or group of libraries. Indeed, many librarians have already done this either independently or as their part in the corporate plan of their parent organisation.

The purpose of the research was to develop a tool for measuring antecedents of customer aggressive behavior (CAB) in healthcare service settings, by identifying its roots in organizational and interpersonal dynamics.

Four studies were conducted. In Studies 1 and 2, antecedents of CAB were identified through analysis of internet reader comments and a questionnaire was distributed to students. In Study 3, scenarios were used to validate the findings of the previous studies. Finally, in Study 4, a scale was developed and validated for measuring organization- and person-related triggers of CAB using samples of 477 employees and 579 customers.

The concept of CAB was conceptualized and validated. In total, 18 items were identified across five dimensions: personal characteristics, uncomfortable environment, aggressive role models, reinforcement of aggressive behavior and aversive treatment. The scale demonstrated good psychometric results.

The research relies mainly on customer perspective. Employees and additional stakeholders should be included to achieve more accurate information that could contribute to a better understanding of CAB and its roots.

Exploring social and organizational antecedents that trigger CAB could help healthcare managers evaluate and proactively manage CAB and its implications within their organization.

This measurement scale is the first comprehensive tool, based on Bandura’s social learning theory (1973), that may identify and measure antecedents of CAB, and could be used to reduce CAB in healthcare service settings.