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The purpose of this paper is to provide a more holistic approach to analysing the impact of all the behaviour of a conflict's participants its overall dynamics, using the example of the Northern Irish troubles.

A novel multivariate time series approach developed by Professor Paul Smoker is presented which can map the dynamics of this conflict and its causal inferences as a series or “systemograms”.

The case example reveals high levels of autocorrelation in the variety of techniques used by the state security authorities to suppress terrorism, indicating their strong role in maintaining this conflict. When more than one party exhibits such behaviour, the conflict “locks in”.

The work remains preliminary and historical. Data was collected on a month‐by‐month basis which suggests associated rather than direct causal influence. It would be useful to further explore these findings using data from similar conflicts.

Suggests that some counter‐terrorism approaches may be dysfunctional especially those adopting sub‐lethal weapons. Provides some insight into behavioural changes required to prevent conflict destabilisation.

Provides a novel conflict research methodology which allows the strong structural dynamics of the conflict to be seen – much the way that elapsed time photography enables hidden processes to be revealed. The raw statistics are presented here.

There is increasing awareness of the needs of people with learning disabilities from different ethnic communities. This paper focuses on the impact of ethnicity on the presentation of mental health problems. The main aim of the paper is to inform those planning and delivering mental health services for people with learning disabilities of the current evidence, in order to enable their practice to improve health outcomes for people from minority ethnic communities.

The use of violence risk assessment measures within intellectual disabilities (ID) services is now the norm and a growing target for research. The purpose of this paper is to examine the clinical utility of the historical and clinical factors of the HCR-20 in predicting violence.

The study took place within a national low secure service for adults with ID examining all completed admissions over a six-year period, (N=22). Clinical records covering the first three months of admission were examined along with historical reports and incident data recorded at three, six, nine and 12 months admission using the Modified Overt Aggression Scale (MOAS).

Significant positive relationship between Historical score and total number of incidents was established. Patients with challenging behaviour less likely to have a previous history of violence, and more likely to be older at first violent incident than patients without challenging behaviour. Incidents involving patients with autism were less severe and those with no additional psychiatric diagnosis were significantly more likely to have substance misuse problems than those with a diagnosis.

The study found the Historical section was predictive of violent incidents and whilst the study is too small to draw any firm conclusions, the significant positive relationship between the Historical Score and number of incidents for those without additional diagnosis needs to be investigated further as well as the potential positive clinical impact of using the HCR-20 in routine clinical practice.

In two previous articles, this author drew attention to the importance of the linguistic resources of legitimising principles, and the uses of ideology and rhetoric in bargaining and negotiation. It was argued that if we are fully to understand the processes of power in organisations generally, and in industrial relations in particular, we need to study in more detail the nature and uses of ideology, legitimising principles and rhetoric, and the ways in which these are used continually to reinforce and reproduce structures of power and domination. Illustrative material from an engineering company, Bettavalve Placid, was used to demonstrate the nature of some of these processes.

Considers the importance of knowledge management for competitive advantage and the contribution which expert systems may make to the process. Explains the structure and role of expert systems, and outlines the advantages they may offer. Explores different methods of introducing them into an organization and subsequently developing their potential, comparing the traditional life‐cycle approach with that of evolutionary methods including prototyping. Concludes with a description of the early stages of introducing an expert system into a large engineering company, based on an action research approach.

Power forms part of the everyday common‐sense language and conceptual framework used by experts and laymen alike to describe industrial relations processes and phenomena. Yet, despite the obvious centrality and importance of power to the study of industrial relations, it may be argued that the concept represents a major lacuna in the theoretical development of the discipline. Thus, there is relatively little literature in industrial relations which focuses directly on the concept. From a study of this literature, and the much more voluminous and extensive work on power in other disciplines (notably sociology, economics and political science), one can discern two almost exclusive central foci. Firstly, there is one school of thought which conceptualises power as an outcome or the result of some other process. From this perspective, the power of social actors can only be ascertained by an analysis of their effects on outcomes or observable events. The second school sees power as a material resource which can be possessed, stored and deployed to achieve the goals of the actor. Whilst both these approaches throw valuable light on some aspects of power, it may be suggested that the predominance of these constrained perspectives has resulted in the relative neglect of other important aspects of power.

Argues that libraries need to keep pace with social changes and specifically must provide better services for the browsing majority. Describes whichbook.net, a ground‐breaking Web site developed for the People’s Network with support from the New Opportunities Fund. Demonstrates how user‐centred functionality and design lead to success on the Web in terms of recognition and high levels of use among communities of Web‐users.