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A survey of individuals and organizations was undertaken to assess how the changing world of work ‐ in terms of delayering, outsourcing, IT, etc., is affecting the preparedness of people to deal with these changes. Responses were received from 184 individuals and 300 organizations. Areas covered included personal career management and organizational support for career management and development. The surprising finding was that individuals seemed more complacent and less prepared to meet these changes than organizations ‐ the latter made no great claims to be able to provide appropriate support in the future.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/09533239510093233. When citing the article, please cite: Susan Bloch, (1995), “Coaching tomorrowʼs top managers”, Executive Development, Vol. 8 Iss: 5, pp. 20 - 22.

Reviews mentoring and its use for day‐to‐day issues in organizations. Goes on to show the basis of mentoring programmes and the role to be played in work‐related issues. Concludes that successful mentoring can only be completed by mentors trained and supervised in counselling skills, thus bringing about individual performance and job satisfaction.

Presents the findings of a recent survey on developing future top managers. Coaching and mentoring are used to encourage managers to take ownership of their own career development but results showed only one‐third of companies surveyed carry this out. Reveals that there has been a hardening of attitudes towards high‐flyers.

Dysphagia experienced by adults with mental health conditions and/or intellectual disabilities (IDs) has been well-reported. However, accessible and inclusive assessment measures to identify and monitor for deterioration in dysphagia are very limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of video to enhance inclusion in dysphagia assessment and intervention for an inpatient setting.

This service evaluation involved adults with IDs and mental illness living in in-patient accommodation and their multidisciplinary team. Participants were invited to film and then reflect on videos and their comments were transcribed for qualitative analysis.

In total, 42 adults gave consent to film, review and discuss mealtime video-clips. Staff feedback was invited. Thematic analysis was conducted for service-user and staff comments. A global theme of “involvement” was identified from the data analysis, with sub-themes of “enhancing participation, insight and incentive”. An additional global theme “clinical benefits” resulted from staff comments. This included sub-themes of breadth of assessment, shared working and outcome measures.

Limitations included refusal of video by people with heightened anxiety but these were a minority. Most people showed enthusiasm and enhanced engagement. Practical issues were resolved regarding governance.

Video offers a dynamic record of muscle tone, coordination, mealtime experience and individual context benefiting both service-user and staff practice. It stimulates insightful discussion of outcomes and supports the inclusion of service-user perspectives. Further research is indicated to develop a greater understanding of dysphagia in this population. Inclusion of service-users in planning and managing safer mealtimes may be enhanced through the sensitive use of video.

This evaluation suggests opportunities for improving inclusive approaches for service-users using video to promote insight.

Further research is indicated to explore the nature of dysphagia in people with mental health conditions using video as a dynamic and unique resource.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.

The association between income distribution and measures of health has been well established such that societies with smaller income differences between rich and poor people have increased longevity (Wilkinson, 1996). While more egalitarian societies tend to have better health, in most developed societies people lower down the social scale have death rates two to four times higher than those nearer the top. Inequities in income distribution and the consequent disparities in health status are particularly problematic for many women, including single mothers, older women, and women of colour. The feminization of poverty is the rapidly increasing proportion of women in the adult poverty population (Doyal, 1995; Fraser, 1987).

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.¹ The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

This study aims to broaches several endemic challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour needed to raise writing quality can seem daunting. Addressing those issues, the authors offer a novel way of working with writing feedback across cultures.

The case study research team of two candidates and one supervisor stumbled onto an effective way of working across cultural and institutional difference. What began as advisory feedback on doctoral writing became an effective collaborative analysis of prose meaning-making. The authors reflected separately and collectively on how this happened, analysed reflections and this narrative inquiry approach led to theories of use to writing feedback practice.

The authors cross between theory and praxis, showing that advisors and supervisors can create Bhabha’s post-colonial third space (a promising social space that sits between cultures, beyond hierarchies, where new ways of thinking can be collaboratively generated) as a working environment for international doctoral writing feedback. Within this zone, Brechtian alienation, a theory from theatre practice, is applied to prompt emotional detachment that enables focus on writing clearly in academic English.

Arguably the writing feedback session the authors described remains bound by the generic expectations of a western education system. The study is exegetical, humanities reading of practice, rather than a social science gathering of empirical data. Yet the humanities approach suits the point that a change of language, attitude and theory can give positive leverage with doctoral writing feedback.

The authors provide a novel practical method of supporting international doctoral candidates’ writing with feedback across cultures. It entails attracting the writers’ interest in theory and persuading them, via theory, to look objectively and freshly at their own writing. Also backed by theory, a theoretical cross-cultural space allows for discussion about differences and similarities. Detachment from proprietorial emotions and cross-cultural openness enables productive work amongst the mechanics of clear academic English text.

Underpinned by sociocultural and metacognitive approaches to learning, reflection from student and supervisor perspectives (the data), and oriented by theory, the authors propose another strategy for supporting doctoral writing across cultures. The authors demonstrate a third space approach for writing feedback across cultures, showing how to operationalise theory.