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A recent entry into the police selection tools market has been the behavioral‐personnel assessment device (B‐PAD). Applicants view videotaped scenarios and are instructed to respond as if they were the officer handling the situation. Participant responses are preserved on tape for subsequent review by panels of three raters. Given the instrument’s limited reliability checks to date and literature that questions the reliability of the oral board process, the present study examines whether B‐PAD ratings are influenced by the demographic backgrounds of raters and ratees. The data were based on 113 subjects exposed to eight scenarios graded by panels of three judges. The results indicate that B‐PAD scores are independent of rater race and sex, as well as ratee race and sex. While the B‐PAD appears to be reliable and free from bias, the study cautions that a need for an independent validity check still remains.

The use of thematic analysis (TA) as a qualitative analytical technique is gaining traction in higher education research. This is a positive development, since TA has a lot to offer in terms of enhancing scholars' analytical prowess. However, its usage in higher education as a field of study appears at times to be inaccurate. In other cases, methodological steps remain unclear, if not completely obscured, making it difficult for a reader to understand how this method should be conducted and/or how specific results/findings have been achieved. Also, researchers have widely embraced a variation of TA that emerged in the last decade and a half, neglecting the original, rigorous method put forward by Boyatzis in the late 1990s. This contribution takes a critical look at the current use of TA in higher education research. It highlights current issues in its application, presents and constructively criticizes the most employed approach to TA in higher education, and proposes greater consideration for TA's original specification and procedural guidelines.

Consideration of the fast‐growing number of food hygiene prosecutions up and down the country, almost all of them of a most serious nature, shows that it is the food preparing room, the kitchen, which is indeed the hub of the matter. Most of the charges result from its condition and the practices carried on within its walls, all‐too‐often enclosing a cramped space, ill‐equipped and difficult to keep clean. Its state in many prosecutions clearly contrasts badly with the soft lights and alluring elegance of the dining rooms in hotels and catering establishments. Yet, who would say that the kitchen is not the most important room in the home, in the hotel and every food‐preparing place? It has been so from time immemorial. House design has suffered severely with the need to cut building costs and the kitchen has suffered most; in small houses, it seems little more than a cupboard, a box‐room, an alcove. Is it surprising, then, that age‐old kitchen arts have degenerated? In the farmhouse, the country homes of the affluent, the “downstairs” of the town house, the kitchen was among the largest rooms in the house, as befitted all the activity that went on there. In the USA, the modern, comfortable home even of relatively humble folk the kitchen is phenomenally large; room for everything and everyone.

The chapter examines the current macro-governance of agri-food in a contemporary sense, taking changes in the UK and more broadly Europe. It first outlines a recent ongoing period of what is called ‘Disruptive Governance’. This emerged in the UK, the USA and indeed Brazil after the prolonged fiscal and financial crisis which brought about economic austerity in these countries over the past two decades. This relatively new disruptive phase, has now become more engrained into wider political and institutional structures and cultures, and indeed re-enforced earlier neo-liberal rounds of political articulation. Whilst there are far wider in effects than with agri-food systems, it is having a profound effect upon the stability and security of current food and farming systems. The chapter then explores the unfolding implications for agri-food in terms of policy changes, further market concentration and further financialisation. At a regional scale, we look at how these macro governance and regulatory forces are impacting in contrasting regional contexts: the UK, Wales and rural North West England (Cheshire and Shropshire). Finally, in conclusion, we ask to what extent these conditions are indeed tempered by longer-running and alternative radical shifts in agro-food systems, and the degree to which these can become mainstreamed. What do these trends suggest for sustainable food transitions and the further application and appropriateness of regime theory and governance?

OUR new features of record and reminiscence appear to have been appreciated by our readers; and, as this number shows, we continue with increased pages and are endeavouring to extend our scope to meet every kind of library interest. There is an atmosphere, of change and, as some think, of crisis, in library matters, especially in those of the public library. The winter to which our minds turn in mid‐September is likely to be interesting and may bring decisions of various kinds. We hope to reflect them, and, as is our invariable custom, invite readers to use us to express their views as well as their experiences.

This chapter explores distributed leadership in volunteer multistakeholder groups tackling complex problems, focusing on community organizing practices to bridge the gap between health and health care in Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia faces increasing chronic disease, high rates of uninsured, unequal access to healthcare services, and rising costs. Regional leaders periodically tackled these problems together but faced challenges common to multistakeholder groups. In 2010, leaders from Columbia partnered with the authors in a learning enterprise to find new, more sustainable ways to address these challenges. Together we adapted a community organizing approach to develop distributed leadership skills necessary to overcome the challenges of volunteer multistakeholder groups and transform the health system in a local area. In the first year, teams provided health screenings to over 1,000 residents; over 3,000 residents exercised leadership to improve community health; over 5,000 residents pledged to improve their health. Clinic hours were extended; new health coaches focused on primary care and wellness programs. Providers and payers committed to reinvesting a share of savings in the community, which has a voice in their use. We show that developing distributed leadership via community organizing offers an approach to solving seemingly intractable community problems.

SEPTEMBER, by a traditional impulse, has always represented to some minds the beginning of the most active period in the library year. This year the month that sees the close of the holiday season, the shortening day and lengthening evening, holds fairer promises and greater difficulties than any in the past six years or perhaps in the past twenty‐five. It sees large programmes in prospect but many fences to be surmounted and, if the physicists are right, the beginning of a new era. It is doubtful if, in so short a space of time as that which has elapsed since we last wrote, so many important events have occurred. The entirely new political alignment may have its effects on our post‐war policy. We hope the library will never again be the protege of a political party because that means that it becomes thereby the target of the opposition—as was the case when in London a change of party in local government brought about the wreck for a generation of at least one library service which had the misfortune to have been initiated by the other party. We have however, no immediate apprehensions about public libraries in present circumstances.

A highly significant action taken by the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, reported elsewhere in this issue, could well result in important advances in surveillance and probably legislative control over enforcement of certain aspects of EEC legislation in the Member‐states. The Minister has sent an urgent request to the Commission in Brussels to dispatch inspectors to each country, including the United Kingdom, to examine and report on the standards of inspection and hygiene with detailed information on how the EEC Directive on Poultry Meat is being implemented. Information of the method of financing the cost of poultrymeat inspection in each country has ben requested. The comprehensive survey is seen as a common approach in this one field. The Minister requested that the results of the inspectors' reports should be available to him and other Member‐states.

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be sucked into the film. Trapped in the gruesome narrative, they have to survive the deranged killer that haunts the premises of the campsite by applying their knowledge of the rules and cliches of the slasher genre. The film is of interest not only because it mixes horror and comedy and exaggerates the horror genre’s conventions – as Scream and other neo-slashers already did. By employing the device of the screen rupture, the film constructs a complex network of self-reflexive moments and intertextual references. The metalinguistic play involves in particular the notoriously sexophobic and gender-led dynamics of the 1980s slashers – those more emancipated girls who have sex are killed; the most prudish girl is the one that eventually manages to defeat the monster, the ‘Final Girl’. In this sense, the film is almost like a video essay that reprises and illustrates one of the most seminal study of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The chapter presents the defining elements of the slasher subgenre as theorized by Clover and then focusses on the analysis of the metalinguistic elements of The Final Girls vis-à-vis Clover’s classic text.

WHETHER the political pendulum is to swing in the direction of the Right or not in the coming year we do not know. Local electors are not the only key to national ones whatever politicians may argue. That there will be a move towards that direction is probable as our people tire of the monotonies of any government. Any change will not affect libraries greatly at present as the world problems are too pressing to allow any practical discussion of domestic ones. Our only fear is that “economy” may become a cry, which means, of course, the lopping of things which are educational, cultural and otherwise not money‐making and it is only too probable that public libraries and indeed other libraries might suffer from the modern equivalent of the Geddes axe which some are hopefully expecting. On the other hand the strength of the organizations which control wages from below is such that the disastrous “cuts” of the first Geddes experiment are not likely to be repeated. And on wages the whole of our financial tructure rests. Moreover libraries have now assumed the right to exist in adequate condition and to displace them may not be so easy as it was thirty years ago; but, nevertheless on vigilance our safety still depends. The conditions are not likely at present to be propitious to any real advance. The much‐desired new Library Bill is being drafted—and should be—but its hearing does not seem imminent; the chances of building new libraries are bleak, and even repairs are to some librarians a nightmare. Confronting all these conditions is the greatly increased use of libraries which is reflected in every kind of public, university, national and commercial library. This strengthens faith in the future in spite of the immediate prospect.