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Prolonged workplace sitting can harm employee health. Sit-stand desks are a potential workplace health initiative that might reduce and break up the time office-based employees spend sitting in the workplace. However, little is known about the feasibility and acceptability of providing sit-stand desks. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The present study sought stakeholder employee views surrounding sit-stand desk implementation within two UK-based non-profit organisations with open-plan offices. This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 26 stakeholder employees and 65 days of participant observations. Data were analysed using thematic analysis, and organisational cultural theory framed the study.

Stakeholders employees’ positioning of sit-stand desks as a workplace health initiative reflected their perceptions of the relationship between sit-stand desk provision, employee health and organisational effectiveness. Perceptions were shaped by the nature and context of the organisation and by occupation-specific processes. Relatively fixed (e.g. organisational structure) and modifiable (e.g. selecting products compatible with the environment) factors were found to restrict and facilitate the perceived feasibility of implementing sit-stand desks.

The findings offer several recommendations for workplaces to improve stakeholder employee attitudes towards sit-stand desk provision and to increase the ease and efficiency of implementation.

Whilst extant literature has tended to examine hypothetical views related to sit-stand desk provision, this study consulted relevant stakeholders following, and regarding, the sit-stand desk implementation process.

International Paint plc, the coatings subsidiary of Courtaulds plc, has acquired La Minerva srl, Italy, and the business of Drogasy Suministros s.a. (DYSSA), Spain.

This review and theoretical analysis paper aims to bring together literatures of place, mobility, refugees and mental health to problematise the ways in which social support is practised on the ground and to rethink its possibilities.

This paper draws on an interdisciplinary understanding of social support that focusses on the social networks and significant and intimate relationships that mitigate negative mental health and well-being outcomes. The authors explore the dialectic relationship between place and mobility in refugee experiences of social support.

The authors argue that, in an Euro-American context, practices of social support have historically been predicated on the idea of people-in-place. The figure of the refugee challenges the notion of a settled person in need of support and suggests that people are both in place and in motion at the same time. Conversely, attending to refugees’ biographies, lived experiences and everyday lives suggests that places and encounters of social support are varied and go beyond institutional spaces.

The authors explore this dialectic of personhood as both in place and in motion and its implications for the theorisation, research and design of systems of social support for refugees.

This paper surfaces the dialectics of place and mobility for supporting refugee mental health from an interdisciplinary perspective.

I am proud to be known as an expert by experience in recovery from mental distress, but I am also a co‐founder and director of a multi‐award winning, peer‐led charity called Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health. In the 1980s, after experiencing my third breakdown, I was an extremely angry person because of the lack of cross‐sector service provision to assist me in becoming whole again. Thankfully I used my rage to develop, along with my co‐founder Dave Wheat, our Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health services to meet the needs of those in mental distress. Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health provides person‐focused, recovery‐rooted services that aim to promote recovery, enabling people to become contributing members of society again. This is the history of Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health, our achievements and the challenges that we have faced in developing the services that we provide today.

To explore the edges of literature, one must look at contemporary literary reviews and journals. The themes and styles of writing in these reviews and journals reveal new ideas and trends in the literary community. These edges are often rough and not polished, they may present more extreme points of view or they may introduce new subjects. The latest issue of Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, exemplifies this. The theme of the Winter 1993–94 issue is “Borderlands,” edited by Russell Banks and Chase Twichell. In his introduction, Banks says: “But as Doris Lessing says ‘Things change at the edges,’ and insofar as I myself want things to change, and I do, for this world as presently constituted is intolerable, then my ongoing affection for work written ‘on the edge’ is political. I am still sufficiently optimistic to believe that if enough decent people see how bad things are on the borders, they will begin to change things there…The stories and narratives (include) white voices, black voices, male and female, with narrators speaking African‐American English, Hispanic‐American English, and Anglo‐American English, talking high church and low, downtown and up‐: these are the voices that daily surround us; and because they come to us, not from some dreamed‐of center where no one in America lives anymore, but from the inescapable borderlands, they speak for us all.” Chase Twichell reflects in her introduction on what she looked for in deciding what literature to select for this issue. “In terms of the task of editing, this means I now look hard at poems that carry the flags of outrage and grief, even if their surfaces are ‘rough.’ In fact, I've come to value highly some kinds of roughness because I believe they carry their cargos more honestly, in fact more precisely, by refusing to try to smooth unsmoothable edges.” These thoughts fascinated me and seemed to express the new directions and new ways of looking at literature. Many of the contemporary literary reviews and journals attempt to do just this.

AFTER the trenchant paper by Mr. A. O. Jennings, read at the Brighton meeting of the Library Association, and the very embarrassing resolution which was carried as a result, one can only approach the subject of the commonplace in fiction with fear and diffidence. It is generally considered a bold and dangerous thing to fly in the face of corporate opinion as expressed in solemn public resolutions, and when the weighty minds of librarianship have declared that novels must only be chosen on account of their literary, educational or moral qualities, one is almost reduced to a state of mental imbecility in trying to fathom the meaning and limits of such an astounding injunction. To begin with, every novel or tale, even if but a shilling Sunday‐school story of the Candle lighted by the Lord type is educational, inasmuch as something, however little, may be learnt from it. If, therefore, the word “educational” is taken to mean teaching, it will be found impossible to exclude any kind of fiction, because even the meanest novel can teach readers something they never knew before. The novels of Emma Jane Worboise and Mrs. Henry Wood would no doubt be banned as unliterary and uneducational by those apostles of the higher culture who would fain compel the British washerwoman to read Meredith instead of Rosa Carey, but to thousands of readers such books are both informing and recreative. A Scots or Irish reader unacquainted with life in English cathedral cities and the general religious life of England would find a mine of suggestive information in the novels of Worboise, Wood, Oliphant and many others. In similar fashion the stories of Annie Swan, the Findlaters, Miss Keddie, Miss Heddle, etc., are educational in every sense for the information they convey to English or American readers about Scots country, college, church and humble life. Yet these useful tales, because lacking in the elusive and mysterious quality of being highly “literary,” would not be allowed in a Public Library managed by a committee which had adopted the Brighton resolution, and felt able to “smell out” a high‐class literary, educational and moral novel on the spot. The “moral” novel is difficult to define, but one may assume it will be one which ends with a marriage or a death rather than with a birth ! There have been so many obstetrical novels published recently, in which doubtful parentage plays a chief part, that sexual morality has come to be recognized as the only kind of “moral” factor to be regarded by the modern fiction censor. Objection does not seem to be directed against novels which describe, and indirectly teach, financial immorality, or which libel public institutions—like municipal libraries, for example. There is nothing immoral, apparently, about spreading untruths about religious organizations or political and social ideals, but a novel which in any way suggests the employment of a midwife before certain ceremonial formalities have been executed at once becomes immoral in the eyes of every self‐elected censor. And it is extraordinary how opinion differs in regard to what constitutes an immoral or improper novel. From my own experience I quote two examples. One reader objected to Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets on the ground that the frequent use of the word “bloody” made it immoral and unfit for circulation. Another reader, of somewhat narrow views, who had not read a great deal, was absolutely horrified that such a painfully indecent book as Adam Bede should be provided out of the public rates for the destruction of the morals of youths and maidens!

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Examines the ninth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Dr Cottle's paper was delivered at a meeting of the Reference, Special and Information Section's Western Group at Salisbury on 20 October 1977 to mark the centenary of the Library Association