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THIS month will see, we understand, the publication of the results of months of regular work of the Library Association Post War Policy Committee, which we believe has been working with exemplary industry. We hear that the Council has endorsed the scheme and that it will deal with such points as the central control of libraries, the sort of area that can support a library service efficiently, the ideals of an efficient system, the training of librarians and many other matters. These topics could be envisaged as obvious ones for any such report to pronounce upon. We shall deal in some detail with them when the report is released but, even now, we can express our gratification that a programme and a policy have been enunciated well before the end of the war is in sight. This does not mean that the report is in any way sacrosanct; it can have no character of a legal document; it can and will be criticised and, no doubt, amended.

A key objective of the community care movement has been to achieve greater opportunities for people with learning disabilities to integrate and interact within their normal communities. Major barriers remain, however, for those individuals who are disabled and who also exhibit significant challenging behaviour. In addition to the unacceptability of the behaviours themselves, the support strategies used to remediate these challenges have also acted as a barrier to inclusion, because of their social unacceptability. The paper presents a model for supporting people who challenge that addresses these concerns by providing an effective, socially valid intervention approach.

Understandings of administrative practice do not seem to reflect the current status of administrative practice, and when administrative practice is conceptualised as an iceberg it becomes clear that much of this knowledge was derived through the application of the research method structured observational studies. However, argues that the application of this research method in an unstructured form is where greater insights and more current knowledge of administrative practice can be gained.

The purpose of this research is to report on the values practised by five effective secondary principals and to seek to identify common values that underpin their work practices.

Principals were observed, each for two days, at work in their schools. From the observations of each principal activities were recorded and the principals' behaviours therein were subjected to analysis. Values manifest in the principals' behaviours were confirmed through an exhaustive process of triangulation – comparison with the espoused values that emerged through completion of both the Senge and Rokeach Scales and through private interviews.

The values identified have been placed in three categories – those relating to Interpersonal Relationships, Operational Style, and Personal Qualities/Attributes. An unexpected outcome was the identification of principals' “interruptibility” – the willingness to be interrupted because of the value placed on quality interpersonal relationships, to enable principals to attend to others' concerns, and to allow the person interrupting to feel valued in terms of his/her concern taking priority over whatever else the principal was doing.

That element of “efficiency” advocated in much of the time management literature – “Thou shalt not be interrupted” – is apparently ignored by effective principals. Principals apparently accept this as part and parcel of their work in schools.

The study reflects some of the limitations of qualitative investigations – “sample short but data heavy”. Generalisations may be difficult to extract. Because of the severe triangulation process much data were discarded and thus other findings may have been masked.

The article notes that, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, the “time management” literature condemns interruptions. The article reports on two studies of interruptions experienced by principals in primary and secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia. Data were gathered via structured, non‐participant observations of principals at work. Analysis reveals the frequency, length, source and type of interruptions sustained. Contrary to the literature, principals did not view interruptions as hindering their tasks as school leaders. Time spent on interruptions is regarded essentially as time invested rather than time lost.

The Braun and Simpson’s (2004) study indicates that the Pause method is an effective teaching approach for auditing based on four sets of hypotheses in developing students’ oral, written and interpersonal communication skills. In addition, it is more beneficial to the learning process and more enjoyable than the lecture-only method. The extent of achieving both of these is dependent on the type of activity that is consistent with the student’s preferred Pause method activity. Students will achieve higher examination scores when following their preferred Pause activity. Our study replicates the Braun and Simpson’s study in Greater China using one university in Hong Kong and one in mainland China as students in these jurisdictions are more passive learners and their value of learning more extrinsic than intrinsic. The results are similar to the Braun and Simpson’s study, thus enhancing the universality of the “Pause” method.

The Reformation, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains, which redefined the relationship between the individual and God as a personal one, “took pains to regulate the relationship of man to alcohol,” and in so doing laid “an essential foundation¦…¦for the development of capitalism.” In the earlier Rabelaisian world, the Church constituted the major site of popular culture. Virtually all work was seasonal in character punctuated by carnivalesque church feasts that numbered over one hundred yearly. Although generally accepted as a safe means to vent communal anxieties, drink comprised an essential element of these festivals, with drunkenness the socially acceptable outcome.¹⁶ However, as the Reformation progressed and new modes of aristocratic behavior developed, reformative efforts to separate the secular and the sacred within the church resulted in attempts to abandon the popular culture of the lower classes. A broad consensus emerged that too much drunkenness amounted to social evil, and that alehouses represented an “increasingly dangerous force in popular society.”¹⁷ As the influence of the Church declined in the early eighteenth century, Carnival resurfaced in the form of gregarious carnivalesque village and town feasts: “the grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized” and writers such as Swift and Pope “perpetually identif[ied] the scene of writing with the fairground and the carnival.”¹⁸ Conversely, in keeping with the symmetrical component inherent in the Carnival/Lent theme, Lent transmuted into organizations such as The Society for the Reformation of Manners, which attempted to reduce drunkenness, cursing, swearing and whoring – all tropes of carnivalesque gregariousness. So, during this period, a contradictory cultural dissonance was being enacted. On the one hand, we find a resurgence of Carnival, but on the other hand, we see “a conservative desire on the part of the upper classes to separate themselves more clearly and distinctly from these popular activities.”¹⁹

What a difference a few years make! In the fall 1982 issue of Reference Services Review I described forty reference monographs and serial publications on photography. That article concluded with these words, “a careful reader will be aware that not one single encyclopedia or solely biographical source was included…this reviewer could find none in print…A biographical source proved equally elusive” (p.28).

ONE of the rising stars in the machine tool rebuild business is Saville Machine Tools of Halifax. In mid‐1989 the company moved into its new 28,000ft2 factory. This was the culmination of nine years of consistent growth.

Commodity racism, as conceived by Anne McClintock (1995), describes a novel cultural formation, binding difference, power, and consumption to one another, a creation at the interface of imperialism and industrialism in the late 19th century that offered an emergent language to simultaneously make sense of difference, fashion identity, cultivate desire, and sell stuff. Importantly, as it remapped the world, placing peoples and cultures in ranked social locations, it also reconfigured gender, the body, and taste as it rerouted the flows between public and private spheres. At its core, as expressed quite clearly in the soap advertisements McClintock analyzes, commodity racism stated the (then) accepted facts of white supremacy, underscoring the propriety of imperial expansion and settling, in many ways, for consumers hailed through it the racial question of the day.