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Twelve‐step facilitation (TSF) is becoming an important approach to the therapy of addiction. It proved an equally effective method as one of the three psychosocial approaches used in Project MATCH during the 90s1‐with the added advantage of helping drinkers to replace prodrinking networks with more supportive peers2. Here Addiction Series editor Martin Weegmann and Tim Leighton share their experiences of using the twelve‐step methods and describe the skills and techniques that can be used by any therapist on almost any client.

Consulting assignments go through various steps and stages. It is important to know what these are so you can identify what needs to be done, when and how. This article outlines the steps and stages seen occurring in most consulting work.

Despite estimates that chemical dependency in the workplace is a $100 billion per year problem, many managers are unable or unwilling to recognise it. There are, though, a number of specific job performance related signs that an employee is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Additionally, the informed manager can watch for certain personality and behavioural changes that indicate chemical dependency. Drug testing is sometimes effective, but it has many drawbacks.

This is a study of how members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) produce their talk, using the principles of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. The focus is on two interralated phenomena of the openings of turns. Recurrently, the first words of the turns, i.e., greetings and self‐identification, are followed with a resonse space during which members display their orientation to coparticipants through allusions to prior speakers. Positive references to prior speakers are stated directly and addressed explicitly, typically through a phrase such as: “I identified with X and what X said,” wheras critical remarks are stated implicitly and without any address. Through this procedure, members establish their individual position in each meeting without posing challenges to other members. The allusions occasions initiation of a subsequent topic of the turn that characteristically is biographically relevant for the speaker. This procedure of organization of talk permits AA meetings to handle delicate issues in a sociable, nonconfrontive way.

Implementing customer Relationship Management systems and processes can be a daunting task, particularly when it is viewed as an all‐or‐nothing proposition. There is, in fact, an implementation path that allows for stepwise deployment, with incremental investment and incremental returned value. This paper explores the capabilities to deploy, the interdependencies among them, and the order in which to deploy them.

The incremental capabilities and their relationships derive from the author’s experience in process and engineering and in deployment of CRM systems and processes.

A 12‐step process emerges from this mindset and experience. The first four steps describe foundation capabilities and activities, without which no CRM effort can succeed. The next four organize basic CRM activities surrounding knowing your customers, managing your channels, and managing your process. The last four describe advanced ways of thinking about the value propositions from the customer view, measuring accordingly, and continuous improvement.

From a practical perspective, this approach offers organizations a method of deploying CRM so that investment can be incremental and value can be returned at every step. Deploying organizations will find that they gain confidence in the value of CRM without a large up‐front investment.

For organizations new to CRM, this paper offers a roadmap for deployment, a rational approach to getting started, and a basis for choosing the scope of a first deployment. For organizations already applying CRM processes and using CRM systems, this paper offers a basis for understanding deficiencies in your CRM practices and system, and it also offers suggestions on how to improve the value of CRM.

This article is supplied by Alison, a long‐time member of Dual Recovery Anonymous (DRA), about the aims and principles of their 12‐step programme. DRA's 12‐step programme helps members to recover from both a drug or alcohol dependency and emotional or psychiatric illness (dual diagnosis) by focusing on relapse prevention and actively improving the quality of their lives.

Purpose – This chapter explores how discourses of obesity as addiction are taken up by weight loss surgery patients and medical and scientific professionals.

Methodology/approach – Based on 14 semistructured interviews, I discuss the ways in which bariatric patients partially account for their presurgical bodies and contemporary struggles with weight loss and regain by referencing food addiction. This work is part of a larger project involving 35 interviews and participant-observation work and therefore these results should thus be considered preliminary.

Findings – I argue that bariatric patients and bariatric professionals portray weight loss surgery as an extraordinary tool that allows the “out of control” to become controllable. However, bariatric patients also emphasize the hard work that is entailed in both losing weight and maintaining a weight loss even after surgery.

Social implications – I suggest that this portrayal, in addition to being an accurate assessment of the potential for regain following weight loss surgery, is a technology of stigma management.

Originality/value – This work contributes to the sociology of the body and medical sociology literatures by illustrating that, within a neoliberal and anti-fat social context, highlighting the hard work involved in weight loss and weight maintenance allows bariatric patients to demonstrate proper subjectivity and thereby reclaim “proper selves” as they work toward a “proper bodies.”

A compact multi‐point laboratory recorder that offers the versatility of also operating as a multi‐range instrument has been introduced by Pye Unicam. Designated PM8235, it embodies plug‐in range modules that enable it to function as a single‐range one‐to‐twelve point recorder, as a twelve‐point six‐range unit, or as a multi‐range instrument. With this multi‐range input module, the recorder has a sensitivity that is adjustable from 1mV to 5V full scale in twelve calibrated steps, with a non‐calibrated control that extends full‐scale sensitivity to 0·3mV. Its zero suppression on all ranges is calibrated and is variable down to 500%.

This paper outlines the principal problems confronting managers when they consider the use of programmed learning. The second part lists twelve steps which a manager should take to install programmed learning in his organization.