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This paper argues that the traditional approach to translating national policy into local practice, based as it is on a metaphor of organisations as machines, will not lead to effective implementation of the national service framework for mental health. The recent innovations of performance management and evidence‐based practice will not rectify the failures inherent in that traditional approach. Rather, the paper contends that there is need for a broader range of metaphors of organisations to be deployed in the creation of a robust implementation process and suggests three ‐ negotiated order, chaos theory and learning theory ‐ that the authors have found of particular value.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nature of request for information (RFIs) on construction projects by using data analytics to understand the frequency of RFIs, when they occur on projects, and the relationship between project characteristics and frequency of RFIs and between project characteristics and RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic approach using RStudio and Minitab software on 168 construction project cases in Australia and New Zealand involving 1,032,949 correspondences and 53,042 RFI event records made available by Aconex, one of the world largest cloud-based project management platform.

Large and complex projects tend to have significantly larger number of RFI events per day and longer RFI turnaround when compared with smaller and less complex projects. Projects with fewer users per organisation recorded a higher RFI turnaround time when compared with projects with more users per organisation – users mean persons involved in managing the project using the online platform (an index of project complexity). RFIs occur early on less complex projects and occur later on more complex projects.

Benchmarks of RFI incidences and turnaround time have been developed for various project characteristics and, practitioners can use them to monitor the RFI performance of projects. Organisations need to pay greater attention to staffing levels needed to handle RFIs to reduce RFI turnaround time.

A data-analytic study of RFI yielded insights for managing RFIs. The findings of previous studies on RFIs are difficult to generalise because they are based on single project case study. The influence of project characteristics on RFI frequency and RFI turnaround time is not yet known.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of time convenience on shopping behaviour in the light of a time scarcity phenomenon that is reported to have reached epidemic proportions in many markets.

The paper begins with a survey of consumer households, examining the importance shoppers assign to time convenience. This is followed by a supply‐side comparison of malls and shopping strips against the attributes of time convenience.

The results indicate that time convenience has a salient influence on consumers' patronage behaviour, and that malls and strips differ in their provision of this key attribute.

Retail planners must give serious thought to creating retail environments that allow shoppers to “buy” time. Providing time convenience via one‐stop shopping, extended trading hours, proximity to home or work and enclosure offers one such strategy for the shopping mall and shopping strip.

The focus on convenience provides practitioners with a strategic alternative to hedonic strategies. It is also one of the first studies to investigate retail centre patronage from both a demand‐and supply‐side perspective.

Today's historian of American history and culture is part of a highly diversified profession. While politics, economics, and social and intellectual history remain basic categories for historical inquiry, new subareas have appeared over the past decade or so. Contemporary historians have found it necessary to adapt the methodologies of psychologists, sociologists, and demographers to their own purposes. As a result of this gradual process, psychohistory (including the history of childhood and the family), urban history, popular culture studies, and studies of the impact of science and scientists on American society have evolved into separate areas of historical scholarship. These new study areas have made certain types of historical records more important than ever before — fiscal documents, censuses, electoral data, parish records (births, deaths, marriages), slave owners' records, etc. It is expected that such documents will light up formerly dark historical corners. The concurrent development of computer technology has obviated the tedium that manual studies of mountains of raw data used to entail. The computer has also made it possible to manipulate data in numerous ways. While traditional historians view the results of quantitative history with suspicion, its potential is great — if the computer is used as a tool and not as an end in itself.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept that expatriate status, as opposed to national citizen status, may impact leader behavior. The intention is not to pursue a research question carved out from the expatriation and leadership research streams but rather to raise the issue of non-citizenship status as potentially moderating leader behavior.

The authors used grounded theory methodology, including interviews to gather data on the behavior of non-citizen leaders in the UAE. The resulting 28 interview transcripts were analyzed using inductive coding to arrive at aggregate theoretical dimensions.

Their findings reveal a keen tendency among expatriate leaders to display organizational legitimacy by remaining sedulously within established organizational schemata and monitoring employees closely.

The study asks, rather than answers, a question and does not use an established theoretical framework, as its area of concern is not one that fits solely within the literatures on expatriation, international business, leadership, cross-cultural management or national citizenship. Furthermore, the context in which they conduct our investigation is the UAE whose workforce has a disproportionately high number of expatriates. Although this serves as a convenient context in which to study the rising occurrence of non-citizen leaders due to increased professional migration, the issue may be more meaningfully tested in geopolitical contexts with typical expatriate–citizen workforce ratios.

The central theoretical contribution of this preliminary study is to provide initial empirical evidence suggesting that the hitherto-ignored variable of national citizenship may be a significant one to address given increasing professional global migration.