Management in New Public Service Systems: Reframing the Position of Managers and Their Training and Development

Management training and development (T&D) plays an important part in enabling managers to deal with complexity and change associated with new public service systems. Using a service-dominant logic approach, this paper explores the relevance of T&D in preparing managers for changing roles, responsibilities and relationships that integrated service systems demand. Exploring the views of service managers working in Community Health Partnerships, the study establishes that present management T&D does not support the delivery of integrated services which require different abilities and new ways of working. New public service systems demand new processes of learning where re-framing the position of managers and their T&D becomes increasingly necessary.     

Sabotage! The Origins,Development and Impact of the IRA's Infrastructural Bombing Campaigns 1939–1997

At various moments in the twentieth century the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its various incarnations have used the tactic of infrastructural bombing, notably in their 1939 attacks in England on electricity pylons and in the summer of 1971 in Northern Ireland on its electrical distribution network. In 1996 the British Security Service (MI5) foiled an attack by the IRA aimed at causing a total electrical blackout of the greater London area, a plan that would have seen major disruption in the capital for many weeks or months. Using recently declassified material this paper seeks to re-evaluate the impact of these IRA infrastructural sabotage campaigns that have until now either been ignored or judged to have been derisory or incongruous failures. This paper demonstrates the historical development of this tactic from both the IRA's perspective, and that of those who were tasked with hindering it, highlighting the devastating potential of such tactics in the future.     

Narrative identity and forensic psychology: A commentary on Youngs and Canter

Purpose. In this commentary, I will take a closer look at Youngs and Canter's (2011) paper on narrative roles in offending and examine the ideas underpinning their study and its methodology. Methods. I briefly overview some important theoretical ideas within the area of narrative research and highlight a number of unresolved and crucial issues. I then summarize the Youngs and Canter paper, concentrating on explicating its findings and identifying the major assumptions underpinning the study. Finally, I critically examine the paper in light of narrative research and theory. Result. There are three classes of problems evident in the paper, which map onto issues evident within the broader field of narrative theory and research. These problems are definitional vagueness, lack of clarity concerning the nature of the self and its relationship to narrative roles, and methodological problems involving reliability and validity. Conclusion. The Youngs and Canter paper makes an important contribution to the application of narrative theory to the forensic and correctional areas although there are some areas of weakness.