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From June 2017 to May 2018, the Prison Reform Trust partnered with Families Outside to identify the particular impacts on children of a mother's involvement in the criminal justice system. This included a literature review and extensive consultations with 25 children and 31 mothers with lived experience. This chapter presents the main findings of the research, which identified five key themes: ‘Children with a mother in prison are invisible within the systems that are there to protect them’; ‘Every aspect of a child's life may be disrupted when a mother goes to prison’; ‘Children feel stigmatised when a mother is involved in the criminal justice system’; ‘Children affected by imprisonment face many barriers to support’ and ‘With the right support, children can become more resilient and develop the skills they need to thrive’. The material presented in this chapter constitutes a compelling case for reform. The chapter concludes with recommendations for action at local and national levels to protect children from the harm caused by maternal imprisonment.

There is an increasing awareness that higher education (HE) institutions face significant challenges in managing and supporting students as they transition into university life. If HE institutions struggle to achieve this important aim, this can lead to an increase in student drop-out. This can of course present significant financial implications and challenges and worse still, result in mental health challenges in students. The concept of Mental Toughness (MT) has been shown in a substantial number of investigations, to develop our understanding of why some people might be more vulnerable to these pressures than others. Importantly, it provides both a means of identifying those people and insights about ways they can be best supported. This chapter proposes a well-researched MT framework to facilitate and support universities with these challenges and highlights three key strategies for managing this successfully.

Technologies are ubiquitous in modern Britain, gradually infiltrating many areas of our working and personal lives. But what role can technology play in the current COVID-19 pandemic? At a time when our usual face to face social interactions are temporarily suspended, many of us have reached out to technology (e.g. Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom) to help maintain a sense of closeness and connection to friends, family and vital services.

One largely unsung technology is the virtual assistant (VA), a cost-efficient technology enabling users to access the Internet of Things using little more than voice. Deploying an ecological framework, in the context of smart age-friendly cities, this paper explores how VA technology can function as an emergency response system, providing citizens with systems to connect with friends, family, vital services and offering assistance in the diagnosis of COVID-19.

We provide an illustration of the potentials and challenges VAs present, concluding stricter regulation and controls should be implemented before VAs can be safely integrated into smart age-friendly cities across the globe.

In pre‐industrial times women managed, not only the household, but aspects of agricultural work such as the dairy, milking, butter and cheese‐making, often disposing of any surplus through trade or commerce. In the nineteenth century women could be found running businesses such as lodging houses and shops. By 1911 women constituted 19 per cent of employers and proprietors and 20 per cent of managers and administrators and higher professionals. Many of today's women managers are “organization” women, part of the professional managerial class which emerged, in the UK, in the immediate post‐war period and it is on these women that the literature concentrates, in an effort to explain why, despite almost 30 years of equality legislation, women remain under represented in management, tend to be occupationally segregated and are paid less than male managers. This paper explores the experiences of today's women managers and compares them with those of their foremothers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that external reports may be assessed not only by their content but also by the affordances provided to assist the reader's understanding. To operationalise this idea, it is applied to statements of service performance issued by New Zealand universities in 2000.

Using concepts drawn from information systems design, the authors develop an index which is applied to archival reports.

The index is negatively correlated with existing disclosure indices applied to the same set of reports, implying that it captures a distinct dimension of performance reporting. A tradeoff is demonstrated between providing more disclosure and more cognitive affordances. The index is fairly robust to certain arbitrary choices in its construction.

The concept of assessing the quality of external reports by their cognitive affordances is shown to be feasible by applying it to one kind of report in a particular setting. Further research will be needed to establish how it could be operationalised in other settings, such as social and environmental accounting.

With further development, the index may provide a way of assessing the presentation of external reports, and hence of improving accounting standards. It may also be helpful to preparers by providing a second dimension (besides content) on which they can evaluate and improve the quality of their reporting.

External reports have previously been assessed in terms of content and of the sentence structure employed. This paper suggests a way of assessing how the structure and presentation of reports affects their usability.

The purpose of this paper is to exemplify how the bioecological model (BM) may be used as a systems approach framework to address workplace well-being in a holistic, meaningful and practical way.

This conceptual paper is structured according to the design of Bronfenbrenner’s (1999) BM. As such, the different layers of the model are described and then examples from the recent international and interdisciplinary literature and current policy from Australia are provided to support the argument. These selected examples represent some key themes in the field of workplace health and well-being management.

The BM is ideal in holistically analysing workplace health promotion and management. This finding supports future research using this model. The limitations of the model are that it can lend itself to research projects that are unfocused. It is suggested that determining the research aims and objectives and then using the model to respond to this agenda would use the model effectively.

This paper proposes the applicability of a specific model to a research agenda suggesting that interested parties could design a project around this model to investigate workplace health and well-being management.

The model gives weight to the lived experiences of employees and suggests that business owners and policy makers hold power in controlling aspects that influence employee well-being. This model could be used to inform policy makers about the holistic nature of employee well-being urging inclusive policies that support positive well-being practices.

This paper provides a unique contribution to the field by offering a topic-specific model useful to those concerned with workplace health and well-being management.