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In a largely exploratory study, the authors investigate: how do managers’ experiences with exogenous hazards (e.g., natural disaster risk) affect their identification of those hazards as salient to the firm? This analysis is based on an international survey of 575 managers across 18 disaster-prone countries. The authors examine whether and how locational hazard risk and managerial experience influence the identification of natural disaster risk as an important firm issue. The authors find that locational natural hazard risk, and direct and indirect experience with natural disasters, increases the likelihood that managers’ will identify firm-specific natural disaster risk as an important firm issue. In addition, the authors also find that managers are likely to identify natural hazards as a threat when natural hazard risk is high and when managers have experience in natural disasters that directly affected their businesses.

This paper outlines and exemplifies the use of a method for analysing power relations based on the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault. The overall research aim of genealogical analysis is to produce “a history of the present”, a history which is essentially critical with its focus on locating forms of power, the channels it takes and the discourses it permeates. Research combining Foucauldian theorisation and method necessarily involves a selective search for injustice and subjection to reveal plausible alternatives to more pervasively modernist histories, which tend to revere progress. Salient features of a genealogical research method are detailed in the context of an actual research project previously conducted by the authors and reproduced here for the purposes of exemplification explicitly as a genealogy.

Frequent attendance at emergency departments (ED) has been identified in adult protection reviews as a potential warning sign of the escalation of someone’s vulnerability. Concern has been expressed about the engagement of the National Health Service (NHS) in adult protection and the small number of NHS adult protection referrals. More specifically ED departments have been identified as an area of high patient through put where there has been little evidence around how well adult support and protection (ASP) was being delivered. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A series of audits were undertaken in three different hospitals across a large Scottish Health Board accessing ED at different times of day on different days of the week to test out whether NHS staff working in EDs are identifying adults who meet the criteria of “an adult at risk”.

The audits identified a total of 11 patients from a total sample of 552 records examined who may have met the criteria to be considered an adult at risk, although further information would have been required to make a fully informed decision.

The main study limitation is that the hospitals are all within a single Health Board. The EDs have a large number of admissions and it is possible that a less pressurised area, might have a lower threshold of “risk” than the practitioners involved in the audits. The decision as to whether an adult was considered to meet the three-point test by the three people undertaking the audit was dependent on the quality of information recorded on the patients’ electronic hospital record.

It is essential that NHS Boards proactively support practice in ED settings so staff are able to identify adults at risk of harm under the ASP legislation so that ED staff are responsive to ASP needs.

The research evidence around adult protection in the UK is still emerging. The development of good practice based on the Scottish Government’s ASP legislation is still being shaped. In England and Wales, the principles of identification and multi-agency working underpinning the safeguarding of vulnerable individuals are broadly similar to Scotland. These audits add to the literature by challenging the assumption that patients who would benefit from local authority investigation and possible support are not being identified within EDs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interaction between a liminal rural Australian city (Lithgow) and the development of higher education options across the city's history. The paper proposes a nuanced interaction between national, social, religious, political, regional and local forces to explain why an industrial city such as Lithgow, with obvious educational strengths, would be overlooked while others (such as Wollongong and Bathurst) were not.

The paper takes the form of a longitudinal study of educational institutions, placed in their historical contexts, in order to demonstrate the fluctuation of educational vision with the rise and fall of socio-economic contributors to the town's fortunes.

The paper finds that the city's formation and dependence on war-related industries created boom-bust cycles which negatively impacted on its entrepreneurial, managerial and working class elites, and so on its ability to bring cultural and political influence to bear in the formation of local higher education options, across a period in which higher education becomes an increasingly federal responsibility.

The paper suggests policy ramifications for the support of higher education options in the city.

The paper supports the interpretation that it is not merely that education itself promotes social mobility, but that what type of education is important, along with an eye to how education contributes to the overall well-being and cross-class profile of the city of Lithgow.

This paper fills a gap in historical knowledge about Lithgow's educational institutions, the study of which heretofore has tended to be located with either labor historical or heritage approaches. This paper takes a socio-cultural and longitudinal/holistic approach which brings together a variety of approaches previously not treated.