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The paper published below was prepared by Taylor Ostrander for Frank Knight’s course, Economic Theory, Economics 301, during the Fall 1933 quarter.

This series of papers aims to explore the transition from higher education into work. It reports on research undertaken over a period of two years and which sought to track a number of young graduates as they completed their studies and embarked upon career of choice.

The approach adopted is defined and discussed as one of “common sense”. Alongside the notion of “common sense” the paper deploys two further concepts, “convention” and “faith” necessary to complete a rudimentary methodological framework. The narratives which are at the heart of the papers are built in such a way as to contain not only the most significant substantive issues raised by the graduates themselves but also the tone of voice specific to each.

Five cases are presented; the stories of five of the graduates over the course of one year. Story lines that speak of learning about the job, learning about the organisation and learning about self are identified. An uneven journey into a workplace community is evident. “Fragmentation” and “cohesion” are the constructs developed to reflect the conflicting dynamics that formed the lived experience of the transitional journeys experienced by each graduate.

Whilst the longitudinal perspective adopted overcomes some of the major difficulties inherent in studies which simply use “snap shot” data, the natural limits of the “common sense” approach restrict theoretical development. Practically speaking, however, the papers identify issues for reflection for those within higher education and the workplace concerned with developing practical interventions in the areas of graduate employability, reflective practice and initial/continuous professional development.

The series of papers offers an alternative to orthodox studies within the broader context of graduate skills and graduate employment. The papers set this debate in a more illuminating context.

This article revisits Nicolas Carr's popular Harvard Review article IT Doesn't Matter on its ten-year anniversary. The purpose is to analyze Carr's argument by analyzing the development of the argument itself as opposed to finding exceptions to the argument, which has been done in the past.

The authors use co-evolutionary theory as a case against Carr's argument by showing that Carr has only looked at the growth of IT from a population ecology perspective and has failed to anticipate the adaptive nature of IT within the organization.

The authors show that Carr's new rules for IT management may not be applicable if viewed through the lens of the three principles of self-renewing organizations espoused by co-evolutionary theory.

The authors provide a new basis for evaluating the strategic nature of IT and offer a background for future research and case studies into evaluating IT strategic competitive advantage within the organization.

The research provides guidelines for organizations to better decide how to strategically implement IT to more fully utilize its capabilities.

The paper provides a new method for refuting a popular article by attacking the argument as opposed to finding exceptions to the argument. This is valuable to those who wish to evangelize the strategic capacity of IT within the organization.

This narrative describes the author’s experience as an artist, author, and a humanitarian. She uses pictures, art, and collage to make connections between her past, present, and future.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study to explore the experience of dignity in the acute care of older people in four acute NHS trusts. It explores the prevalent view that acute care is not the right place for older people and the failure to acknowledge that the largest group of users are the very old, the frail and the dependent, which results in environments that are not friendly to older people generally, and are especially hostile to those with cognitive impairments. Added to this, a culture that is risk averse and defensive, where care is undervalued and where professional accountability and discretion are replaced by standardised checklists, pathways and audits, cultivates the attitude that if an aspect of care can't be measured it doesn't matter. Overall, getting the job done appears to matter more than how the job is done, so that the focus is primarily on the task rather than seeing the person. It describes how the failure of acute trusts to respond to the needs of the majority of their users ‐ older people ‐ results in the failure to provide dignified care and the impact of this on both the quality of care and patient outcomes.

If confession is good for the soul, this is Crawford's personal revival meeting. Yes, the hardcore text maven and trailing‐edge devotee has gone GUI: most of his home computing now uses a true graphical user interface. The author says that the taste of crow has passed and that the new environment works very well, albeit not without a few frustrations. This article discusses the author's move to Windows and some of the good and bad points of that interface. The author includes some tips on Windows, as seems inevitable for any article on that topic. The author also provides some additional notes related to previous columns, on clip‐art collections and the actual construction of TrueType typefaces. As usual, the article concludes with notes on the recent PC literature.