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Based on a theme that emerged from a study conducted with 25 Indigenous stakeholders between 2009 and 2010, this article argues for the inadequacy of Western models of the practitioner–client relationship, and a need to consider rural and cultural characteristics of Indigenous social work in relationship building and maintaining. The findings suggest that historical and affective contexts, life contextualized scenarios and the collective interest which affect professional boundaries and the dyadic relationship are important in terms of addressing the relationship in a tribal community. The article ends by highlighting implications for Indigenous social work.

Purpose
– Business to business (B2B) professional services depend on inter-firm cooperation for the co-creation of value. Such cooperation rarely happens overnight; it requires time for the relationship to develop. The purpose of this research is to investigate how different performance attributes of a professional service differ with the tenure of the relationship.


Design/methodology/approach
– This exploratory study utilizes seven years of longitudinal customer data provided by a B2B professional service firm. The firm's customers assess satisfaction, value, loyalty, performance quality and their image of the firm after each project.


Findings
– Data were classified into three tenure related groups – i.e. transactional, emergent and mature relationships. MANOVA and post hoc contrasts of the average attribute scores of the three groups were conducted. The data support the conclusion that high performance in professional services is evident in mature relationships.


Research limitations/implications
– Data come from company archives and reflect the firm's efforts for tactical management of client relationships, not independent informant reports from randomly selected accounts.


Practical implications
– Satisfaction surveys can be employed tactically by professional service providers to develop stronger relationships with their clients en route to co-creating extraordinary value from high levels of service quality and the client's high regard for the provider's professional qualities, such as expertise, customer focus and initiative.


Originality/value
– To the authors' knowledge, no one has shown empirically the dramatic performance advantage stemming from relationships. This is important because theory suggests that customer relationships hold strategic value. Because they are immobile and inimitable, they represent a potential sustainable competitive advantage. However, relationships take time to develop. This begs the question of whether they are worth the time and effort to develop. In the professional service context, where buyer and seller seemingly must collaborate to co-create value, mature relationships indeed yield higher performance, compared to transactional and emerging relationships.

Working in a rural community locates the professional in a wider social network as community members often expect more from their professionals; not only as service providers, but also as engaged members of the community. This can result in the rural social worker being highly visible both personally and professionally and it can also lead to overlapping relationships. These higher expectations can place stress on the worker in terms of maintaining accepted professional roles and a sense of professional identity. This qualitative study explores the first-hand experiences of a cross-section of service providers in more than a dozen communities within northwestern Ontario and northern Manitoba, Canada. The responses of the participants provide some insight into how rural practitioners maintain their professional identity when working within the unique demands of the rural and remote context. Recurring themes from the interviews suggest that these professionals craft their own informal decision-making processes to address intersecting roles, community gossip, and personal isolation, even while, in some cases, practicing in their home community. The findings provide greater understanding of the pressures and realities of working in small remote towns and the challenges of responding to the expectations and realities of relationships including the expectation of working with friends and family members of friends or colleagues: issues that have not been adequately studied in the literature to date.

Purpose– Although qualified women are still underrepresented at ranks of senior management in all countries, considerable progress has been made in identifying work experiences associated with career success and advancement. The studies of mentor relationships in North America have shown that women receiving more functions from their mentors reported benefits such as greater job and career satisfaction, and female mentors provided more psychosocial functions than did male mentors. The present study examined antecedents and consequences of mentor relationships in a sample of managerial and professional women working for a large organization in Turkey. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– Data were collected from 192 women managers and professionals using anonymously completed questionnaires.Findings– The following results were obtained: having a mentor relationship had little impact on work outcomes, female and male mentors generally provided the same mentor functions, and mentor functions had little impact on work outcomes.Practical implications– Highlights the potential role of both organizational and societal values in mentoring programs.Originality/value– These findings are at odds with previously reported results obtained in Anglo-Saxon countries. Possible explanations for the failure to find previously reported benefits of mentoring are offered.

Debates over the relationship between professional practice, professional standards and professional identity have been a feature of Australian and international educational and political discourse for the last two decades (Ball, 1997; Bodman, Taylor & Morris, 2012; Doecke, Howie & Sawyer, 2006; Power, 1994; Sachs 2001). The discourse is replete with neo-liberal claims about educational reform that supposedly benefits everyone. It invariably includes appealing rhetoric about greater transparency, democratic participation, individual choice, and the freedom for individuals within the system to express themselves openly. Much research has shown that these claims are belied by the increasingly dominant regimes of performativity (Ball, 2003) and audit cultures (Avis, 2003; Power, 1994) that seek to standardise and narrow educators' professional practice. In their quest for professional recognition, teachers and teaching communities are obliged to engage with the twin banner of standardisation and accountability as a measure of whether young Australians are meeting important educational outcomes. Yet, the literature shows that teachers in Australia have engaged with their working practices in different ways (see Gannon, 2012; Parr, 2010). This inquiry investigates how a small number of (mostly) experienced educators in Australia have engaged with this rhetoric and this neo-liberal policy making. It explores and reflects on the actions and professional choices they have made in their day to day professional lives, and the attitudes and emotions that have underpinned these actions. Adopting institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005, 2006) as an important dimension to this research, I map out how educators, individuals and groups act and are acted upon across time and space, drawing attention to the complex negotiations they undertake in their particular educational sites. The study involves interviews with twelve secondary school teachers (most of them with more than 20 years' experience, but some beginner teachers, too) and school leaders in Melbourne and overseas. A multifaceted narrative, this thesis is also informed by references to literature in the fields of philosophy, autobiography (Florio-Ruane, 200 I), poetry, and literary fiction as well as the expected literature in educational theory. One element that draws this perhaps disparate range of literature together is my interest, as both a literature teacher and a researcher, in language. Language, with its creative and educational possibilities, and also its power to control and contain, is centre-stage in this study. Through close attention to the language I use, I make explicit the impact on the research of my own professional and personal background (Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006) and this same close attention to language enables me to explore how my activities, feelings and experiences hooked me into "extended social relations" (Smith, 2004, p. 5) in my work in the classroom and in conducting this research. I explore these institutional relations and practices reflexively through journal entries and autobiographically as part of the "memory work" of this study (Haug et aI., 1987). 3 A key focus of this study is to explore the extent to which emotion is an important dimension of the intellectual, critical and relational practices of teachers. This exploration is underpinned by socio-cultural (e.g., Ball, 2003) and dialogic (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981) theory. I challenge traditional psychologistic studies that see emotion located in the individual, a 'natural' phenomenon that one must learn to 'control' (e.g., Boler, 1999; Rose, 1998). This study critically and reflexively teases out some ofthe consequences of practitioners engaging in their work, rather, with a degree of "emotionality" (Denzin, 1984). Expression of feelings may often be considered 'inappropriate' in neo-liberallandscapes and political agendas that are pre-occupied with standardised learning outcomes and professional performance (see Zembylas, 2003). When teachers repress their feeling, they learn - sometimes at great emotional cost - how to self-regulate emotions and know which ones may be expressed and which may not. While this study shows some examples of this, it also shows the potential for the relational and emotional dimensions of teaching to re-form subjectivities and 're-embody' professional practice. The research accentuates the diverse local, contextual and social factors that shape teachers' everyday work in ways that challenge neo-liberal politics of standardisation, regulation and technicism. It illustrates how in any open and democratic society the social world can be "a site of debate" (Smith, 2004, p. 27), opening up for engagement with all members of a professional community the mUltiple views and intellectual positions that exist in that community. As the narratives from the participants in this study reveal, in educational settings which understand and appreciate the complex interplay of intellectual, emotional and relational dimensions of teachers' work, teachers are best able to commit to a vision of participating, caring and learning. They can forge trusting professional relationships and collaboratively work together to create rich and robust professional practice and professional learning that ultimately benefit their students and the futures they hope to build.

Much is being done by governments and organizations to help workers reconcile their family and employment responsibilities. One such measure has been the introduction of flexible working policies. While academic and policy debates focus on the barriers to flexible working, less consideration is paid to those who work alongside flexible workers. Through a gendered lens, this article focuses on professional women and explores the implications of UK flexible working policies for women's workplace relations in organizations that have traditionally been based on male models of working. Drawing on interviews conducted in three English organizations, it was found that the women's interests did not always coincide and that their social relationships, with respect to flexible working, involved both support and resentment. In particular, the women's interests were affected by organizational and job‐related factors and their stage in the life course. These findings illuminate the ways in which policies are negotiated at the level of daily workplace life and show that co‐workers are a pivotal part of the wider picture of flexible working.

Most psychological contract research examines single-agency situations in which a breach only affects one firm. In a multiple-agency relationship, however, the individual performs work that simultaneously satisfies the requirements of two firms, allowing for the possibility that breach outcomes extend across both the breaching and the nonbreaching firms. We theorize two mechanisms through which breach outcomes extend across organizational boundaries. First, we propose spillover effects for feelings of violation and for organizational citizenship behaviors from the breaching firm to the nonbreaching firm. Second, we propose that, in cases where the individual expects the nonbreaching firm to intervene and rectify the other firm's breach as part of a regulatory obligation, there are direct and moderating effects of meeting (or failing to meet) these perceived obligations. Using professional service firms as the empirical context, we find evidence of breach outcome spillover between the two firms in the multiagency relationship and direct and moderating effects of unmet obligations to intervene by the nonbreaching firm. We also find some key differences in the nomological networks depending on whether the breaching firm was the consulting firm or the client firm. These insights highlight the importance of extending psychological contract study to multiple-agency relationships.

"'Professions' are work collaborations in which representatives of certain vocations address the life problems of 'laypersons'. In such relationships, adequate communication between representatives of the profession and laypersons is crucial in addressing their individual problems. Accordingly, 'understanding', as well as interactional documentation of this understanding, is of considerable importance. The authors of the present volume, 'Understanding in Professional Spheres of Activity', address the documentation of this understanding in certain professional spheres. They examine the requirements for the documentation of such understanding and the forms of documentation used in the fields of doctor-patient communication, counseling communication, and organizational collaboration on a movie set. Conversation analytic as well as ethnographically complemented studies draw further attention to an examination of the interactional level in its socio-structural context, and to that end the study employs a combination of conversational linguistics and sociological research. This contribution is therefore important not only in terms of linguistics but also sociologically." (author's abstract)