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Study finds section 251 returns system to record education and children's services spending produces data that is often inaccurate and of little use. John Freeman says only an overhaul of the process will deliver improvements

All research is experiential, whether this is the experience of reading in the library or observing in the field. Autoethnographers take experience into narratives and are themselves key participants in their research, and often also its subject. For autoethnographers the idea of research as a neutral process is abandoned in favour of a self-reflective form that explores the researcher's perspective on the subject in question. Autoethnography inevitably negotiates the relationship between the stories we want to tell and the histories we have lived through; between the necessary fictions of publication/presentation and the real world experiences we draw upon. This article questions whether we can ever tell our experiences truthfully. This article questions what it might mean to write oneself into research findings and narrative reports, and it asks what happens when one's self goes further and becomes the research. It offers perspectives and provocations which are informed but not bound by autoethnography's extant body of thought and readers are invited on a brief journey through self-writing as it relates to the vagaries of memory and the illusion of truth.

The child sexual exploitation revelations in Rotherham highlight challenges of leadership, says John Freeman

This essay considers one of the more intriguing techno-events of this decade: the claim of the Irish technology company Steorn to have produced a perpetual motion device, the Orbo. Although its promised demo in July 2007 failed to produce a working device, events leading up to and beyond the failed demo offer a case study in what Galloway and Thacker define as an "exploit," "a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political diagram." Selecting its own jury to test and validate the Orbo, the company has resisted the normal scientific validation process. Enlisting the aid of an "outernet" workforce, Steorn has challenged traditional business models as well. Unfortunately, Orbo's failure has put a reverse spin on the Steorn Exploit and its viral marketing campaign, demonstrating that viruses not only spread but also mutate. Embarking on its own exploit, Steorn's on-line forum has morphed into a Webmind whose emergent properties recall Goertzel's psynet, "a self-organizing network of information-carrying agents." "Mobile agents," forum members create new links and provide each other feedback as they sort through the multiple drafts of Steorn's narrative. Scripted into this narrative, they must also do battle with other counter-exploitive elements such as Herr Doktor Mabuse, a nightmarish perversion of Steorn's original vision. Whether or not the forum endures depends paradoxically on the very spirit of contestation that drives its-and Steorn's-operations.

Gibbons argues persuasively that economic modeling offers a useful set of tools that noneconomists may employ to good effect in their research on organizations. His arguments are even more persuasive if it is understood that this brand of modeling lends itself naturally to one of the key theoretical problems facing such researchers—the need for a theory of aggregation, sometimes called a theory of action. Such a theory is necessary to link the behavior of individuals with properties of collectivities, such as corporations. Gibbons demonstrates that organizations populated with utility-maximizing actors can nevertheless be characterized by political chicanery, foolishness, and structural inertia, all of which can be seen as kinds of "organizational messes." So building a macro theory on rationalist assumptions does not require one to ignore many of the phenomena that have interested organizations researchers in the past.