This paper highlights the need for learning technologists to establish their 'academic legitimacy' within the complexities of online learning and teaching practice. Frameworks such as the 'five stage e-moderating model' can be useful in developing the knowledge base but there are dangers in them becoming too reified within an increasingly commodified higher education (HE) environment. The paper calls for greater professional reflexivity and contestation within learning technology practice and concludes by inviting the ALT-J readership to engage in a critical debate with regard to these issues.

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DR. PAULJOYCE, DR. ADRIAN WOODS, and Tony McNulty are lecturers in the business school of the Polytechnic of North London, England. Dr. Paul Corrigan was also formerly based at the polytechnic. This paper examines the perceptions of business people on the barriers to making desired changes in various aspects of their businesses. The evidence is based on interviews conducted in a number of relatively small manufacturing and retail enterprises in the London borough of Hackney. It was found that the market was seen by these business people as an important barrier to making changes. This was so in a number of areas but was especially critical in respect of the firms' flexibility in changing their products or services and, for the manufacturing firms, in making changes to their orders. The analysis develops the argument that the market is a particular type of economic co- ordinating mechanism, one which is a source of opportunities for small firms and simultaneously a constraint on their actions. The opportunities create the potential for change; the constraint makes the actual change potentially difficult. It is the cause, on occasion, of the need to make changes. The market is, therefore, as a co-ordinating mechanism, full of difficult actual and potential changes for small businesses.

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