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This chapter examines the similarities and differences in ways of life and experiences of residents in Milton Keynes and Cergy-Pontoise. Both New Towns resulted from efforts to create a form of urbanity that combines the attractions of urban and suburban life. In the tension between urbanity and suburbanity, many planners emphasised urbanity. To many new residents, their New Town was attractive precisely because of its suburban character. Using empirical material drawn from interviews with middle-class residents, this chapter looks at socio-spatial practices and experiences in the private domain of the home, in neighbourhoods and in public spaces and in the wider urban region. It is suggested that ways of living are conditioned by the structure and design of a city’s spaces, but people do not automatically conform to them. Their practices deviate from the city as planned and designed because residents will add meanings of their own to it. The chapter also reveals that there are differences in ‘suburban urbanity’ between both New Towns. The planning concepts and the daily lives of residents reflect cultural values attributed to suburbanity and urbanity in England and France. If the suburban middle class’s practices in the two cities reveal similar patterns, there are differences as well. In Milton Keynes, the emphasis is more on the private domain, and this causes residents to utilise and experience this city in a strikingly natural fashion. In Cergy-Pontoise, residents have a strong involvement with both the public domain and their own home.

At the turn of the century, I was hunched over a clammy steel desk in a far-flung project office, listening to my counterparts explain how many times in the recent past this particular Ministry had been bombed. Hearing something like this would be enough to get anyone thinking about their future. And it did stimulate my thinking. Over the next year, as I journeyed from Central Asia to the Caribbean on various development projects, I plotted my next move.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.

This chapter compares faculty self-assessment of teaching with student opinion of instruction in an online environment, in order to determine the level of agreement between faculty self-assessment and student assessment, in areas of overall program strength and directions for individual and whole-group professional development. A faculty self-assessment of teaching inventory based on established guidelines was administered to participating faculty in the Master of Library Science program at East Carolina University, and scores were compared to students’ ratings of instruction for one academic year. Scores were corrected for bias, tabulated, and Pearson correlation and t-scores were calculated. The method used produced an effective benchmarking and diagnostic tool, and indicated directions for instructional improvement. Because the study was for the express purpose of internal, formative evaluation, model data tabulations are presented as examples only. Data from the actual study are not presented. Limitations of the study are that items on student evaluation of teaching surveys may not always lend themselves to concept mapping, and that data were collected only for one academic year in a single program. The chapter contributes a method that is replicable and scalable, demonstrates that data are relatively easy to acquire, and that procedures are simple to implement, requiring only basic statistical tests and measures for analysis. Results can be interpreted and understood without extensive knowledge of quantitative methods. There are few studies that compare students teaching evaluations with faculty self-evaluations, and none that specifically address it for library and information science education programs.