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While information communication technologies (ICTs) are essential for social and economic development in today's emerging digital society, the problem of the digital divide persists. To close this gap, the European Union has proposed eInclusive policies. However, a general belief has emerged that this issue must be dealt with at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to report on such an effort, the Digital Local Agenda (DLA). It aims to show the DLA development in Europe and provide an example of its utilization in practice through a European initiative.

The paper explains the rationale for the DLA, and examines implementation of the DLA in pilot sites in five European countries to support civil servants in small municipalities, and empower them to develop and utilize their capacities to use ICTs and reach people most in danger of eExclusion.

Preliminary findings indicate that the DLA should be considered when looking for solutions to the persistent problem of digital exclusion in Europe. Implementing the DLA may improve public service provision and reduce the digital divide faced by disempowered groups.

Given the flexible and adaptable instruments provided for in the DLA, the paper argues that the DLA is an effective and strategic approach to translate policy frameworks into solutions that practitioners can deploy to overcome the barriers of accessing eGovernment, reduce the digital divide among marginalized groups in Europe and include all stakeholders in decision making processes.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate an instrument that can measure distributed leadership (DL) as employees’ active participation in DL tasks. The authors designate this as the distributed leadership agency (DLA).

Data were collected throughout all departments and occupational groups at a merged centralized hospital setting in Denmark. A total of 1,774 employees from 24 hospital departments and 16 occupational groups completed our survey. Structural equation model and confirmatory factor analyses were applied to identify appropriate items and a test for measurement invariance, predictive, discriminant and convergent validity, and ANOVAs were applied to analyse group differences in DLA.

The identified unidimensional questionnaire consists of seven items, as it is different from, but associated with, empowering leadership, organizational influence, attitude to participation and trust in management. As theoretically predicted, DLA is positively related to self-efficacy, job satisfaction and innovative behaviour. Chief physicians, permanent employees and employee representatives scored higher on the scale than the rest of their respective counterparts.

The survey offers a method to assess a distribution of leadership agency in hospital organizations. Such assessment may provide a basis for organizational and leadership development.

The present study provides a reliable and valid quantitative instrument that measures how much employees at all hierarchical levels are involved in concrete leadership activities in the hospital context. Taking a normative perspective the authors could show that DL – measured with the DLA-questionnaire – has positive effects on employees’ behaviour.

Employees constitute an important source of innovation in organizations. Innovation management strategies often include attempts of stimulating employees' innovative contribution by instilling managerial trust and granting job autonomy. However, the authors suggest and investigate the role of employees' distributed leadership agency (DLA) in hospital employee-driven innovation.

The authors tested the hypotheses using survey data from 1,536 nonmanagerial employees at a hospital in Denmark. In order to deal with a methodological risk of survey designs, the authors assessed and adjusted the results for common method variance (CMV).

The authors validated a DLA measurement instrument and found an indirect relationship between job autonomy and trust in management on the one hand, via DLA, and with idea generation, promotion and implementation on the other hand. In addition, the results showed a small direct relationship between job autonomy and the three innovative behaviors. The results showed that CMV did bias relationships and reliabilities but only little.

The study introduces distributed leadership to the field of innovation management and confirms that this concept is highly relevant for employee innovation. In order to strengthen an organization's innovative potential, leaders may not only need to grant autonomy and instill trust in their employees, but also gain from employee innovation by distributing leadership tasks to employees.

This study is one of the first to introduce distributed leadership to the field of employee innovation management. By identifying distributed leadership as a key variable, the findings add to one’s extant understanding of how employee involvement encourages employee innovation.

In the behavioural science areas of psychology and consumer behaviour, the means‐end value hierarchy model has often been applied to understand individuals’ values structures ‐ in particular, the value of a company’s product/ service offering to its customers. Applying the means‐end value hierarchy model in a logistics context, logistics customer value can be thought of as a higher‐order evaluative standard for customers’ satisfaction and service quality evaluation processes. As such, it is important for a firm to know what its customers value when seeking to build a competitive advantage. Attempts to advance our understanding of logistics customer value through the application of the means‐end value hierarchy model to logistics. More specifically, investigates the customer value of logistics service in a business‐to‐business setting using the means‐end value hierarchy model. Uses focus group interview data for developing the customer value hierarchy.

Over the past eight years, the MELVYL catalog has become one of the largest public access catalogs in the world, and now plays a central role in providing access to the library resources of the University of California. Currently, under heavy load, the MELVYL catalog supports many hundreds of simultaneous terminal connections, servicing over a quarter of a million queries a week and displaying more than two million records a week to its user community. This article discusses the history of the network that has supported the MELVYL catalog from the early days of its prototype to the present. It also describes both the current technical and policy issues that must be addressed as the network moves into the 1990s, and the roles that the network is coming to play in integrating local automation, the union catalog, access to resource databases, and other initiatives. Sidebars discuss the TCP/IP protocol suite, internet protocol gateways, and Telenet and related inter‐operability problems.

The set-union knapsack problem is one of the most significant generalizations of the Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP)-hard 0-1 knapsack problem in combinatorial optimization, which has rich application scenarios. Although some researchers performed effective algorithms on normal-sized instances, the authors found these methods deteriorated rapidly as the scale became larger. Therefore, the authors design an efficient yet effective algorithm to solve this large-scale optimization problem, making it applicable to real-world cases under the era of big data.

The authors develop three targeted strategies and adjust them into the adaptive tabu search framework. Specifically, the dynamic item scoring tries to select proper items into the knapsack dynamically to enhance the intensification, while the age-guided perturbation places more emphasis on the diversification of the algorithm. The lightweight neighborhood updating simplifies the neighborhood operators to reduce the algorithm complexity distinctly as well as maintains potential solutions. The authors conduct comparative experiments against currently best solvers to show the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Statistical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can find 18 out of 24 better solutions than other algorithms. For the remaining six instances on which the competitor also achieves the same solutions, ours performs more stably due to its narrow gap between best and mean value. Besides, the convergence time is also verified efficiency against other algorithms.

The authors present the first implementation of heuristic algorithm for solving large-scale set-union knapsack problem and achieve the best results. Also, the authors provide the benchmarks on the website for the first time.

The UK’s ninth‐largest law firm has changed over the last five years from being regarded in legal circles as the “rottweilers from the north”, with a “revolving‐door culture”, to being a great place to work. DLA was 35th in the 2004 Sunday Times Great Place to Work table – its fourth consecutive listing in the top 100 – and tenth in the Financial Times list of the best 50 workplaces in the UK. The company, which has also won an accolade for best learning and development strategy, was a finalist in the 2003 HR Excellence Awards. It holds Investor in People status.

To reflect on activities and developments related to the 3M™ Digital Materials Flow Management since its implementation at the UNLV Libraries, including system hardware and software developments and the UNLV Libraries' evolving relationship with 3M™.

Following an introduction which highlights the major 3M™ Digital Materials Flow Management components in place at the UNLV Libraries, product improvements that have expanded the functionality of the system are detailed, patrons and staff benefits of the technology are described, and RFID privacy issues at the UNLV Libraries are examined.

Expanded capability and use of the 3M™ Digital Materials Flow Management system has allowed the UNLV Libraries to establish more efficient processes for undertaking collection management activities, such as inventory and weeding. The system has also had a positive impact on customer service. Benefits of the system currently outweigh the potential risks in terms of patron privacy.

Libraries must continually assess their positions on radio frequency identification (RFID) and patron privacy as technology progresses. Additional possibilities and developments stemming from further collaboration between libraries and vendors in areas such as product standardization are anticipated.

Provides information on innovative uses of the 3M™ Digital Materials Flow Management system and gives concrete examples of system benefits. Useful to libraries considering the implementation of an RFID system, those currently working with the 3M™ Digital Materials Flow Management system, and those considering collaborative work on product development with a vendor.

One of the United States’ premier research libraries, Lied Library, located at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, opened in January 2000, and is a model for the library of the future. As one of the largest and most technologically advanced libraries in the nation, Lied Library delivers the highest level of information services to the campus and community. Describes why Lied Library prevails as one of the most technologically advanced academic libraries in the USA, and possibly the world, and how its incorporation of new and innovative library technology, such as 3M digital ID collection management, benefits both library staff and patrons by making the library a more efficient place to retrieve information.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of earnings management during initial public offerings on the listing day returns.

The study collected data for 511 Indian IPOs that came between April 2003 and March 2019 for calculating earnings management. On the basis of the Cross Sectional Modified Jones Model 1995, the paper presents three proxies of earnings management as discretionary accruals (DA), discretionary current accruals (DCA) and discretionary long-term accruals (DLA). The study further used correlation and multiple regression analysis to assess the impact of earnings management on listing day returns.

The findings show that earnings management and listing day returns vary through issue-year and industry-type. Apart from it, the study reveals a greater contribution of short-term accruals in earnings management on the basis of higher DCA values. It also discloses that the aggregate level of earnings management (DA) influences listing returns, whereas DCA and DLA separately have no impact on the listing day returns of the Indian IPOs.

The findings are useful to potential investors and analysts to observe, assess and understand the quality of financial reports that are based on fallacious disclosure of accounting figures. The study also reflects the efficacy of Indian regulatory norms for IPOs in constraining earnings management and underpricing, thus providing meaningful insight to the policy makers and the regulators.

This study is distinguished by its focus on determining the influence of earnings management on listing day returns in Indian IPOs by using three earnings management proxies.