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This article focuses on the conditions that are conducive to effective work on reducing children's vulnerability to social exclusion. It draws on three studies of practitioners who are collaborating to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. Two ideas are discussed: distributed expertise and relational agency. Distributed expertise recognises that expertise is distributed across local systems and that practitioners need to become adept at recognising, drawing on and contributing to it. Relational agency offers a finer‐grained analysis of what is involved in working in systems of distributed expertise. Findings include the need for professionals to develop relational agency as an extra layer of expertise alongside their core professional expertise and a concern that interprofessional work may result in seeing clients as tasks to be worked on rather than people to be worked with relationally. Implications for training and professional development are outlined.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

Sharing expertise is a growing field of interest because of the increased amount of available information, turnover of experts and globalization of companies. Sharing expertise is a difficult task; therefore, experts often lack motivation, skills and time to document their expertise. The developed expertise cycle is a framework where knowledge stewards build personal trusted relationships with experts. Knowledge stewards interview the experts, construct the knowledge and document it, making it available for knowledge seekers. The expertise cycle is tested in two cases where the expertise is distributed to different individuals and business units. In both cases the usage of the expertise cycle was expanded. As a conclusion, the usage of the expertise cycle and described best practices are recommended. Instead of providing more information we should concentrate on providing better quality of information – and the expertise cycle is a valuable method to achieve this goal.

This article explores how the social media usage affect team creative performance via transactive memory system, knowledge interaction and expertise coordination.

The study is based on the perspective of transaction memory system and expertise coordination theory. A research model was constructed and tested, involving 289 individuals from 67 distributed agile software development teams.

The results indicate that social media usage is positively correlated with transactive memory system, and social media usage and transactive memory system have positive relations to knowledge interaction and expertise coordination. Moreover, this analysis shows that knowledge interaction has a positive relationship with expertise coordination, and expertise coordination positively affects team creative performance. However, knowledge interaction has no direct relationship on team creative performance, and its indirect impact on team creative performance was fully mediated by expertise coordination. This research shows that social media usage by distributed agile software development teams can support the development of transactive memory system and promote expertise coordination. In addition, knowledge interaction alone is not enough, and expertise coordination must be achieved to increase team creative performance.

First, this paper explores the mechanism of transactive memory system in distributed Agile Software Development teams from the perspective of social media, which is different from the previous information processing theory framework that confined transactive memory system to the cognitive aspects of knowledge coding, storage and retrieval. Second, this research focuses on the knowledge interaction and expertise coordination formed by team members in the process of communication in the context of social media usage, which confirms the crucial roles of social media usage and transactive memory system in team knowledge management and team creative performance. Then, this research also shows that the development of transactive memory system in the team is indeed an important factor to promote knowledge interaction and professional expertise coordination.

The idea of Simon according to which instructions are premises for further decisions is formalized with respect to informationally decentralized organizations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper is built on the economic theory of teams by Marschak and Radner. Team theory is particularly suited to the analysis of informationally decentralized systems. Teams are composed of agents who strive for a common aim, but are informed of different parameters that characterize the state of nature. In particular, the members want to maximize the team payoff function that depends on both the actions of the members and the state of nature.

For teams à la Marshack-Radner, since every member needs to compute optimal action rules, the paper shows that two types of expertise are required: forecasting expertise (as competence over the randomness of the parameters that affect the team payoff function) and organizational expertise (as comprehension of the relevant characteristics of the other members). When the members are supposed to have complete expertise, the only role of orders is the communication of information about the state of nature. Instead, when instructions report actions under the control of the senders, the team population can be classified into ranks, each one having a particular computational problem to solve. The paper analyzes the conditions under which instructions can correspond to different and ordered degree of intelligibility of the team operations. Through instructions non-decodable information is built directly into the decision rules chosen by the receivers, and instructions can realize economies in the use of expertise.

Instructions are formally shown to play a crucial role when expertise is differently distributed across agents.

What is the nature of reference work in the digital library? What is the role of the reference librarian where many users serve themselves by means of BIDS and other free‐at‐point‐of‐use services which emulate the Bath original (e.g. MIDAS in Manchester and EDINA in Edinburgh)? How is the concept of the ‘reference desk’ to be defined where points of presence for both users and librarians are distributed? Can assumptions based on specialist roles and fixed locations migrate to the world of virtual reference work? An Edinburgh‐based research project is exploring these issues in the context of the enhanced regional communications now available through EaStMAN (Edinburgh and Stirling Metropolitan Area Network). A major goal is for local HE institutions to explore the possibilities afforded for collaborative reference work. The project team have completed preliminary work with the BIOSIS Abstracts service hosted by the EDINA consortium. In this paper, we present the results of an investigation of the experiences of users and the work patterns of librarians and relate these to the design rationale of a prototype Web‐based network reference consultation support system. Our focus here is on typologies of user problems and expert response across various media and genres of interaction. A pilot service is scheduled to start in the autumn of 1997 and we plan to report on its use at a later date.

The paper focuses on preventative services for children, young people and families. It argues that client‐led service provision calls for flexibility from service providers, using the distributed expertise to be found across the professions involved and a high degree of interprofessional trust. All this, in turn, requires a systemic response from the major agencies if they are to support this new professionalism.

The purpose of this paper is to compare a range of quality and continuous improvement strategies and to investigate whether there is a best choice of strategy for use within the medical devices sector.

A brief literature‐based review of a number of continuous improvement strategies. Comparison of these strategies and a subsequent discussion of the rationale that guides the choice of strategy based on the prevailing conditions. An overview of this process in the context of the medical devices sector is provided.

Quality and continuous improvement strategies can be differentiated in terms of their cultural or process focus. Moreover, the favoured leadership style of an organisation may play a part in determining which strategies are likely to be most appropriate. From the medical device and healthcare product perspective, regulatory and purchasing considerations will have a role in determining the strategy adopted.

For managers seeking to implement a strategy for continuous improvement, a review of organisational leadership styles may help the decision–making process. For the medical devices sector, in particular, the need to align the strategy adopted with regulatory requirements is perhaps self‐evident. However, only by a detailed understanding of the issues involved in continuous improvement, can all of the attendant benefits be gained.

The paper proposes a link between a given organisation's favoured leadership style and the applicability of a particular continuous improvement strategy. The implications for the medical device and healthcare technologies sector are specifically addressed.

This paper reports findings from five case studies of New Zealand organisations that introduced new initiatives such as TQM and “learning organisation” concepts as a result of facing a business environment of continuous change and uncertainty. The case studies, carried out between 1993‐96, highlight seven crucial limitations in the debate about the appropriate skills for such environments. Research findings also provide: evidence of the core skills that employees and managers need for such environments; and a new paradigm of the critical organisational characteristics, culture and form that facilitate learning in these conditions; and the implications for managers, human resource practitioners and training providers.

This study aims to investigate how boundary work is carried out at the incident site during exercises with police, ambulance and rescue services, and how boundary awareness is developed based on this boundary work. Collaboration in emergency work is challenging on many levels. The unforeseen and temporary nature of incidents presents basic challenges. Another important challenge is boundaries between specialised and autonomous emergency service organisations. Knowledge on how exercises are performed to increase the individuals' and organisations' preparedness for future joint-response work is relatively limited.

Empirically, full-scale exercises involving police, ambulance and rescue services and with repetition of practical scenarios and joint-reflection seminars are studied. Interview data with 26 exercise participants were analysed using thematic analysis. The analytic focus is on how boundaries are identified, negotiated and managed in the participants’ work.

Much of the work in the exercises was performed within distinct areas of expertise, in accordance with concrete routines, skills and responsibilities. Boundary work was often organised in the form of distribution of labour or creating chains of actions. The exercises shed light on challenges related to other aspects of emergency response, such as a lack of resources, diverging primary responsibilities, time-criticality and hazardous environments. The design allowed participants to explicate boundaries, to test and discuss alternative solutions and to visualise the effects of different solutions, as the scenarios were repeated.

The study found that the boundaries that were identified were often of institutional character, and were also related to the specific scenarios and to the actions taken in the activities. By integrating real-life experiences of collaborative work in the exercise, the exercise gained a certain meaning that was essential for the participants to develop boundary awareness.