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Only in the search tor answers to disruptive questions will you find the means to build an Extraordinary Organization

Stanley Jast, who could be brash and also subtle in over‐ and in under‐statement once said to the writer that librarians as a class were much too bashful. He observed that most of the town librarians who had crossed the library stage since public libraries began were quiet lads who had done their duty, taken their cash, and let the credit go. Only now and again had one stood out to catch the limelight of the stage, and quickly it would darken again. We leave this great thought to our readers.

This paper was originally presented as a keynote presentation to the annual conference of the ANZHES whose theme was “knowledge skills and expertise”. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on history as a field of study in the context of changing conditions and new debates about knowledge in the twenty-first century.

The paper reviews three important lines of sociological argument about changed conditions for knowledge: the case to “bring knowledge back in” to school curriculum; the contention that knowledge in universities is moving from “mode 1” to “mode 2” forms; and arguments about testing and audit culture effects on the practices of universities and schools. It then draws on interviews with historians and history teachers to show how they think about the form of their field, its value, and the impact of the changing conditions signalled in those arguments.

The paper argues that some features of the discipline which have been important to history continue to be apparent but are under challenge in the conditions of education institutions today and that there is a disjunction between teachers’ views of the value of history and those evident in the public political arena.

The paper draws on a major Australia Research Council funded study of “knowledge building across schooling and higher education” which focusses on issues of disciplinarity and the fields of physics and history.

The paper is intended as a new reflection on the field of value to those working as historians.

The use of social media in crisis communication is growing and spreading in an instantaneous speed. The social media technology enables immediate information sharing reaching millions of users on various social media platforms. This paper has gathered lessons learnt from the experiences of the Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service in the UK, the Oslo Police Operation Center in Norway, and from an extensive literature review on social media and crisis communication. This empirical and theoretical information was the basis of the 18 guidelines or “do’s” and “don’ts” on how to use social media in crisis communication. The purpose of this paper was to gather best practices that can help crisis managers when attempting to use social media as a crisis communication tool.

The paper had two cases with semi-structured interviews with representatives from two crisis management organizations (Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service in the UK dealing with safety and Oslo Police Operation Center in Norwa dealing with security). The empirical data were complemented by documentary analysis of the most up-to-date articles on social media in crisis communication.

The paper provides empirical insights about how to use social media as a crisis communication tool. The two case studies provide different ways to use social media (one-way communication tool and as a two-way information share). This empirical and theoretical information was the basis of the 18 guidelines or “do’s” and “don’ts” on how to use social media in crisis communication. The “do’s” and “don’ts” are best practices that can help crisis managers when attempting to use social media as a crisis communication tool. Some of the main “do’s” include building a relationship with the public prior to a crisis; being courteous, honest and transparent; being factual, accurate and credible; being timely in your messages during a crisis, etc. Some of the main “don’ts” include do not speculate; do not post personal opinions; do not post anything that could bring the organization into disrepute etc.

Because of the chosen research approach with two case studies complemented by a literature review, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the guidelines provided and to further find other case studies.

The guidelines including 18 “do’s” and “don’ts” are best practices that can help crisis managers when attempting to use social media as a crisis communication tool.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how social media technology can play a major role in the response efforts of the crisis management community during a crisis. It also reveals the potential of using social media as an “information harvesting” tool and a tool for “rumor management”.

In many countries in the Global North, interventions in deprived neighbourhoods have attempted to tackle poverty by spatially deconcentrating it. This has commonly been done through housing restructuring programmes in areas of social housing. Supported by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis, such interventions promote the diversification of housing tenures and housing typologies, based on the idea that a wider mix will result in increased opportunities of interaction across housing tenures and in local social networks becoming more heterogeneous. Using data from interviews, surveys and participant observation in meetings and events organised by local residents in North Peckham, an area in South London which in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s was the site of a large-scale housing restructuring programme, this chapter explores the expectations and experiences of neighbouring of long-term and newer arrival social housing tenants. This chapter shows that their different experiences of the neighbourhood and of physical and social change, as well as their diverging socio-economic characteristics – long-term residents tended to be older and retired while newer residents tended to have more complex needs – highly influenced perceptions of neighbourly relations and the significance attached to them. Despite finding high levels of neighbourly interaction and assistance, it also shows that attitudes and expectations towards neighbours were marked by a sense of nostalgia among long-term social tenants, stigma due to the area’s past and towards newer social tenants and by feelings of alienation due to the perceived residualisation of the social housing tenure and increased housing unaffordability.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

The purpose of this article is to explore the ability of a novel psychological theory of how people make decisions, narrative‐based decision theory, to help explain people's decisions about whether to continue investment in a research and development (R&D) project (R&D progress decisions).

The paper applies the new theory to an empirical finding of existing research on R&D progress decisions; the finding that instruction in the sunk cost principle seems to mitigate the sunk cost effect in R&D progress decision‐making.

By interpreting the empirical finding in terms of narrative‐based decision theory, the paper is able to clarify and extend an earlier explanation for the empirical finding. More specifically, by drawing on narrative‐based decision theory the paper is able to provide a more detailed explanation of how the predictor variable (sunk cost) and the moderator variable (instruction in the sunk cost principle) may exert an influence.

Based on the result of the exploration, the authors call for further investigations into narrative‐based decision theory's value in explaining R&D progress decisions, and other management decisions.

Furthermore, the authors call for investigations into how narrative‐based decision theory may help decision‐makers in improving the quality of R&D progress decisions.

Narrative‐based decision theory is a recent theory from the field of naturalistic decision‐making. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first article that, by using an example, illustrates how the theory may help in explaining the findings of empirical research on management decisions.

Chemistry as an applied science suffers from the fact that its necessarily close connection with various branches of industry is ill defined and generally very unsatisfactory in character. One result of this is that those who have made chemistry their profession find themselves more often than not in the position of having to subordinate their professional instincts to the temporary exigencies of some particular branch of trade and to find their professional status called in question and criticised by those who are not in the profession itself and who have no right to criticise.

To explain how genres structure temporal coordination in virtual teams over time.

The first year e‐mail archive of a small distributed software development start‐up was coded and analyzed and these primary data were complemented with interviews of the key participants and examination of notes from the weekly phone meetings.

In this paper, it is found that members of a small start‐up organization temporally coordinated their dispersed activities through everyday communicative practices, thus accomplishing both the distributed development of a software system and the creation of a robust virtual team. In particular, the LC members used three specific genres – status reports, bug/error notifications, and update notifications – and one genre system – phone meeting management – to coordinate their distributed software development over time.

The study confirms the various suggestions from prior virtual team research that structuring communication and work process is an important mechanism for the temporal coordination of dispersed activities. In particular, an attempt has been made to show that the notions of genre and genre system are particularly useful to make sense of and analyze how such structuring actually occurs over time.

In this paper, the research focus is shifted from how a given set of temporal coordination mechanisms affect team performance to how coordination mechanisms emerge, are stabilized, and adapted over time. It is also shown how the notion of genre may be used to shed light on the practices through which temporal coordination is accomplished in geographically distributed teams.