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The task of the financial manager of a library is a formidable one. Wacht defines a financial manager as a person who manages the resources of an economic entity for the purposes of influencing the future outcome of its operations. The financial manager plays the major role in planning and measuring the organization's needs for funds, raising the necessary funds, and making certain that the funds acquired are properly employed. A financial manager must also estimate the future cash flow associated with individual projects, in addition to the funds necessary for the total operation of a library. Other duties include the evaluation of prospective new investments and programs on the organization's operations.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

The aim of this study is to document and analyze experiences with building a new hospital guided by lean-led hospital design (LLHD) (Grunden and Hagood, 2012) and to investigate key mechanisms enhancing healthcare professionals' participation and collaboration in implementing this innovative approach.

An in-depth case study of the implementation of LLHD in a Dutch hospital was performed based on multiple data sources. The case hospital presented a unique opportunity since there was embedded access to the data by the first author.

Three mechanisms supporting participation and collaboration of staff for implementing LLHD were identified. (1) Freedom in translating a concept enables managers to balance it with variations in practice at the organizational level. (2) A set of key principles governing the design process appeared an important anchor on a managerial level in a changing environment. (3) Creation of a supportive attitude toward lean and lean facility design, with co-creation as a key element of LLHD.

By using the emerging mechanisms, managers/change agents can enlarge collaboration and participation of hospital staff when implementing organization-wide innovations.

This case study delivers a unique inside view on the dynamics evolving in the complex change processes at organizational, managerial and personal levels involved in implementing LLHD.