Search results

The purpose of this paper is to consider personal digital archiving (PDA) from an academic perspective. Although elements of research data management and personal information management are relevant, it is unclear what is available on university websites supporting PDA. The following question guided the research: where is “PDA” content housed in the top-level .edu domain and what is the format and nature of the content made available?

This descriptive study analyzed Google hits yielded by searching “PDA” within the .edu domain. Results were analyzed to determine where content was housed and its format and nature. Placement in the domain, delivery methods, topics, and the nature of the most highly ranking Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) were analyzed.

In the academy, PDA is not exclusively of interest in libraries; not quite half of the .edu URLs (45 percent) pointed to a library site. Scholarly papers were the most returned content, followed by blogs and conferences information. Closer analysis of the top 20 URLs showed that libraries are popular and papers, and blogs continue to be dominant.

The results suggest good PDA practices and recommendations are evolving. Academic librarians should examine these practices, refine them, and make them available and discoverable on the web.

This is the first paper, to the knowledge, to consider PDA content from the perspective of universities and university libraries.

Are radically novel practices more likely to attract recognition when the evaluating audience is composed of external evaluators? Our baseline argument asserts that radical novelty is more likely to be positively evaluated by an external audience and that peripheral (rather than core) producers have higher incentives to adopt novel practices that depart from tradition. Yet, because peripheral producers often lack the necessary support and legitimacy to promote novelty, audiences play a critical role in recognizing their innovative efforts. How can peripheral producers mitigate the challenges associated with novelty recognition? To answer this question, we explore how peripheral producers’ collaboration with acclaimed consultants affects the process of external audience recognition in the context of the Italian wine field from 1997 to 2006. Our findings suggest that radical novelty is positively received by an external audience composed of critics, although we do not find a significant difference between core and peripheral producers. However, external audiences are more open to recognizing peripheral producers’ use of novel practices when they collaborate with well-connected consultants. We find that the use of central consultants produces a “boosting” effect that accentuates the differences between evaluations of peripheral producers who embrace novelty and evaluations of those that follow the tradition. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence of the value of considering third-party actors such as consultants, who sit at the nexus between the agency required for innovation and external audiences’ recognition of novelty, when studying novelty evaluation and recognition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles that libraries play in the development of open source software.

Analyses how the use of open source software implies freedom and flexibility for libraries.

This column is simply exploratory, and proposes the motivation for libraries to be more actively involved in the open source movement.

As libraries are also involved in discussions regarding open access publishing and open standards for metadata and protocols, so should they take a more active role in the testing and development of open source software. Taking this role will not only assist libraries in the furtherance of important digital projects but extend the primary activities of librarianship in general.

One of the values of this column is to present, via the convergence of the open initiatives, a motivation for libraries to be more actively involved in the open source movement as an extension of traditional librarianship and as an enhancement to the digital projects and services they are already engaged in.

The journey of novelty – from the moment it arises to the time it takes hold – is as fascinating as it is problematic. A new entity, to be recognized as such, needs to be differentiated from what existed before. However, novelty poses cognitive challenges that hamper its appreciation since it is difficult to form expectations about and make sense of something genuinely new. And since novel ideas, products, technologies, or organizational forms often violate existing practices and social structures, they are usually met with skepticism and resistance. In this introductory piece, we take stock of research into the challenges of generating, recognizing, and legitimating novelty. We review each paper in this volume and highlight the new perspectives and insights they offer about how individuals, teams, and organizations search for novelty, see novelty, and sustain novelty. Finally, we outline several research themes that, we believe, are worthy of further scholarly attention.

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This paper introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This paper introduces topic modeling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.

For over four decades, IB scholars have been conceptualizing and empirically examining the organizational structure of the multinational corporation (MNC) without really placing relationships at the center of attention. It therefore remains unclear what characterizes those relationships beyond subunits’ roles, motivation, or control mechanisms. Relationship as a term has often been used but rarely defined in the IB literature on intra-firm networks. We develop arguments that position such relationships as the focal unit of analysis. We extend current IB literature to examine in detail the nature and dynamics of relationships in MNCs by borrowing insights from Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research, which focuses on the relational nature and dynamics of interactions between actors. We offer a theoretical framework and develop a conceptual model that brings to the fore the multiplexity and temporality of relationships in MNCs. We also argue that intra-MNC network relationships can be seen as an evolving process and advocate for shifting away from variance-based and typological views toward a process view for examining relationships. Theoretically, understanding what characterizes the nature of MNC intra-firm relationships and what processes contribute to structuring them provides important insights into the global configuration of the MNC and the required organizational design mechanisms needed for MNC existence and resilience. The study is timely and practically relevant in the sense that considering intra-firm relationships deserves even more attention in the current global economic environment when accessing external resources becomes costly and/or inefficient.

This chapter will explore processes of decommodification of specific local foods in South Italy. The aim is to offer both conceptual and empirical reflections on the topic. On the one side, the attempt will be to show the centrality of the notion of ‘labour’ in theoretically understanding the perspective of decommodification. On the other side, empirical support will be given through the presentation of a case study in South Italy. It clearly emerges that these processes are induced, among other elements, by a return to the land after having had different social and working experiences in urban contexts.