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This paper focuses on the way users navigate bibliographic families not only when a user has no specific document in mind but also when he/she has a specific predefined need in mind.

To this end, the Epic of Kings was selected as a test-bed for the study and both situations were studied based on International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions-Library Reference Model (IFLA-LRM), but the potential users (participants of this study) were not directly exposed to the entities of the model. Card sorting, interview and distributing questionnaire constituted the data-gathering process.

Almost all of the participants in this study, when they had no specific resource in mind, generated a top-down view of the family, and in this view, all of them disregarded the item entity and lots of them disregarded the manifestations also. Yet on the other side, when they were asked to assume themselves in certain situations (in need of a specific work with a predefined expression and format), they viewed the bibliographic family from a bottom-up approach.

Most of the studies in this area regard the navigation process of users as a top-down approach and the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) family as a model suitable for hierarchical top-down visualization of bibliographic families. Yet this study poses the bottom-up approach of users regarding the family.

The aim of this paper is to explore issues of cultural identity of the people of Baltistan and any challenges they face in the nation state of Pakistan.

The paper uses a postcolonial lens to offer a review and synthesis of issues of cultural identity of the Balti people of Pakistan.

The review demonstrates how the historical and socio‐political context is intertwined with the Balti people's cultural identity which remains hybrid as well as contextual in its construction. It reveals that while the state of Pakistan has been able to assert its control over the Balti people and the region of Baltistan predominantly through military means, the critical issues of cultural pluralism and the basic human rights of the Balti people have remained generally ignored throughout the 63 years since partition.

The contentions offered in this paper need to be refined through in‐depth empirical studies. Future scholars may wish to examine the class and cultural politics at work in the emerging renaissance movement in Baltistan. Scholars may also examine how the lack of economic development and investment in Baltistan may be forcing the Balti people to resign (at least some elements of) their cultural identity to seek employment in urban areas of Pakistan.

The paper brings to the fore issues of cultural identity of the people of Baltistan, which have – to a large extent – remained ignored by Pakistan as well as internationally.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of cities develop strategies. The discourse of strategic management has become an obligatory point of passage for many city managers. This paper starts by posing an ostensibly simple question: why do cities need strategies? The commonsensical answer to the question is: because cities compete with each other. This paper aims to problematise the seemingly natural link between cities, competition and strategy. It also aims to explore the role that calculative practices play in creating city league tables that, in turn, function as the a priori condition that generates competition between cities.

This paper is interdisciplinary and draws on the related disciplines of accounting, organization theory and strategy. The argument unfolds in four steps: first, it briefly provides some theoretical background for analysis and relates it back to strategizing and accounting as a calculative practice; second, it scrutinizes league tables as an a priori of competition; third, it discusses the implications of the argument for city management and critical accounting; finally, it concludes with a discussion of the power effects of those calculative practices that shape strategizing in cities through the production of competition.

This paper argues that city strategizing is best understood as a set of complex responses to a new competitive arena, one rendered visible through calculative practices, manifested through city rankings. The paper makes five key contributions: one, league tables reduce qualities to a quantifiable form; two, league tables create an order amongst an heterogeneous ensemble of entities; three, league tables stimulate the very competition they claim to reflect; four, once competition is accepted, individual players need a strategy to play the game; and five, league tables have important power effects that may result in unintended consequences.

The paper contributes to understanding how calculative practices relate to strategy; it explores the organizational environment in which city managers strategize; in addition, it discusses the problem of civic schizophrenia.

The paper seeks to open up an agenda for studying city management, strategy and accounting.

Although it depicts a Germanic warrior culture of nearly 1,500 years ago, the Old English epic poem Beowulf contains timely insights into leadership and motivation, trust, respect, loyalty, and sacrifice that could inform current leadership practice and teaching. To help reveal some of these insights, this study has three main purposes: (a) examine the character of Beowulf as a leader of his warrior band and nation; (b) explain the ways in which the hero Beowulf fits into the Conger-Kanungo model of charismatic leadership; and, (c) explore how the epic poem dramatizes risks of an overreliance upon a charismatic leader. The results of this investigation attempt to provide meaningful insights for practitioners of management, researchers, and instructors of leadership with a special emphasis on the pedagogical value of artifacts of popular culture.

The purpose of this paper is to help leaders to reflect on how to make difficult decisions by developing practical wisdom based on Indian traditions. In complex scenarios, when leaders are is crisis, they often tend to rush into decisions without proper reflection, rely too heavily on data and analytics, and demonstrate an inability to decide based on subtle, intangible and often very important elements like emotion, intuition and spiritual discernment. In this paper, the author discusses what it means to make wise decisions based on the Hindu concept of discrimination (viveka) – that is, the ability to perceive and make fine distinctions and also to notice and value quality which is very important part of spiritual discernment.

This paper uses four decision-making scenarios from an Indian epic Mahabharata to cast light on dilemmas that seem to trip up so many twenty-first century leaders. The author draws lessons from the four stories and highlight key challenges in decision making – developing spiritual discernment to support logic based and emotion-laden decision making.

Allowing crisis to drive decisions, failing to recognize and account for the biases and attachments, and not developing good role clarity keep leaders from making the decisions they need to, from a place of ethical clarity. The subtle but essential spirit of ethical decision making is discernment and quality of discernment increases when leaders develop “viveka” or discrimination capability and use it regularly.

It is important to remember that developing skills in using viveka in discernment suggested in this paper requires “unlearning” some of the beliefs and practices that served leaders in the past. This framework might be thought provoking and rich conceptually but only action and practice using this framework with awareness makes managers wise leaders.

This paper proposes a framework for making difficult decisions and has implications for developing managers and leaders who can make decisions with discernment. Especially in these days of complexity and turbulence, we need to develop people to resolve dilemmas wisely and effectively. The framework for developing discernment by using intuition, instinct and emotions along with data effectively can help leader using this framework make wise decisions. The stories of leadership success and failure in the Mahabharata serve to remind us that reactive or unreflective decision making are not the answer to rapid change and uncertainty. Yet, leaders need to be able to make sound decisions rapidly in a complex and changeable context by paying attention to both explicit and tacit factors. Stories open up other paths to cultivating this ability of paying attention to viveka that is at the root of spiritual discernment. With clear engagement with the role of leader; the will to detach from desired outcomes; and a stance of courage, humility and ethical clarity, we have the tools we need to manage accelerating complexity, whatever its source.

Decision-making process is examined holistically – by bringing in recent developments in brain research along with stories and lessons from an ancient epic from India to recognize that making decisions is complex and important element that distinguishes wise leaders from smart leaders. This paper could help smart leaders gain ethical clarity by developing discernment integrating fine qualities of discrimination.

More than 20 songs by Spanish and non-Spanish bands about the Castilian lord and epic hero Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, account for the topicality of the Hispanic Middle Ages in heavy metal. This chapter explores how diversely El Cid is addressed in 10 of these songs, in particular, from the perspectives of reception theory and both the cultural background of the band (Spanish or non-Spanish) and the language in which the lyrics are written (Spanish or English). Through detailed textual analysis and contextualisation, I will examine how, for Spanish (and Spanish-American) bands, El Cid serves the purpose of naturalising the stereotypical heavy-metal medieval knight, thereby functioning as a vindication of Hispanic cultural heritage within what is perceived to be an Anglo-American (and Germanic-Nordic) dominated musical scene. By contrast, non-Spanish bands resort primarily to El Cid to refresh the overused motif of the medieval knight, but sometimes in a more connoted manner as well, in which his iconic value as a Moor-slayer and a defender of the Western white Christian principles is highlighted. Moreover, I will discuss the appropriation and re-appropriation of El Cid by, respectively, non-Spanish and Spanish heavy metal bands, from the point of view of cultural appreciation and appropriation, and Islamophobia.

The figure of the Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, is progressively becoming a frequent topic in metal music. This growing presence has been evident particularly since the explosion of power metal in the late 1990s, and the more recent rise of folk metal, being felt not only in Spanish and Spanish-influenced bands, but also in others with no known links to the Spanish culture. This chapter establishes how the choice of such sources influences the final portrait of El Cid in metal music and the message conveyed to and the effect on the listener. The motivation behind the choices above is explored with a focus on musical, socio-cultural and political–ideological factors.

Sages and seers in ancient India specified dharma, artha, kama and moksha as the four ends of a moral and productive life and emphasised the attainment of a proper balance between the spiritual health and the material health. However, most of their intellectual energy was directed towards the attainment of moksha, the salvation from birth‐death‐rebirth cycle. Kautilya, on the other hand considered poverty as a living death and concentrated on devising economic policies to achieve salvation from poverty but without compromising with ethical values unless survival of the state was threatened. Kautilya's Arthashastra is unique in emphasising the imperative of economic growth and welfare of all. According to him, if there is no dharma, there is no society. He believed that ethical values pave the way to heaven as well as to prosperity on the earth, that is, have an intrinsic value as well as an instrumental value. He referred the reader to the Vedas and Philosophy for learning moral theory, which sheds light on the distinction between good and bad and moral and immoral actions. He extended the conceptual framework to deal with conflict of interest situations arising from the emerging capitalism. He dedicated his work to Om (symbol of spirituality, God) and Brihaspati and Sukra (political thinkers) implying, perhaps, that his goal was to integrate ethics and economics. It is argued that the level of integration between economics and ethics is significantly higher in Kautilya's Arthashastra than that in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or for that matter in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Interactive video: is it all talk, or is somebody out there actually doing something? Having discussed theoretical and technical questions in this series in past months, I would now like to describe some practical applications. If you attended EPIC's Interactive Video Briefing in London in November, you heard about a number of pilot projects, here and in America — and saw three demonstrated. The theme of the briefing was ‘Practice Not Theory’, and the day included presentations, in graduated degrees of complexity, on three pilot projects currently under way in Britain. The Royal Military Police demonstrated the tape‐based Sony Responder; Smith Kline & French introduced their videodisc, produced by EPIC, for use on the Pioneer PR‐7820 disc player with micro‐processor onboard; and the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology (UWIST) unveiled a project undertaken for Texaco Overseas Tankship to produce an interface between the Pioneer disc player and an external Commodore PET micro‐computer. Let's just recap on these to begin.