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The quest to discover optimal conditions or amounts has been carried out in many scientific disciplines and practical fields. In astrophysics, biology, medicine, psychology and education, the quest has resulted in finding the right amount of something, a desirable middle between extremes, a balance between conditions or the optimal state of a system. The results are referred to as the Goldilocks principle, which is based on the idea of being “just right”. The aim of our study was to find out if there are any measures in information search that could be identified as Goldilocks ranges.

We conducted a user experiment in which 68 participants carried out a time-unlimited, topical search task involving finding relevant websites on the basis of which the participants were supposed to prepare a presentation on a given topic. We examined aspects of their search behavior.

We found that information search Goldilocks ranges can be identified for a length of a search session, number of relevant results, number of queries submitted and number of search engine results pages (SERPs) visited. This preliminary study has resulted in indicating the following dominant ranges: Number of relevant documents found: 5–8; Time spent searching: 21–35 min; Number of queries submitted: 3–7; Number of SERPs viewed: 1–3.

Till now, no one has studied Goldilocks ranges in information retrieval. The Goldilocks ranges have some practical implications for improving the effectiveness of web searching.

This paper aims to discuss issues concerning the desirability of finding ways to close the gap between academic research and management practice – especially in the case of marketing and consumer research.

The issues are addressed by means of a personal essay.

The discussion adopts the extreme viewpoint that achieving a reconciliation or resolution of the differences between scholarly inquiry and managerial relevance in either research or teaching constitutes an undesirable or even deplorable form of compromise.

The essay concludes that – contrary to the wisdom of Goldilocks – compromise between academic scholarship and practical relevance merits opprobrium rather than approbation.

The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of CEO arrogance on key attitudes of a company’s top management team (TMT).

An experimental design involving a business simulation is used to test the effects of a CEO’s perceived arrogance and humility on the TMT in a boardroom setting.

The study finds that, as predicted, arrogant CEOs adversely impacts TMT engagement, cohesiveness, collaboration and consensual decision-making. Thus, the higher the level of CEO arrogance, the lower the levels of positive TMT attitudes. The study intriguingly also finds that CEOs who displayed humility also negatively influenced the attitudes of the TMT.

The study took place in South Africa, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The use of a laboratory experiment may affect the ecological validity of the findings.

The results demonstrate that a “Goldilocks” area of neutrality between arrogance and humility should be sought after by CEOs and recruiters of CEOs. If this is impossible, humble CEOs are preferable to arrogant ones.

This paper empirically demonstrates that arrogant leaders negatively impact their TMT followers in a boardroom environment across a number of attitudes that are keys to the success of effectively managing a corporation. The study also demonstrates that moderation is desired by followers and that CEOs being perceived as overly humble is almost as bad as being perceived as arrogant.

This paper aims to examine the conditions under which small and medium enterprises (SMEs) invest in security services when they migrate their e-commerce applications to the cloud environment. Using a risk management perspective, the paper assesses the impact of security service pricing, security incident prevalence and virulence to estimate SME security spending at the market level and draw out implications for SMEs and security service providers.

Security risks are inherently characterized by uncertainty. This study uses a Monte Carlo approach to understand the role of uncertainty in the decision to adopt security services. A model relating key security constructs is assembled based on key constructs from the domain. By manipulating security service costs and security incident types, the model estimates the market-level adoption of services, security incidents and damages incurred, along with measures of their relative dispersion.

Three key findings emerge from this study. First, adoption of services and protection is higher when tiered security services are provided, indicating that SMEs prefer to choose their security services rather than accept uniformly priced products. Second, SMEs are considered price-sensitive, resulting in a maximum level of spending in the market. Third, results indicate that security incidents and damages can be much higher than the mean in some cases, and this should serve as a cautionary note to SMEs.

Security spending has been modeled at the firm level. Adopting a market-level perspective represents a novel contribution. Additionally, the Monte Carlo approach provides managers with tangible measures of uncertainty, affording additional information and insight when making security service adoption decisions.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the conceptual and historical genesis of the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) which has become one of the most commonly used instructional frameworks for research and professional development in the field of reading and literacy.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This chapter uses a narrative, historical approach to describe the emergence of the model in the work taking place in the late 1970s and early 1980s in reading research and educational theory, particularly at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana as carried out by David Pearson, Meg Gallagher, and their colleagues.

Findings – The GRR Model began, in part, in response to the startling findings of Dolores Durkin’s (1978/1979) study of reading comprehension instruction in classrooms which found that little instruction was occurring even while students were completing numerous assignments and question-response activities. Pearson and Gallagher were among those researchers who took seriously the task of developing an instructional model and approach for comprehension strategy instruction that included explicit instruction. They recognized a need for teachers to be responsible for leading and scaffolding instruction, even as they supported learners in moving toward independent application of strategies and independence in reading. Based in the current research in the reading field and the rediscovery of the work of Vygotsky (1978) and the descriptions of scaffolding as coined by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), Pearson and Gallagher developed the model of gradual release. Over time, the model has been adapted by many literacy scholars, applied to curriculum planning, used with teachers for professional development, reprinted numerous times, and with the advent of the Internet, proliferated even further as teachers and educators share their own versions of the model. This chapter introduces readers to the original model and multiple additional representations/iterations of the model that emerged over the past few decades. This chapter also attends to important nuances in the model and to some misconceptions of the instructional model.

Research Limitations/Implications – Despite the popularity of the original GRR model developed by Pearson and Gallagher and the many adaptations of the model by many collaborators and colleagues in literacy – and even beyond – there have been very few publications that have explored the historical and conceptual origins of the model and its staying power.

Practical Implications – This chapter will speak to researchers, teachers, and other educators who use the GRR model to help guide thinking about instruction in reading, writing, and other content areas with children, youth, pre-service teachers, and in-service teachers. This chapter provides a thoughtful discussion of multiple representations of the gradual release process and the nuances of the model in ways that will help to dispel misuse of the model while recognizing its long-standing and sound foundation on established socio-cognitive principles and instructional theories such as those espoused by Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, Anne Brown, and others.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter makes an original contribution to the field in explaining the historical development and theoretical origins of the GRR model by Pearson and Gallagher (1983) and in presenting multiple iterations of the model developed by Pearson and his colleagues in the field.

This edited collection proposes an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of reproductive technologies (RTs), which reflects the fact that many people use different technologies throughout their lifecourse and resists the disciplinary siloing of research on these technologies. The ever-expanding availability of RTs, the continued roll-out of ‘family planning’ and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and trans* people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users' expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies' availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We offer this book as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and RTs, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of RTs and the ways in which they are studied and theorised. Here, we introduce the project and outline the structure of the book.

The purpose of this study is to use the optimization modeling method to explore whether there is an ideal arrangement of course enrollments that can yield optimal parking demand and supply on college campuses.

Using the University of Louisville as a case study, this study deploys a three-step analytical process to examine the correlation between parking demand and course enrollment, estimate parking demand based on course enrollment with regression analyses and embed this estimated relationship in an optimization model that minimizes on-campus parking demand and supply.

The correlation analyses suggest significant correlations between course enrollments and on-campus parking. The correlation patterns are different between students and university employees. The optimization results indicate that coupling parking supply and course scheduling decisions can reduce parking supply by 30%.

Voluminous studies on sustainable campus transportation have focused on transportation demand management strategies. The relationship between course-scheduling and parking demand was not explicitly accounted for in most studies. This study's results reveal that parking demand on campus depends on the number of courses offered across time. Thus, factoring and optimizing course schedules in campus parking decisions remains a viable and essential option to reduce on-campus parking demand.