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The decision by Aslib to allocate a complete session of the Annual Conference to two papers on the relations between a central information unit and sectional units is an attempt to bring into the open a question which has for years been clouded in prejudice. The growth of information services, whether on an international, national, industry, or laboratory scale, has often been haphazard. A central unit, or a number of sectional units, or both systems together, may have developed as a result of pressures which often do not reflect the true needs of the users. The purpose of this paper is to try to review the problem objectively and to see what principles should govern the relationship between various units concerned with information within an organization (using the word organization in its widest sense).

Purpose – The integration of librarians and technologists to deliver information services represents a new and costly organizational challenge for many library administrators. To understand how to control the costs of integration, this study uses structural contingency theory to study the coordination of librarians and technologists within the information commons.

Design/methodology/approach – This study tests the structural contingency theory expectation that an organization will achieve higher levels of performance when there is a positive relationship between the degree of workflow interdependence and the complexity of coordinative structures necessary to integrate these workflows. This expectation was tested by (a) identifying and collecting a sample of information common; (b) developing and validating survey instruments to test the proposition; and (c) quantitatively analyzing the data to test the proposed contingency theory relationship.

Findings – The contingency theory expectations were confirmed by finding both a positive relationship between coordination and interdependence and a positive relationship between perceptions of performance and degree of congruency between interdependence and coordination.

Limitations – The findings of this study are limited to both the context of an information common and the structures tested. Future research should seek to both broaden the context in which these findings are applicable, and test additional structural relationships as proposed by contingency theory

Practical implications – This study contributes to the library profession in a number of ways. First, it suggests that managers can improve IC performance by matching coordination structures to the degree of interdependence. For instance, when librarians and technologists are strictly co-located, managers should coordinate workflows using less resource-intensive policies rather than meetings. Second, the instruments developed in this study will improve the library manager's ability to measure and report unit interdependence and coordination in a valid and reliable manner. Lastly, it also contributes to the study of structural contingency theory by presenting one of the first empirical confirmations of a positive relationship between interdependence and coordination.

Originality/value – This study represents one of the first empirical confirmations of the structural contingency theory expectations of both a positive relationship between workflow interdependence and coordination, and a positive relationship between performance and coordination's fit to workflow interdependence. These findings are of value to both organizational theorists and to administrators of information commons.

The purpose of this paper is to lay a theoretical foundation for identifying operational information units for library and information professional activities in the context of scholarly communication.

The study adopts a deduction-verification approach to formulate a typology of units for scholarly information. It first deduces possible units from an existing conceptualization of information, which defines information as the combined product of data and meaning, and then tests the usefulness of these units via two empirical investigations, one with a group of scholarly papers and the other with a sample of scholarly information users.

The results show that, on defining an information unit as a piece of information that is complete in both data and meaning, to such an extent that it remains meaningful to its target audience when retrieved and displayed independently in a database, it is then possible to formulate a hierarchical typology of units for scholarly information. The typology proposed in this study consists of three levels, which in turn, consists of 1, 5 and 44 units, respectively.

The result of this study has theoretical implications on both the philosophical and conceptual levels: on the philosophical level, it hinges on, and reinforces the objective view of information; on the conceptual level, it challenges the conceptualization of work by IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Library Reference Model but endorses that by Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME 2.0 model.

It calls for reconsideration of existing operational units in a variety of library and information activities.

The study strengthens the conceptual foundation of operational information units and brings to light the primacy of “one work” as an information unit and the possibility for it to be supplemented by smaller units.

This study aims to investigate the moderating role of hedonic and utilitarian purchase motives for the presentation order effect. Although past research finds that presenting item first and price later (e.g. 70 items for $29) increases consumers’ purchase intention more than presenting the information in the opposite order (e.g. $29 for 70 items), the effect was mostly examined in a hedonic consumption context. This study examines whether the effect is applicable for hedonic purchases but is less applicable for utilitarian purchases, and why.

Seven experiments tested the moderating effect of purchase motives for the presentation order effect. Two serial mediation analyses were conducted to examine the underlying mechanism.

The “item-price” (vs “price-item”) order increases hedonic purchases, but not utilitarian purchases. Because consumers feel guilty about hedonic purchases, they engage in motivated information processing to perceive greater value from their hedonic purchase when item (benefit) information is presented first and price (cost) information is presented later. Perceiving greater value reduces guilt, which consequently increases hedonic purchases. In contrast, the order effect is not observed for utilitarian purchases that do not elicit guilt. When a price discount is offered, the order effect is reversed because actual savings justify hedonic purchases better than perceived savings resulting from motivated information processing.

When promoting hedonic products, marketers are recommended to present item information before price information, unless a price discount is offered, in which case the price should be presented first.

This research introduces a novel moderator for the presentation order effect and a novel underlying mechanism, driven by the motivation to alleviate guilt associated with hedonic purchases.

This study aims to explore how firms can design their government affairs (GAs) units in ways that improve their ability to monitor and influence legislative developments in their firms’ corporate political environments.

This conceptual work is informed by existing research into organizational design, brought to life with illustrative examples of firms’ political actions derived from interviews conducted with practitioners in the field.

In line with organizational design thinking, the authors find that high-performing GA units need to be designed and built using a blend of mutually reinforcing organizational mechanisms. GA units should be staffed by autonomous managers with mixed skills-sets. Moreover, they should not be constrained by formal rules, but instead given autonomy and support to create lateral relations with other business units.

This study provides a “recipe” that managers can follow to create opportunities for the exchange of political information within their firms and enable and motivate GAs practitioners to monitor and influence political developments more effectively.

This research exposes important, organizational antecedents of firms’ political strategies, which have not been systematically explored in the existing literature.

I was asked to say something about the place of the information unit within the organizational structure and it was suggested that in making my contribution I should consider three particular areas: status, lines of communication between the information unit and other parts of the organization and relationship with management.

An industrial information unit must undertake certain activities to meet its customers' needs. The paper discusses these activities and places them in an order of priority. The resources available to a small, medium or large information unit are matched against the activities. The major activities, in order of priority, are considered to be (1) customer liaison, (2) special collections, (3) internal reports, (4) current awareness, (5) retrospective searching, (6) system development, (7) external literature data base compilation.

This paper aims to first investigate how unit pricing affects consumers’ grocery purchase decisions and perceptions of the shopping task’s information load. The second goal is to test how time pressure enhances the behavioural and perceptual effects of displaying unit prices.

Two on-line experiments were conducted using national samples of shoppers. In Study 1, participants indicated their choices and perceptions in an inter-brand shopping scenario where prepackaged products have conflicting positions on retail price and unit price. In Study 2, participants conducted the same shopping task but now under a condition of time pressure.

Study 1 shows that unit pricing shifts consumer choices towards the lower unit priced options and improves their perceptions of task information load. Study 2 shows that when consumers are under time pressure, unit pricing shows stronger effects on choices but not on perceptions.

The study comprised a fairly homogenous set of low involvement categories and relatively small assortments in a hypothetical purchase setting. Exploration of the role of unit pricing in more complex and more realistic purchase environments pose suitable avenues for future research.

This study shows that consumers benefit from unit pricing because it makes it easier for them to find the lower unit priced items and to more quickly complete their shopping task. Retailers will benefit from increased customer satisfaction and possibly an improved store image.

The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit pricing and that unit price information does not create harmful effects in terms of increasing their information load.

This study uses a specifically designed and controlled but nevertheless realistic grocery choice task to study the effects of unit pricing in an inter-brand context where there are only small differences in size and price. The study contributes to the literature by showing that in such conditions, unit prices help consumers compare the economic losses associated with product options. Their heuristic role is more pronounced when consumers are under time pressure. The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit prices.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology that enables the generation of valid and reliable inferences on what and how intellectual capital (IC) information is communicated by sell‐side analysts in their research reports.

The method described in this paper involves content‐analysing initiating coverage analyst reports using a four‐dimensional IC coding framework and a detailed coding instrument, which is founded in the literature and indigenous to analyst reports. The paper explicates methodological decisions associated with content analysis: selecting the appropriate sampling unit; recording unit and measurement unit; developing the categorisation scheme and coding instrument; the need for test coding; the approach to data collection; and assessment of reliability and validity.

The methodology described is applied to a sample of analyst reports to illustrate inferences that can be drawn on what and how IC information is communicated in analyst reports.

Various practical issues arising in the application of content analysis method are discussed and a methodology for investigating IC communications by sell‐side analysts is described in this paper. This knowledge can be useful to future researchers conducting content‐analytic studies involving analyst reports in general, and IC communications in analyst reports in particular.

This paper extends the methodology developed previously to examine IC information in analyst reports. Although inspired and heavily influenced by these works, the methodology presented in this paper differs from theirs on several fronts. The paper introduces an alternative methodological paradigm to the study of analyst reports by emphasising them as a communication medium through which sell‐side analysts may pursue an agenda of their own. This is contrasted with the view held by several prior researchers that analyst reports just provide a record of analysts' thought processes.

A web site usually contains a large number of concept entities, each consisting of one or more web pages connected by hyperlinks. In order to discover these concept entities for more expressive web site queries and other applications, the web unit mining problem has been proposed. Web unit mining aims to determine web pages that constitute a concept entity and classify concept entities into categories. Nevertheless, the performance of an existing web unit mining algorithm, iWUM, suffers as it may create more than one web unit (incomplete web units) from a single concept entity. This paper presents two methods to solve this problem. The first method introduces a more effective web fragment construction method so as reduce later classification errors. The second method incorporates site‐specific knowledge to discover and handle incomplete web units. Experiments show that incomplete web units can be removed and overall accuracy has been significantly improved, especially on the precision and F1 measures.