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In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

The global proliferation of distance learning programs has become a major phenomenon of our times. So rapid is the growth rate of distance learning options, that statistics on them are rendered out-of-date at the moment of publication. As soon as innovations in media and automation technologies have appeared, their new capabilities have been adapted to distance learning applications, fueling the growth of distance learning programs, and providing marketing tools for the promotion of newly upgraded or newly created distance learning programs and institutions. Rapid growth in a highly competitive market has led to the duplication and overlapping of new distance learning options both within institutions and across institutional and geographical boundaries.

The creation of public value is a topical debate for Dutch civil society organizations. Over the years, moving from government to governance, they supposedly have gained responsibility and space in meeting public needs. However, meeting the priority public needs and demonstrating actual public value creation has proved difficult. This has led to many discussions on how and if these organizations are creating public value. This study therefore investigated three practical cases to explore and explain how managers of housing associations create public value.

A case study method was employed.

Based on the different cases we can conclude that despite high ambitions, deviating normative views and the will to change displayed by the managers in the cases we investigated, we did not encounter situations where managers actually managed spaces for the creation of public value. The involved managers are still led by formal agendas and policies, rather than engaging in dialogues with their relevant stakeholders. They remain segmented in their approach and offering of services. Managers’ environment and stakeholders are not yet naturally seen as a place for sharing information and reframing boundaries for creating public value.

The opportunity in the investigated cases and for these managers lies in mobilizing and utilizing network relationships. This article provides a public value praxis model that focuses on involving stakeholders in investigating priority needs, collectively (re)designing services that meet these.

Tax professionals in public accounting firms must meet professional standards in working with their clients, but may also face pressure from both their clients and firms when making ethical decisions. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of client factors on tax professionals’ ethical decision-making. Furthermore, we also investigate how client service climate and different ethical climate types affect these ethical decisions. Based on an experimental design with 149 practicing tax professionals, results indicate that tax professionals are not swayed by client importance or social interaction with the client when making ethical decisions. However, tax professionals are more likely to engage in ethical behavior when their own accounting firm monitors and tracks the quality of client service, whereas unethical behavior is more common when public accounting firms emphasize using personal ethical beliefs in decision-making. The results of the study suggest the importance of strong policies and procedures to promote ethical decision-making in firms.

This chapter examines megaproject design and planning in two “shrinking cities” – Philadelphia, PA and Detroit, MI – and concludes that megaproject “metastasis,” or repeated expansions into surrounding urban fabrics, is promoting the reduction of downtown into a series of self-contained enclaves. While political coalitions are constructing megaprojects, or large public works and/or single buildings, in cities around the world, in the United States, single-building megaprojects motivated by “growth coalitions” of public and private development actors have proliferated in downtowns since 1990. The urban design impacts of these megaprojects on the surrounding urban fabric have been little studied. Data on the institutional history, physical expansion, and relationship of the megaprojects to the urban fabric is combined with a qualitative analysis of megaproject theory and its application to the American condition, as well as to the political economy of development in American shrinking cities. The chapter concludes that megaprojects such as convention centers and casinos tend to expand inexorably once they are introduced into the American downtown. This metastasis results in the destruction of existing older buildings and street networks, the consolidation of street blocks into ever-larger superblocks, and the eventual physical restructuring of downtowns into enclaves of older fabric amidst clusters of megaproject superblocks. Applying Jacobs’ (1992) theory of “moral hybrids” between “commerce and politics” to megaproject metastasis, the chapter argues that while megaprojects may be inevitable in American downtowns, they should be sited away from active, small-scale urban fabrics to reduce the negative impacts of future metastases. The chapter takes a design-oriented perspective on a phenomenon that is almost always understood from a political economy perspective alone. Megaprojects are significant physical entities, and the chapter clarifies their physical impacts on the urban fabric while indicating urban design policy directions to reduce these impacts in future.

As the role and uptake of digital media, devices and other technologies increases, so has their presence in our lives. Technology has revolutionised the speed, type and extent of communication and contact between individuals and groups, transforming temporal, geographic and personal boundaries. There have undoubtedly been benefits associated with such shifts, but technologies have also exacerbated existing patterns of gendered violence and introduced new forms of intrusion, abuse and surveillance. In order to understand and combat harm and, protect and empower women, criminologists must investigate these practices. This chapter discusses how technology has transformed the enactment of violence against women.

Typically, studies have focussed on particular types of technology-facilitated violence as isolated phenomenon. Here, the author examines, more holistically, a range of digital perpetration: by persons unknown, who may be known and are known to female targets. These digital harms should, the author contends, be viewed as part of what Kelly (1988) conceptualised as a ‘continuum of violence’ (and Stanko, 1985 as ‘continuums of unsafety’) to which women are exposed, throughout the course of our lives. These behaviours do not occur in a vacuum. Violence is the cause and effect of inequalities and social control, which manifests structurally and institutionally, offline and online. Technologies are shaped by these forces, and investigating the creation, governance and use of technologies provides insight how violence is enacted, fostered and normalised.

Purpose — The principal hypothesis of this program of research is that people's choices of which resources to own are a function of expected travel needs.

Methodology/approach — This chapter reports recent research using a stated-choice survey design that is innovative in two respects. First, respondents are asked to consider two types of choice having different time horizons but which are thought to be linked in a strategic-tactical structure. The two types of choices are (a) purchasing ‘mobility resources’, which include commitments such as car ownership and subscription to carsharing services and (b) choosing a mode of transport for a particular instance of travel. The second methodological innovation is that respondents indicate their choices in the context of giving advice to a demographically similar ‘avatar’.

The development of a technique for ‘empirically constrained’ efficient design is discussed, as is its application to this survey. This objective is to provide survey designs with a high degree of statistical efficiency whilst maintaining plausibility in the combination of attribute levels. Field data from an empirical application (n = 72) was collected and analysed.

Findings — The proposed method for efficient design proved successful. The main substantive findings from the empirical application are presented, along with detailed results relating to how different demographic classes of respondents engaged with the instrument. For instance, living with one's partner and living with no children at home were associated with high scores on a scale of similarity between the experimental choice context and one's real-world mobility choices.

Research limitations/implications — The proposed techniques appear promising, though the empirical results must be viewed as indicative only due to the size and coverage of the field data sample.