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Academic library consortia in South Africa are indeed beasts whose time has come at last, although whether they constitute a second coming for our profession or our end‐users remains to be seen. They can probably be described as a group of diverse entities, rough and as‐yet unsure of their destination. In this descriptive text, we attempt to outline, for a mainly North American audience, the specifics which distinguish the developing consortia in a newly democratic and newly globalised South Africa from those in other more economically advantaged parts of the world. It remains to be seen whether the center will in fact hold. Letting go reluctantly of this literary conceit, for the time being at least, we describe the all‐important social and political background in which our institutions must operate, moving on to an analysis of the impulse to cooperate and the obstacles that have emerged to stifle that impulse. In our conclusion we risk some predictions about where academic library consortia may be headed in our part of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to depict the effects and relative importance of technological, organizational, environmental and managerial factors on the organizational performance of start-up businesses.

This research’s primary data was collected from 389 start-up companies in Malaysia. Principle component analysis and the orthogonal model with Varimax rotation method are used to perform exploratory factor analysis test. Structural equation modelling is also used in confirmatory factor analysis to explore the relationships between independent and dependent variables.

The findings suggest positive effects of technological and environmental characteristics on the organizational performance of start-up businesses. The managerial characteristics do not have any positive effect on the organizational performance of start-up businesses. The organizational characteristics split into two parts: the availability of internal financial resources, which positively affects the organizational performance of start-up businesses; and the availability of business incubation, which does not have any important effect. Moreover, start-up companies should choose the one with the highest perceived advantage as it would have the most significant positive effect on their organizational performance. In addition, it was detected that venture capitalists’ (VCs) support has the most positive influence on organizational performance and social customer relationship management adoption even more than governmental supports in the context of Malaysia.

The proposed framework of this research can be used not only as a research tool for examining determinant factors affecting organizational performance of start-up businesses but also by governments, VCs and other investors to detect best-performing start-up businesses.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

Purpose: In this chapter, I analyze proceedings from 2015 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was asked to determine whether Dutee Chand, an Indian sprinter, could compete as a female athlete. Excluded on the basis that her naturally high testosterone levels conferred an unfair athletic advantage, Chand argued that existing policies in international sport were scientifically flawed. The purpose of the analysis is to examine whether the case led to a shift in the gender politics of sport, law, and science.

Methodology/Approach: I present a textual analysis of the arbitral award document, drawing on feminist methodology to identify where and how the adjudicating panel’s assessment of the case was gendered.

Findings: The CAS decision defined the right to compete as primarily a matter for science to decide, in the process obscuring the gendered and tilted playing field upon which scientific knowledge production takes place. Furthermore, the right to unconditional recognition as a woman was reduced to science alone.

Social Implications: My analysis reveals that Chand’s victory is a precarious one, with binary and biologized models of sex and gender prevailing when the institutions of sport, law, and science determine the policy boundaries of “fair play” for female athletes.

Originality/Value of Study: This chapter shows how the institutions of sport, law, and science work together to determine gender. As a consequence, even feminist versions of the biology of sex difference risk reifying the authority of science as the dominant knowledge form within the institutional spaces of sport and law.

Purpose – To use insights from economic sociology to analyze how U.S. employment law understands and regulates the relationship between prison labor and conventional employment.

Methodology – Legal analysis of all published court opinions deciding whether federal employment laws such as the minimum wage apply to prison labor.

Findings – Courts decide whether prison labor is an “employment relationship” by deciding whether it is an “economic” relationship. Most interpret prison labor as noneconomic because they locate it in a nonmarket sphere of penal relationships. A minority of courts use a different conception of the economy, one which interprets prison labor as a form of nonmarket work.

Implications – The economic character of prison labor may be articulated using the same theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques developed to analyze family labor as economically significant nonmarket work. Doing so, however, too readily accepts the market/nonmarket distinction. Given the thoroughly social character of market work, prison labor's highly structured, institutionally specific character does not preclude characterizing it as market work, and some of its features support interpreting it as such.

In this legal context, identifying practices as economic or not, and as market or not, has concrete consequences for the actors themselves. Rather than using market/nonmarket distinctions as analytical tools, scholars might treat actors' designation of an economic practice as part of a market or not as a site of conflict, subject to institutionalization, and worthy of sociological study.

The foundation collection of the printed books now forming the Library of the British Museum was that of Sir Hans Sloane. This comprised about 40,000 volumes. To it was added in 1759 the Royal collection, begun in the time of Henry VII and inherited by George II from his predecessors on the throne.