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Purpose – Global cooperation between and within organisations has become essential for successful businesses. For the information management within such an international and necessarily multilingual environment, new challenges arise due to the diversity of the stakeholders and participants as well as due to the heterogeneity of approaches and traditions of information handling.

Design/methodology/approach – Key technologies like search technologies need to be adapted to support content in multiple languages and efficient access to it. Information processes need to be analysed while bearing in mind that problems may arise due to cross-cultural misunderstandings. The diversity requires appropriate treatment and appropriate methods in information systems in order to improve international information flows.

Findings – This chapter identifies some of these challenges and shows how they can be approached from an information science perspective. User-oriented research at the University of Hildesheim in the areas information retrieval, information seeking and human–computer interaction is presented.

Originality/value – Global enterprises and organisations may use this chapter to identify challenges and solutions for adapting their information technology to an international scale. Researchers who work on multilingual information access and intercultural aspects of information systems get an overview on some current research.

Library and information science (LIS) is an academic, intellectual and industrial field with a large international reach. LIS educates library and information professionals, and is an active field in research and practice with a tradition of research development, standards, networks and distribution worldwide. The field has in recent years experienced a significant growth and development in all parts of the world, however, the field's long-term future is at the same time being challenged by new technologies, education changes and the development of new industries. A refocusing from a library to an information focus is in development within the LIS field. However, the field of information is also being grasped by the technology fields on the one hand and the psychological/behavioural fields on the other. Unfortunately for the field of LIS, information is now everyone's problem and of greater interest to more scientific fields and in addition, industry and government are looking for information management solutions that require technological development based on the psychological quality research. How the LIS field survives over the next 20 years will be played out in educational and industry environments globally.

David Ellis is Professor in the Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University. He was previously lecturer and senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield. He has a PhD and an MA in Information Studies from the University of Sheffield, and a BA in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Durham. His PhD study of the information behaviour of academic social scientists represented one of the first attempts to apply a rigorous qualitative methodology to modelling the information seeking patterns of social science researchers and was subsequently extended to studies of scientists in both academic and industrial research environments. These interests were further developed in the course of the uncertainty in information seeking project carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of North Texas. Professor Ellis has published extensively in the information studies field, his work has been recognised as representing a distinct, substantive and methodological contribution to the fields of information behaviour and information retrieval research, and is widely cited in both. His current research interests are in the areas of information behaviour, information and knowledge management and information systems. Professor Ellis's professional activities have included service on the UK Research Assessment Exercise, Peer Review Panel for Library and Information Management, and Research Convenor of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review Panel for Librarianship, Information and Museum Studies. He is a member of the AHRC and the Economics and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) Peer Review Colleges and Research Notes Editor of the International Journal of Information Management.

Research on the commitment to customer service (CCS) typically considers either trainable behavior or external stimuli such as financial incentives vital to CCS. Utilizing the cultural context of Confucian Asia, this study proposes a novel approach that shifts the focus towards the antecedents of the informal institutional environment.

This research considers four informal institutions typical for Confucian Asia about their influence on CCS: power distance, perceived individual independence, openness to change, and informal network ties. Hypotheses are tested in a structural equation model using data obtained from a South Korean subject pool.

Results show that informal institutions like power distance and network ties, and mediators like perceived individual independence and openness to change are positively related to CCS. Power distance and network ties also have a direct positive effect on openness to change. Moreover, power distance negatively affects perceived individual independence.

The authors' findings contribute to the service management literature by showing that a given CCS of service employees can be explained by antecedents of the company's informal institutional environment.

From a human resource perspective, the informal institutional environment should be taken into account when establishing a supporting organizational culture and designing management training programs.

This research introduces the institutional view to services management research, focusing on the role that informal institutions play. In particular, factors like power distance and network ties that influence CCS are tested for the first time.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.