Search results

The coming year will see many enthusiastic librarianship graduates emerging from colleges and universities up and down the country and taking their first professional posts. Successful job applicants will be seeking to make their mark with an attitude of enthusiasm, efficiency and professionalism. However, so many newly qualified librarians fail to maintain such an attitude. Why? At a recent conference, Pat Coleman warned librarianship students that they “would feel frustrated in their first professional post after completing their courses, and that they would have difficulty in trying to bring about change”. Anna Smyth also expressed some concern at the fate awaiting many of our young colleagues; “If they remain unfulfilled, unstretched and uninterested for long they may well become bored, frustrated and cynical — a well known syndrome within librarianship”.

Two new members of staff are joining BLRDD in September: Lawrence Howells, who is at present working in the Science Reference and Information service, will become a project officer, and Ros Cotton, who is currently working in the Library Association Library, will be the new dissemination officer.

A country no stronger than its information As a result of the new Gramm‐Rudman‐Hollings law which mandates a balanced federal budget by 1991 (a cut of $9.9m), and an $8.4 in budget reduction by Congress, the Library of Congress is suffering a total cutback of 7.6% from last year. This means a loss of $1 in every $13. The total number of hours open will be reduced by 30% per week; evening and weekend hours by 59%. The Library will be unable to purchase some 80 000 new books.

Library of Congress update The Urgent Supplemental Appropriations Bill for FY 1986 signed into law in July by Ronald Reagan contained an appropriation of $867 000 for the Library of Congress. This means that the general reading room is able to restore evening and weekend hours. The ten “Books Not Bombs” people who first protested the closure spent several weeks in July in a courtroom trial, where testimony was given by the Librarian of Congress and other officials. Since the “freedom readers”; as they are called in a newspaper article, face jail and/or a fine, perhaps appreciative scholars and researchers should start a fund to help defray the costs of their protest.

The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship.

A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities.

Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty.

An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving.

This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA.

The purpose of this research is to systematically review the properties of supply chains demonstrating that they are complex systems, and that the management of supply chains is best achieved by steering rather than controlling these systems toward desired outcomes.

The research study was designed as both exploratory and explanatory. Data were collected from secondary sources using a comprehensive literature review process. In parallel with data collection, data were analyzed and synthesized.

The main finding is the introduction of an inductive framework for steering supply chains from a complex systems perspective by explaining why supply chains have properties of complex systems and how to deal with their complexity while steering them toward desired outcomes. Complexity properties are summarized in four inter-dependent categories: Structural, Dynamic, Behavioral and Decision making, which together enable the assessment of supply chains as complex systems. Furthermore, five mechanisms emerged for dealing with the complexity of supply chains: classification, modeling, measurement, relational analysis and handling.

Recognizing that supply chains are complex systems allows for a better grasp of the effect of positive feedback on change and transformation, and also interactions leading to dynamic equilibria, nonlinearity and the role of inter-organizational learning, as well as emerging capabilities, and existing trade-offs and paradoxical tensions in decision-making. It recognizes changing dynamics and the co-evolution of supply chain phenomena in different scales and contexts.

Since 2018, millions of students have mobilised as organisers, advocates and activists for action on global warming in movements like the School Strike 4 Climate. In Australia, an estimated 500,000 school students, some as young as five, and predominantly girls and young women, have taken part in coordinated school strikes, protest actions online and in cities and towns around the country (Hilder & Collin, 2022). While children and young people have long been central to politics, this more recent mass mobilisation raises new questions about how the various new forms of political participation and expression adopted by young people are significantly reshaping political norms, values and practices in ostensibly liberal democratic regimes like Australia. In this chapter, we propose that close attention be given to whether young people’s political views and demands for political recognition, rights and climate justice is re-constituting politics and whatever passes for ‘democracy’ in contemporary societies. Drawing on a study of the student climate movement in Australia, this chapter briefly describes the emergence of the movement globally and locally. Deploying Isin’s notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008), we examine the ways young climate activists are engaged in critical, performative, political practice, making claims for political recognition, rights and climate justice.

The author introduces a strategic responsiveness model that reflects an organization’s ability to sense environmental changes and learn from emergent adaptive responses that attempt to realign organizational activities and gain a better fit with the changing conditions. The author shows in computational simulations how superior strategic adaptation is associated with higher average returns and lower performance risk among firms that compete in the same industry contexts and generate negatively skewed outcome distributions consistent with empirical observations. The model is refined to incorporate an interactive strategy-making process, where experiential insights from decentralized initiatives update forward-looking projections in central planning. The ensuing analysis demonstrates how this adaptive strategy-making approach further enhances the favorable risk-return outcomes. The author discusses these findings and the implications for the study of dynamic adaptive strategy-making processes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in eight preservice teachers’ professional identity and the factors contributing to such changes during a four-week block practicum.

A qualitative case study design was used and the data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with preservice teachers and their mentors, reflective journals and observation checklists. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data.

The findings showed high levels of confidence and development of teacher voice by the end of their four-week block practicum. The findings also suggested that positive mentoring relationships contributed to changes in the preservice teachers’ teacher identity.

Despite focussing on a relatively small number of preservice secondary teachers during the first four-week practicum of a single teacher education program at a Western Australian University, this research highlights the need to maintain constructive mentoring relationships with preservice teachers to provide positive influences on their professional identity. In order to facilitate this, preservice teacher education programs should provide thorough training for mentor teachers.

This work highlighted the crucial role of mentor teachers in creating positive impacts on preservice teachers’ professional identity, such as development of their confidence and teacher voice. This paper provides useful insights for researchers, mentor teachers, and preservice teacher education policy developers.