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Examines unit pricing of grocery products, a recent business response to the forces of consumerism in the USA, and its effects on the consumer, the retailer and the manufacturer. States that, as a pricing device, unit pricing is not entirely new, as products such as meats, dairy products and many fresh fruits and vegetables have been unit priced for years. Concludes that, before the full impact of unit pricing can be assessed, additional research questions need to be answered.

In this chapter, we use intentional noticing to deconstruct and reconstruct assumptions within an exploratory case study that involved a university and a school in Aotearoa New Zealand and how this contributes to global understandings around the influence of power on notions of Indigenous languages in schools. The current chapter originates from an exploratory case study that examined the efficacy of a phonological awareness and vocabulary program for children within their early years of schooling, aimed at developing emergent literacy skills in te reo Māori (the language of Indigenous Māori peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand). Reconstructing understandings was challenged by several factors, including assumptions around the content and implementation of the program and challenges that emerged from within the research team and that influenced the engagement of teachers and children within the program. We explore how teachers and children interrupted existing models of teaching and learning that have previously been used as a tool for assimilation, to foster the development of te reo Māori and emergent literacy skills. We conclude that it is crucial for researchers to be conscious of their assumptions within the research process to decolonize practices and to develop cultural understandings of ways of being. This means that relationships with Indigenous peoples is fundamental within cross-cultural research.

In 1993, a proposal was made at Harvard College to renovate the principal undergraduate library (Lamont) to create a Gateway library. What do we mean by that phrase? A Gateway library, as we define it, is a transition from a traditional library (characterized, perhaps a little unfairly, as a passive storehouse of the scholarly output of printed texts and space for their study) to the emerging world of digital information and distributed computing, sometimes whimsically portrayed as a network of astonishing resources available over broadband networks from anywhere in the world. Specific predictions about how information technology will change and affect libraries is premature, in part, because we do not fully understand how it will affect universities, of which libraries are a necessary and integral part. The Gateway, then, represents a transition between two learning cultures—print and digital—and tries to bridge the gap between the traditional library and what it might become as higher education metamorphoses.

The authors contribute to practice-driven institutionalism by examining how the introduction of new field-level evaluation practices may facilitate encroachment of highly institutionalized organizational fields by new institutional logics. The authors conducted an inductive study of a trial of social impact bonds in the field of social integration services in Finland. Our analysis elaborates how new field-level evaluation practices created an experimental space that induced organizational practice experimentation, reconfigured relationships among field members, and lowered the barriers to entry for new organizations. The authors theorize how evaluation practices may create experimental spaces by suspending the carriers of established logics and legitimizing institutional innovations. The authors further elaborate how such spaces can bring about a parallel “shadow field” by inducing bottom-up experimentation aligned with a new institutional logic.

This study confirms and extends previous research by providing a detailed longitudinal examination of the strategic group and performance relationship in the hospital industry from 1983 to 1993. Based on a deductive approach using Porter's (1980) typology, we find that matching strategy to environment affects hospital performance, that the appropriate match between strategy and environment changed over the 1983 to 1993 time period, and that hospitals combining a low cost and differentiation strategy (i.e., a best‐cost approach) performed well during most of the time period examined. We also find significant movement between strategic groups, thus calling into question the degree to which mobility barriers affect between group performance differences. Finally, our research suggests the existence of multiple groups following the same strategic approach, a result that calls into question the view that groups within an industry are monolithic.

Scholars have primarily focused on how language represents categories. We move beyond this conception to develop a discursive perspective of market categorization focused on how categories are constructed through communicative exchanges. The discursive perspective points to three under-researched mechanisms of category evolution: (1) the interaction between market participants, (2) the power dynamics among market participants and within the discourse, and (3) the cultural and material context in which categories are constructed. In this theoretical paper, we discuss how each of these mechanisms shed light on different phases of category evolution and the methods that could be used to study them.

The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional reach of courts, and drastically unsettle what has been, up to now, a highly stable institutional field. These changes have caused pronounced threats to the status of different groups of actors in the field. Our work examines the impact of these threats, and the varying responses among groups of professional actors. In so doing, we detail how intra-professional status differences and uncertainty hindered attempts to maintain threatened institutions.