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In recent years the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Public Schools have displaced over 1,800 teachers and professional staff. While there is an extensive job loss literature, there is no information available on the adjustments encountered by displaced teachers. Survey data were obtained from a random sample of teachers and licensed staff who were downsized from 2000–2001 through 2003–2004. The majority of downsized teachers reported difficulty in finding another teaching position, in large part because many of them were laid-off during the summer after other districts had completed their hiring. Continuing lay-offs have cut deeper into the seniority roster, exacerbating job insecurity tension for downsizing survivors.

This chapter draws on recent literature in I/O psychology, management and sociology to posit a relationship between organizational structure and temporal structure and develops the construct of layered-task time. Layered-task time is similar to polychronic time (P-time) in the inclusion of simultaneous, multiple tasks but includes additional dimensions of fragmentation, contamination and constraint. The chapter links the development of this new time and its resultant time-sense to variation in the degree to which organizations are hierarchical and centralized and develops propositions about these relationships. The chapter contributes to the growing literature on workplace temporalities in the contemporary economy.

The purpose of this paper is to historicise research conducted in the fields of Information Seeking and Learning and Information Literacy and thereby begin to outline a description of the history of information in the context of Swedish compulsory education.

Document work and documentary practices are used as alternatives to concepts such as information seeking or information behaviour. Four empirical examples of document work – more specifically informational reading – recorded in Swedish primary classrooms in the 1960s are presented.

In the recordings, the reading style students use is similar to informational reading in contemporary educational settings: it is fragmentary, facts-oriented, and procedure-oriented. The practice of finding correct answers, rather than analysing and discussing the contents of a text seems to continue from lessons organised around print textbooks in the 1960s to the inquiry-based and digital teaching of today.

The paper seeks to analyse document work and documentary practices by regarding “information” as a discursive construction in a particular era with material consequences in particular contexts, rather than as a theoretical and analytical concept. It also problematises the notion that new digital technologies for producing, organising, finding, using, and disseminating documents have drastically changed people’s behaviours and practices in educational and other contexts.

The article concerns information literacies in an environment characterised by the two partly competing and contradictory cultures of print and digital. The aim of the paper is to provide a better understanding of the ways in which students assess the credibility of sources they use in school, with a particular interest in how they treat participatory genres.

An ethnographic study of a school class's project work was conducted through observations, interviews, and log books in blog form. The analysis was influenced by a socio‐cultural perspective.

The study provides increased empirically based understanding of students' information literacy practices. Four non‐exclusive approaches to credibility stemming from control, balance, commitment, and multiplicity were identified.

The study adds to the understanding of how credibility is assessed in school environments with a particular focus on how digital and participatory genres are treated.

This paper investigates the experiences of school teachers of supporting pupils and their apprehensions of how pupils search and assess information when search engines have become a technology of literacy in schools. By situating technologies of literacy as sociomaterial the purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss these experiences and understandings in order to challenge dominant views of search in information literacy research.

Six focus group interviews with in total 39 teachers working at four different elementary and secondary schools were conducted in the autumn of 2014. Analysis was done using a sociomaterial perspective, which provides tools for understanding how pupils and teachers interact with and are demanded to translate their interest to technologies of literacy, in this case search engines, such as Google.

The teachers expressed difficulties of conceptualizing search as something they could teach. When they did, search was most often identified as a practical skill. A critical perspective on search, recognizing the role of Google as a dominant part of the information infrastructure and a co-constructor of what there is to know was largely lacking. As a consequence of this neglected responsibility of teaching search, critical assessment of online information was conflated with Google’s relevance ranking.

The study develops a critical understanding of the role of searching and search engines as technologies of literacy in relation to critical assessment in schools. This is of value for information literacy training.

This study aims to increase knowledge about the information‐sharing activities of design research scholars.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were carried out with selected participants from a Nordic design research network. The interview transcripts and notes from workplace‐observations were approached from a discursive point of view and analyzed in accordance with Theodore Schatzki's practice theory.

Information‐sharing activities are intrinsically intertwined with other information practices such as information seeking and use. It is further established that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be seen as important parts of the arrangements of human and non‐human entities that, together with practices, form the social site in which the scholars are active. There is a reciprocal relationship between ICTs, and other material arrangements, and the ways in which information is used and shared. ICTs function both as a source of meaning and as a preconfigurator of actions.

The findings have implications for the development of information systems and services aimed at scholars working in collaborative interdisciplinary settings. Library and information science scholars can benefit from the elaborated concept of information sharing.

Design scholars' information sharing has not been studied before. By applying a practice‐theory lens this paper presents a particular perspective. Increased knowledge about the information‐sharing activities of an epistemologically and socio‐culturally amalgamated network of scholars is the main contribution of this paper.

This editorial aims to investigate the interface between gendered processes and family business by exploring the extent to which gendered processes are reinforced (or not) in family business operations and dynamics. This approach will complement the agency and resource-based view theoretical bases that dominate family business research (Chrisman et al., 2009) and further contribute to extending gender theories.

Acknowledging that gender is socially constructed, this editorial discusses the interface between gendered processes and family business within entrepreneurship research.

Despite a growing interest in gender and family business, there is limited literature that explores gender theory within family business research. A gender theory approach embracing family business research contributes to a needed theoretical deconstruction of existing perspectives on the operations, sustainability and succession of family businesses in the twenty-first century.

This editorial makes a contribution to extant scholarship by extending gender theories through an exploration of the gendered processes in family business research.

In this chapter, we propose an educational framework to position Information Literacy (IL) and Higher Education (HE) in relation to Lifelong Learning (LLL): comprehensive enough to make sense of, and give educational direction to, future development of people in information literate populations. We identify crucial changes in the HE environment, particularly in the United Kingdom; analyse the concept of IL as a discipline, and situate the IL person in the changing information culture and society. In doing this we draw on our own work and that of Schuller and Watson (2009). We propose a curriculum for an information literate lifecourse, sensitive to the context of the individual within a changing information culture. The curriculum is framed, on the one hand, by the nature of the information economy, technology, organisational culture, local/national culture and society, and personal goals. It is also framed by the life stage of the individual, using the four key stages and transitional points proposed by Schuller and Watson (2009). Academics and librarians have a key role in designing and facilitating these IL capabilities for the 21st century citizen.

The purpose of this paper is to inform on results of the study based on the dissertation project – the study of newcoming university students and their information literacy experience. It describes the three categories of information literacy experience as perceived by these students.

The document is based on a qualitative phenomenographic study of 40 first-year undergraduate students of teacher education programs from five faculties of Comenius University in Bratislava. Data were collected from each participant in two stages by three methods: written statements, drawings and interviews.

The phenomenographic analysis results in three categories of information literacy: (1) the conception of digital technologies, (2) the conception of knowledge and (3) the conception of truth. The outcome space presented by two alternative models points to a strong interrelation of all three categories. The resulting conceptions point to the diversity of the concept of information literacy in relation to other types of literacies, especially digital, reading and media literacy, as well as to intersections with other scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science or philosophy.

The most important limits of this qualitative research are the low numbers of participants and the high degree of subjectivity in data evaluation. For this reason, a verification study was carried out one-year later.

Although phenomenographic studies of information literacy in the educational context are quite common, the third category of this study brings a new contribution to the information literacy theory – the dimension of truth or truthfulness of information.