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This paper aims to describe how a fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis can be used to describe which combinations of academic factors are most influential for achieving success in college‐level mathematics. Using a fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis allows for the comparison of all possible combinations for a collection of predictor variables, as well as strategies for determining which configurations of these sets of variables are the most consistent with success in college‐level mathematics. Recent advances in fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis techniques have now integrated traditional qualitative comparative analysis strategies with formal statistical tests, thus allowing for the analysis and comparison of complex relationships that are difficult to describe with more traditional statistical methods such as regression analysis.

Data were collected from 259 full‐time, first‐time freshmen at a large state university in the USA. They were analysed using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (FQCA).

Findings from this study suggest that the most parsimonious configuration of college remediation status, spending less time away from mathematics, and doing better in high school mathematics are key to success in college‐level mathematics.

Although numerous studies have made great progress in describing the complex relationship between prior mathematics exposure in high school with success in college‐level mathematics, one limitation of many studies is that they rely on analytic methods that only estimate the net effect of a single predictor variable, or a very small collection of predictor variables. This study utilises fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (FQCA) which can be used to analyze more complex interrelationships among a collection of predictor variables.

Increasing the ethicality of a project and the usefulness of the data enhances the probability that social good will result from the research; a combination of ethical and methodological soundness is therefore crucial. From 1999‐2002 I conducted a qualitative study of women’s, men’s, and mixed Internet chat room conversations. In this article, I discuss the particular ethical issues that arose, outlining my ethical decision‐making process within the context of current debates. I also describe the methodological concerns, demonstrating why a synthesized method responsive to the advantages and disadvantages of cyberspace was necessary, and how the data were enhanced by this choice of method and by certain characteristics of cyberspace. In discussing the details of my study, my overall goal is to provide an assessment of the social good of the project with a view to increasing the probability of more ethical and useful Internet‐based research outcomes more generally.

Critical realism is an increasingly popular “lens” through which complex events, entities and phenomena can be studied. Yet detailed operationalisations of critical realism are at present relatively scarce. This study's objective here is built on existing debates by developing an open systems model of reality, a basis for designing appropriate, internally consistent methodologies.

The authors use a qualitative case study examining changing practices for client contact management in professional services firms during restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 crisis to show how the model can be operationalised across all stages of a research study.

This study contributes to the literature on qualitative applications of critical realism by providing a detailed example of how the research paradigm influenced choices at every stage of the case study process.

More importantly, this model of reality as an open system provides a tool for other researchers to use in their own operationalisation of critical realism in a variety of different settings.

In the past few years two methods of information access using the citations given in published papers have been developed. These methods are citation indexing and bibliographic coupling, and although they are closely related it is important clearly to distinguish between them. In essence, bibliographic coupling is a concept developed by M. M. Kessler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concerned with the relation existing between two documents by virtue of their joint descent from a third—that is, two documents are said to be coupled if they both cite the same document, and the strength of the coupling is determined by the number of citations they have in common. We are here primarily interested in citation indexing and will therefore only discuss Kessler's work as it becomes immediately relevant to this subject. A citation index is ‘an ordered list of cited articles each of which is accompanied by a list of citing articles. The citing article is identified by a source citation, the cited article by a reference citation. The index is arranged by reference citations.’ It is helpful at this stage to think of the source citations as descendants, and the reference citations as their ancestors.

After insisting on the strong coupling between education and society, this paper aims to detect the symptoms of a crisis in education and present the reasons of pathology that testify to the failure of the actual paradigm of thinking.

Casting doubt on the economic model approach adopted in recent decades as being inappropriate for the educational field, the author goes from the peripheral question about students' outcomes and schools' effectiveness to the central question of societies' well‐being, arguing that the ultimate goal of education should be to lead individuals to understand how the world functions and help them find new ways to make the world.

This paper draws on research in literature on school populations (teachers, students). It is suggested that the inappropriateness of the paradigm of thinking adopted has altered education's nature and goals.

Exposing the main misunderstandings and confusions that has led to the above crisis, two epistemic transpositions are proposed as a way towards a new era.

The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) is a key social‐economic regeneration instrument in the UK delivered through partnerships of cross‐ sectoral organisations with local communities. The article discusses recent research which found that women’s needs and capabilities were largely ignored in SRB. The reasons stem from widespread “gender blindness” characterised by familiar gender‐neutral motifs which deny the salience of gender as a variable through which human life and inequality are experienced. Gender blindness was additionally supported by social processes and institutions which have emerged from shifts in public policy and political change since the 1980s. The gender blindness of the late 1990s is described as a new manifestation of discrimination and its curiousness is that it is evident in a policy context which gives high priority to combating social exclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the disconnect that can develop between corporate goals and those of individual intra‐organisational business units arranged as an internal supply chain within a large vertically integrated agribusiness. It also aims to explore and discuss the development of a holistic performance metrics system that facilitates internal supply chain coordination and cohesion, while allowing synergies to develop across the company.

A case study approach involving a participative action research component was used to examine the disconnect between internal business unit (operational) goals and overall corporate (strategic) goals and to develop a conceptual performance assessment model addressing both operational and strategic contexts.

The findings show that appropriate performance indicators and measures can be created that relate directly to logical operational outcomes, thus encouraging a more tightly integrated internal supply chain, a stronger coherence among the components and a better aligned set of operational and corporate goals.

Only financial information and data obtained from a participative managerial decision‐making simulation were used to explore performance goal incongruence between operational and corporate managers, compared with the need for multiple contextual performance measurement metrics that the literature suggests provides a best practice system.

The rapidly developing corporate agribusiness sector provides a unique operating environment in that these companies deal primarily in self‐regenerating assets such as livestock. Additionally the development of performance metrics for improving the coordinated integration of autonomous business units is explored for the first time and the concept of “Integrated Autonomy” is suggested as a way to describe the resulting situation.