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The purpose of the paper is to present the latest scholarly trends in the field of social capital in libraries, to review research concepts published by LIS professionals and to suggest further research possibilities in this area.

This paper presents a review and critical analysis of literature associated with research on social capital in libraries to highlight its importance for the development of LIS and its impact on the functioning of environments linked with various types of libraries. The goal of literature analysis was to determine the current condition of research on social capital in libraries. The main trends were identified and the need for further qualitative analyses, which are missing at the moment, was confirmed.

It was determined that, so far, LIS professionals have focussed mainly on the role of municipal libraries in developing social capital, the problem of building trust, especially in immigrant circles and the impact of libraries on promoting a civil society. Academic libraries, rural libraries, organisational capital in libraries and individual social capital of librarians were a much less frequent subject of research. The role of libraries in developing social capital in educational (primary and secondary education) and professional (non-university professionals) circles is practically non-existent in research, and it will require in-depth studies and analyses in the coming years.

This paper constitutes a synthetic review of the latest research concepts concerning social capital in libraries. It identifies the most important research trends and areas that so far have not been explored and suggests research methods to help LIS professionals design future research in this area more effectively.

Social capital, understood as intangible community values available through a network of connections, is a factor in the development of societies and improving quality of life. It helps to remove economic inequalities and prevent poverty and social exclusion, stimulate social and regional development, civic attitudes and social engagement and build a civic society as well as local and regional identity. Many of these tasks may be implemented by libraries, which, apart from providing access to information, may also offer a number of services associated with social needs. The purpose of this paper is to present the roles and functions that libraries may serve in local communities in terms of assistance, integration and development based on classical social capital theories.

The paper reviews the classical concepts of social capital in the context of libraries. It analyses the findings of Pierre-Félix Bourdieu, James Coleman, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Putnam, Nan Lin, Ronald Stuart Burt, Wayne Baker and Alejandro Portes. Based on their respective concepts, the paper analyses the role of the contemporary library in the social life of local communities. In particular, it focuses on the possible new functions that public libraries may serve.

A critical review of the concept of social capital revealed certain dependencies between libraries and their neighbourhoods. With new services that respond to the actual social needs, libraries may serve as a keystone, namely they may integrate, animate and engage local communities. This, however, requires a certain approach to be adopted by the personnel and governing authorities as well as infrastructure and tangible resources.

The social engagement of libraries is usually described from the practical perspective (reports on the services provided) or in the context of research on the impact of respective projects on specific groups of users (research reports). A broader approach, based on original social theories, is rarely encountered. The paper draws on classical concepts of social capital and is a contribution to the discussion on possible uses of those concepts based on an analysis of the role of libraries in social life and in strengthening the social capital of local communities.

This study uses social capital theory to analyze how social capital and supplier development support achieving supplier satisfaction and preferred customer status. The resulting model is compared between manufacturing and service suppliers.

A survey receiving 482 supplier responses from manufacturing and service suppliers was utilized and analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling and multi-group comparison tests.

The paper adds new explanations for preferred customer status through empirical evidence of relationships between supplier development, social capital, supplier satisfaction, and preferred customer status. Cognitive and relational capital directly support achieving preferred customer status. The role of supplier satisfaction in achieving preferred customer status is lower for manufacturing suppliers.

Both service and manufacturing suppliers could also be studied in their specific industry settings. A more in-depth investigation of other business relationship dynamics, such as power, is needed in a future study.

Service and manufacturing suppliers need different strategies to obtain the benefits from supplier development and social capital building. For service suppliers, more intangible factors are relevant in comparison to manufacturing suppliers.

This study advances the literature in two main ways. First, it elaborates the role of supplier development and social capital in the path toward supplier satisfaction and preferred customer status as perceived by suppliers. Second, this study answers the calls for a better understanding of the contextual characteristics underlying potential differences in how preferred customer status is formed.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the activities that nascent firms undertake to improve customer attractiveness and gain collaborative commitment from strategic suppliers.

Data from a grounded theory study consisting of 26 participants from 15 firms and a review of extant literature were used to develop a theoretical model that explains how a nascent firm increases its customer attractiveness to elicit commitment and collaboration from strategic suppliers.

The authors find that social capital, born of close social ties and social history, enhances the effectiveness of a nascent firm's relationship-building practices. This counteracts a supplier's collaborative risk and consequently increases the nascent firm's customer attractiveness, thus enabling it to obtain strategic supplier collaborative commitment.

This research helps managers by providing direction on what practices nascent firms pursue to gain strategic supplier resources and collaboration. Given the reality of resource constraints in nascent firms, it is suggested that this insight is essential to obtaining crucial external resources needed to survive and grow.

Extant research on buyer–supplier collaboration is mostly confined to the context of mature firms and does not account for the unique inter-organizational relational challenges faced by nascent firms. This research uncovers the idiosyncrasies of supplier management in nascent firms, and elucidates on the actions that nascent firm managers take to gain supplier collaborative commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a wide range of performance measures, while acknowledging that of late, outcome measures have become increasingly important. Several initiatives are underway to develop a broad framework and suggest approaches to developing outcome measures for all types of libraries. However, while outcomes may be increasingly used, determining the value of a specific outcome is complicated by the reality that value is determined by a combination of perspective and each individual experiencing a specific library service.

This paper reviews the literature about outcomes and determining the value of outcomes as a foundation for exploring these two inter-related issues – outcomes and value.

The findings of a number of reports and studies are reported.

Separating the question of identifying the outcomes associated with library services and the value of these outcomes are shaped by the perspective of value and determining value will assist libraries in attempting to measure the impact of the services they provide.

The purpose of this paper is to explore building information modeling (BIM) implementation and practices in developed economies by developing a benchmarking model that will enhance BIM adoption and implementation in developing countries.

The research design adopted a qualitative approach which includes the desktop review of the extant literature as well as case study reviews of ten BIM projects using an explanatory case study technique to form the foundation upon which the study proposed the model. The moving basis heuristics technique was adopted to develop the scoring system.

The BIM benchmarking model and assessment template were developed which consisted of three-level concepts modeled to aid project organizations and project team in developing countries to assess and score the level of improvement and implementation of BIM in a project. A desktop review of BIM projects in developed countries demonstrated the significant improvements and benefits possible through the implementation of the established BIM benchmarking model.

The assessment template in conjunction with the benchmarking model is useful for a comparative evaluation of similar BIM projects and benchmarking purposes. The study also discussed how current findings extends and contradicts previous findings.

The findings have provided policymakers, construction stakeholders and professional bodies in the construction industry in developing countries with valuable insights and counter-intuitive perspective that could facilitate the uptake of BIM in construction projects.

[In view of the approaching Conference of the Library Association at Perth, the following note on the Leighton Library may not be inopportune. Dunblane is within an hour's railway journey from Perth and has a magnificent cathedral, founded in the twelfth century, which is well worthy of a visit.]

The paper aims to investigate why organizations often opt to reject Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)-sponsored mediation of employment disputes (in contrast to employees who tend to readily agree to it). It is guided by recent research associated with Shapiro and Kirkman’s (1999, 2001) theory of “anticipatory justice”, whereby (in)justice is anticipated, or expected, when people think about an event they have not yet experienced whose likely fairness they are questioning. In contrast, “organizational justice” reflects people’s retrospective assessments of how fair they have been treated to date.

The paper relied upon data made available by the mediation program administered by the US EEOC. The EEOC provided the names and contact information for the officially designated EEOC contacts for each dispute. The authors distributed surveys to each of these organizational representatives and received completed surveys from 492 organizations (a response rate of 85.8 per cent).

The authors tested the extent to which organizational representatives’ decision to accept or reject mediation as a means of settling discrimination claims is influenced by representatives’ expectation of more versus less fair treatments – by the opposing party as well as by the third-party mediator – during the mediation procedure. The pattern of findings in the study support all hypotheses and, thus, also the expectation-oriented theories that have guided them.

The study relies on self-reports. However, this concern is somewhat lessened because of the salience and recency of events to the time of surveying.

The paper provides new insights on the need for organizations to implement rules, policies and procedures to constrain decision-maker choices consistent with organizational goals. The authors offer specific procedural proposals to reduce this organizational tendency to reject mediation.

Employee grievances are costly to organizations in terms of finances, reputation and to the emotional climate of the organization. Moreover, it is similarly costly to employees. This study provides new insights to better understand why employees (as opposed to organizations) are almost three times more likely to elect mediation of employment disputes. As such, it offers some promising ideas to narrow that gap.

The paper investigates a little-studied phenomenon – the differential participation rate of employees versus organizations in EEOC-sponsored mediation.

This study investigates the impacts of return channel type on the relationships between return service quality (RSQ) and customer loyalty (CL) in an omnichannel retailing environment.

Data comes from Chinese customers having a return experience in omnichannel retailing that uses the channel type of both buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS) and buy-in-store-return-to-online warehouses (BSROW). The authors use the structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses and the bootstrapping method to test the mediation and moderation effect.

For BORIS channel, satisfaction of customer returns (CRS) partially mediates the relationship between convenience and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and responsiveness, transparency and competence, respectively. For BSROW channel, CRS partially mediates the relationship between responsiveness and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and convenience, transparency and competence, respectively. The mediation effects indicate that omnichannel customers may feel more satisfied due to higher omnichannel fulfillment (responsiveness and convenience) and omnichannel trust (transparency and competence) provided by retailers. Return channel type moderates the relationship between RSQ-convenience and CL. The results show the different expectations between BORIS and BSROW customers in the return process.

This paper serves as a pioneering study to apply cognition-affect-behavior paradigm into the field of return management in omnichannel retailing.

The findings suggest retailers develop their strategies on customer returns and post-sales service quality improvement in the omnichannel. Also, retailers should develop an integrated return system across channels to provide convenient service to BORIS customers and quick response to BSROW customers.

Studying return service management in the omnichannel from customer's cognition appraisal, this study contributes to the literature of the reverse service management by bringing in the effect of omnichannel type to explore the relationship between RSQ and CL.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between three types of process innovations (i.e. innovation in production, IT, and logistics processes) and ambidexterity performance. Specifically, the paper attempts to examine whether changes in business processes help companies to reconcile exploration and exploitation learning activities within the firm domain.

This research is based on data of 2,843 manufacturing firms, whose data are available from the Italian Innovation Survey (period 2010-2012). Hypotheses are developed and tested by using a Tobit regression approach.

Innovation in production and IT processes favors ambidexterity performance, whereas changes in logistics activities, despite being positive, are less relevant.

This is one of the first attempts to offer empirical evidence about the relationship between process innovations and ambidexterity performance (without engaging in domain separation), hence providing additional insights into the ambidexterity literature and the literature on process innovation.