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The textbooks are full of explanations of why businesses must understand their competitive arena. There are numerous conceptual frameworks and checklists to assist in this endeavour. Perhaps not too surprisingly, many businesses exhibit only a superficial knowledge of their competitors’ strategies and actions, taking little account of their rivals when formulating their own marketing plans. The electronics industry, already the fourth most important industrial sector in the world, is tipped to become the principal growth sector in the next century. A recent survey reveals that in this important industry, companies’ attempts to understand their competitors do not always live up to the models of Michael Porter or Philip Kotler.

A poem written by Brandon opens space on the literacy landscape for initiating an exploration of the boys' self-positioning in their literate narratives as comedic heroes. This space on the literary landscape outlines the ways in which characters in literature can be positioned when the plot of the story suggests distribution should occur. After exploring how characters function in literature, according to Frye (1957), it is easier to see how the boys use a similar self-positioning in their narratives when literacy is the boon – intended for distribution.The Moon, The Lake, and the LoonLily pads span the shore in a curtain of green,Accented by yellow flowers with watery sheen.In the heart of the lake floats the black speckled loon—guardian and ghost beneath the silver twilight moon.A sea of pine trees shield the outer world awayfrom this inner earth unchanged day by day.The lament of the loon pierces the heart and soul;capt'ring the body and mind beyond control.Leaving haunted beauty, wishing to be back soon.In the land of the moon, the lake, and the loon.(Brandon's in-class assignment, May 2009)

Since the late 1990s, teacher professional development models have shifted from a focus on individual improvement to collaboration as a means to foster support, information, and resource exchange between teachers. Following this shift, researchers began to use social network research methodology in the early 2000s to reveal the ways in which informal relationships affect teachers’ practices. This chapter reviews current literature on teachers’ social networks and teacher quality to describe the ways in which social networks mediate teachers’ practices. It provides detailed examples from two studies on teachers’ social networks and suggests ways that scholars can incorporate the constructs of social capital and social networks into large-scale research on teacher quality.

The study of franchising as a small business growth strategy is only weakly researched and understood. This preliminary, qualitative investigation examines the experiences of 17 operational and five “failed” franchises in the UK, in translating their business concepts into a franchise format. It reveals that small firms select franchising as a growth strategy for both economic and idiosyncratic reasons, but that economic reasons tend to prevail. The findings suggest that franchising is a viable growth strategy for small firms and that per se it creates few major problems for growth‐oriented small businesses. It is argued that further research is needed, particularly into the experiences of “failed” franchises and into the problems encountered by growing small firms who do not adopt franchising as a growth strategy.

“WE come now to another aspect of the question, and it must be admitted that the resource and ingenuity of the opposition have left nothing unnoticed. This is the common and constantly repeated assertion that novels are so cheap that every working man in the country can buy all he needs for less than the annual library rate. This statement was first made some years ago when publishers commenced to issue cheap reprints of non‐copyright novels at 1s. and 6d. each. Previous to this the halfpenny evening paper had been relied upon as affording sufficient literary entertainment for the working man, but when it was found to work out at 13s. per annum, as against a library rate of 1od. or 1s. 4d., the cheap newspaper argument was dropped like a hot cinder. We doubt if the cheap paper‐covered novel is any better. Suppose a workman pays £20 per annum for his house, and is rated at £16, he will pay 1s. 4d. as library rate, or not much more than 1¼d. per month for an unlimited choice of books, newspapers and magazines. But suppose he has to depend on cheap literature. The lowest price at which he can purchase a complete novel of high quality by any author of repute is 3d., but more likely 4½d. or 6d. However, we will take 3d. as an average rate, and assume that our man has leisure to read one book every fortnight. Well, at the end of one year he will have paid 6s. 6d. for a small library by a restricted number of authors, and it will cost him an additional 4s. or 5s. if he contemplates binding his tattered array of books for future preservation. Besides this, he will be practically shut off from all the current literature on topics of the day, as his 3d. a fortnight will hardly enable him to get copyright books by the best living authors. With a Public Library at his command he can get all these, and still afford to buy an occasional poet or essayist, or novel, or technical book, well bound and printed on good paper, such as his friend who would protect him against an iniquitous library rate would not blush to see on his own shelves. It seems hard that the working men of the country should be condemned to the mental entertainment afforded by an accumulation of pamphlets. Literature clothed in such a dress as gaudy paper covers is not very inspiring or elevating, and even the most contented mind would revolt against the possession of mere reading matter in its cheapest and least durable form. The amount of variety and interest existing among cheap reprints of novels is not enough, even if the form of such books were better. It is well known to readers of wide scope that something more than mere pastime can be had out of novels. Take, for example, the splendid array of historical novels which have been written during the present century. No one can read a few of these books without consciously or unconsciously acquiring historical and political knowledge of much value. The amount of pains taken by the authors in the preparation of historical novels is enormous, and their researches extend not only to the political movements of the period, but to the geography, social state, costume, language and contemporary biography of the time. Thus it is utterly impossible for even a careless reader to escape noticing facts when presented in an environment which fixes them in the memory. For example, the average school history gives a digest of the Peninsular War, but in such brief and matter of fact terms as to scarcely leave any impression. On the other hand, certain novels by Lever and Grant, slipshod and inaccurate as they may be in many respects, give the dates and sequence of events and battles in the Peninsula in such a picturesque and detailed manner, that a better general idea is given of the history of the period than could possibly be acquired without hard study of a heavy work like Napier's History. It is hardly necessary to do more than name Scott, James, Cooper, Kingsley, Hugo, Lytton, Dumas, Ainsworth, Reade, G. Eliot, Short‐house, Blackmore, Doyle, Crockett and Weyman in support of this claim. Again, no stranger can gain an inkling of the many‐sided characteristics of the Scot, without reading the works of Scott, Ferrier, Galt, Moir, Macdonald, Black, Oliphant, Stevenson, Barrie, Crockett, Annie Swan and Ian Maclaren. And how many works by these authors can be had for 3d. each? The only way in which a stay‐at‐home Briton can hope to acquire a knowledge of the people and scenery of India is by reading the works of Kipling, Mrs. Steel, Cunningham, Meadows Taylor, and others. Probably a more vivid and memory‐haunting picture of Indian life and Indian scenery can be obtained by reading these authors than by reading laboriously through Hunter's huge gazetteer. In short, novels are to the teaching of general knowledge what illustrations are to books, or diagrams to engineers, they show things as they are and give information about all things which are beyond the reach of ordinary experience or means. It is just the same with juvenile literature, which is usually classed with fiction, and gives to that much‐maligned class a very large percentage of its turnover. The adventure stories of Ballantyne, Fenn, Mayne Reid, Henty, Kingston, Verne and others of the same class are positive mines of topographical and scientific information. Such works represent more than paste and scissors industry in connection with gazetteers, books of travel and historical works; they represent actual observation on the part of the authors. A better idea of Northern Canada can be derived from some of Ballantyne's works than from formal topographical works; while the same may be said of Mexico and South America as portrayed by Captain Mayne Reid, and the West Indies by Michael Scott. The volume of Personal Reminiscences written by R. M. Ballantyne before he died will give some idea of the labour spent in the preparation of books for the young. The life of the navy at various periods can only be learned from the books of Smollett, Marryat and James Hannay, as that of the modern army is only to be got in the works of Lever, Grant, Kipling, Jephson, “John Strange Winter” and Robert Blatchford.

LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER : BEFORE Opening, as we do, a new volume of THE LIBRARY WORLD, especially as with it we reach the venerable age of sixty‐one, does suggest retrospective and prospective view. The magazine is the oldest amongst independent library journals, though others existed before 1899 in different forms or under other titles than those by which they are known to‐day. When at the end of last century it was felt that utterances were needed about libraries, unfettered by uncritical allegiance to associations or coteries, librarianship was a vessel riding upon an official sea of complacency so far as its main organisation was concerned. It was in the first tide, so far as public libraries were concerned, of Carnegie gifts of buildings, not yet however at the full flood. The captains were men of the beginnings of the library voyage; who were still guided themselves by the methods and modes of the men who believed in libraries, yet feared what the public might do in its use of them. Hence the indicator, meant to show, as its name implies, what books were available, but even more to secure them from theft, and to preserve men and women from the violent mental reactions they would suffer from close contact with large numbers of books. There were rebels of course. Six years earlier James Duff Brown has turned his anvil shaped building in Clerkenwell into a safeguarded open access library in which he actually allowed people, properly vetted, to enter and handle their own property. This act of faith was a great one, because within a mile or so some 5,000 books had been lost from the Bishopgate Institute Library, which has open shelves, too, not “safeguarded”. Brown's “cave of library chaos” as a well‐known Chairman, who by one visit was convinced of its good sense and practicability, called it, focused the attention of scores of librarians—so much so that Brown had to beg them to keep away for about a year, so that the method might be better judged after sufficient trial. It also focused the attention of the inventors of the indicator, who, presumably, had more than a benevolent interest in its sales. So there was war against this threat and for several years this childish contention raged at conferences, in private conversations amongst library workers, and in letters to the press aimed to convict Brown and all his satellites of encouraging dishonesty, mental confusion and other maladies public. Hence Brown, L. Stanley Jast, William Fortune and others initiated this journal to teach librarians and library committees how libraries were to be run. That, in extreme brevity, is our genesis. For sixty years it has encouraged voices, new and old, orthodox or unorthodox, who had something to say, or could give a new face to old things, to use its pages. Brown was its first honorary Editor, and with some assistance in the later stages remained so for the thirteen years he had yet to live. Nearly every librarian of distinction in his day has at some time or other contributed to these pages. So much of our past may be said and we hope will be allowed.