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Visual communications are defined and illustrated in their contemporary operations management setting. They manifest four distinct advantages: assimilation, exposure, evoking and unifying. In Japan, they are related to underlying inherent values and ensure employee involvement. The Japanese experience itself, with its consequent relative success in the field of visual communications, is both investigated and analysed as to type, functions and associated purposes. Visual communications are perceived as galvanising into company plans. Their potential and transferability to Western corporate cultures are explored with a view to their power to deliver information through the hierarchical organisational structure. The underlying thrust is towards achieving continuous improvement in communication, the impact of which would provide a better quality of work life for the employee and improve performance.

States that people management is one of the most crucial variables of corporate success. Provides an analysis of the orientation process, comparing Japan with the West. Investigates Japanese recruitment philosophy in relation to its effective and planned orientation management. Examines and illustrates the scheduling of Japanese orientation programmes. Posits that within this scenario, employee development is perceived under three distinct headings: becoming part of a team, becoming a company person and becoming trained in organizational expectations. Emphasis is put on inter‐relationships, requiring a shared understanding of the direction and values needed for effective business and individual performance. Communication, through orientation, is seen as an essential key to the integration and efficacy of new recruits and existing employees facing strategic change.

Implementations of inter-organizational networks are common, following a growing diversity of cooperative modes between the independent companies associated in these networks.

Their scientific analysis has recently intensified, attention to network structures obviously including the study of the way their performance can be measured. Although academic research has mostly dealt with the performance of the network’s members, the concern of this article is rather with the performance of the global network.

Among the numerous forms of existing inter-organizational networks, maritime port communities are complex organizations which have to deal with operational synchronization, strategic cohesiveness and global performance measurement problems.

This article therefore mainly describes a port performance measurement system (PPMS): built in a predominantly empirical research context, the performance model and the associated measurement indicators illustrate the kind of network-level dedicated, performance control systems, on which port communities need to rely when designing their global strategy.

This article aims to report on a usability study to assess whether students performed better after working through a screencast library tutorial or a web‐based tutorial with screenshots.

This qualitative study asked 21 students from diverse backgrounds and learning styles to take two learning style inventories prior to a usability study. The students then went through two short tutorials (a static web page tutorial with screenshots and a Camtasia screencast (video) tutorial, as well as a pre‐ and post‐test and debriefing for each. The “think aloud” protocol was used as their movements and voices were recorded using the Camtasia software.

The results of this study indicate that across all learning preferences students performed much better in recreating tasks when they used a static web page with screen shots than they did after viewing a screencasting tutorial.

Suggestions are offered for ways to create tutorials that are effective for multiple learning styles that will fit into a student's workflow.

Results of this study may help inform other librarians in ways to effectively design tutorials and learning objects to meet student needs.

The study aims to investigate how the action research contributes to the collective construction of a discipline in management. This issue was the motivation for the present study, which was developed from the experience of master's degree students attending the post-graduate program in management of an institution in the State of Bahia, Brazil.

The overall objective of this study is to understand the method's effectiveness for this aim, whereas the specific objectives are to identify the commitment of the subjects in the activities proposed and to assess the effectiveness of the use of active methods in the discipline construction. The theoretical background is regarding digital education transformation, active teaching methods and action research. As for the qualitative perspective, the methodological approach of choice was that of participant observation (for data collection) and content analysis.

It was possible to highlight the awakening of critical sense and the effectiveness of action research in enhancing the protagonism of the master's degree students in the construction of their own knowledge.

This study not only contributes to the field of applied social sciences but also opens a precedent for the experience of collective construction of a discipline in another area of knowledge by means of action research. Another factor demonstrating the relevance of this study is the production of essays and articles by master's degree students in which active methodologies were related to themes of interest.

This study demonstrates how individual paradigms implicate the questions asked, methods used and results drawn in association with a common object of study in human information behavior (HIB) research – the relationship between uncertainty and decision-making.

The author uses textual case studies to examine uncertainty and decision-making through the framework of four paradigms used in HIB research: positivism, cognitivism, collectivism and constructionism and suggests deconstructionism as a paradigm which raises new questions around this topic.

Positivistic approaches to uncertainty are often systems oriented; cognitive approaches are often user-oriented; collectivist approaches are intersubjective; and constructionist approaches blend a subjective and intersubjective research orientation. Deconstructionism raises new questions around ethics and responsibility in relation to decision-making, and the author therefore situates it as a new paradigmatic approach for this topic in HIB research.

Despite the presence of research aimed at recognizing and defining paradigms in HIB research, a comparative micro-examination of how individual paradigms implicate a specific research topic has yet to be conducted. Each paradigm uniquely shapes the ways in which uncertainty and decision-making are characterized, but the four central ones examined here have thus far left out questions of ethics and responsibility as being core elements of decision-making as tied to uncertainty. Therefore, this paper introduces deconstructionism as a paradigm new to HIB uncertainty research, arguing that it provides an important and novel complication of existent research questions and approaches.

Purpose – Despite an abundance of literature on the effects of copyright infringement on music consumption, empirical evidence remains ambiguous. The aim of this chapter is to quantify the effect of copyright infringement on recorded music purchases and live music attendance for Spanish frequent music consumers, and to measure its effect on participation for all music consumers.

Design/methodology approach – We rely on survey data for the Spanish population as our main information source and use propensity score matching to estimate the average effect of copyright infringement on music consumption. In order to do so, the methodology aims at estimating the difference between actual outcomes (record purchases or attendance to live concerts) for copyright infringers and the (counterfactual) outcome would they had not been infringers.

Findings – Two findings stand out. First, and with regards to recorded music consumption, we find a net positive effect of copyright infringement on full album purchases although a nonsignificant one for tracks. Second, there is a positive and significant effect on live attendance, which is consistent with an indirect appropriation effect across products. These results are robust when participation is considered, but some interesting differences arise between recorded music purchasers and live concerts attenders.

Originality/value – First, the use of a counterfactual control group provides an additional approach to the assessment of copyright infringement. Second, within the same framework we investigate the effects of copyright infringement on recorded and live music, an approach that sheds some light on the degree of complementarity between both markets.

The growth of the nationalist right in Europe and the United States has set off a debate over whether “economic anxiety” or “racial resentment” is at the root of this phenomenon. Examining the case of the French National Front, I suggest that this is a poor way of posing the question of the significance of class in explaining the rise of the nationalist right. Recent advances by the National Front—particularly among working-class voters—have tended to be attributed to the party's strategic pivot toward a “leftist” economic program and an embrace of the republican tradition. This in turn has been critically interpreted in two different ways. Some take the FN’s strategic pivot at face value and see the party's success as the expression of a new political cleavage between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Others see the National Front's embrace of republicanism as a cynical ploy hiding its true face. Both interpretations, however, point to a strategy of “republican defense” as a means to counteract the National Front. I argue that this strategy is likely to misfire and that class remains central to explaining—and countering—the rise of the National Front, albeit in a peculiar way. Working-class support for the National Front does indeed appear to be driven primarily by ethno-cultural, not class, interests, but this is itself predicated on a historical decline in the political salience of class due to the neoliberal depoliticization of the economy. I argue that it was this disarticulation of class identity that helped deliver the working-class vote to the National Front and that any strategy for combating the nationalist right must thus find new ways to articulate a class identity capable of neutralizing racist and chauvinist articulations.

Scholars often suggest that institutionalized employee voice reduces turnover as an alternative to exit when employees are dissatisfied. Paradoxically, Denmark presents a case of high union density and thus high institutionalized employee voice, yet high turnover rates. To explore the Danish turnover paradox, this chapter looks at the macro-societal contextual factors impacting turnover rates in the Danish labor market. Institutional characteristics such as the flexicurity model (i.e., a welfare state model with proactive labor market policy; a portmanteau of flexibility and security), legal frameworks (i.e., relatively lax labor market regulations), and cultural factors (i.e., a culture of equality and collective collaborative structures) are all relevant to understand the high turnover rates in Denmark. The authors first overview the general trends and figures on turnover in Denmark and then examine the Danish institutional, legal, and cultural factors as they relate to the high turnover rates in the Danish labor market. Finally, the authors summarize and discuss the findings and consider their implications for research and practice related to employee turnover in the Nordics and beyond.

Simple expressions for upper and lower limits to the shear modulus of honeycomb sandwich cores are obtained by application of the Unit Displacement and Unit Load methods in conjunction with simplifying assumptions as to the strain and stress systems respectively in the core. The theory is given for cores built up from foil ribbons to form cells of general honeycomb form. Test methods for the experimental determination of the shear modulus are also discussed. Of these, the three‐point bending test on sandwich beams is considered most satisfactory and results of such tests on steel and aluminium foil honeycombs show good agreement with the theory.