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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the arrival of Colombo Plan Scholars in New Zealand and consider ways in which their experience helped to bridge distances between “east and west”, as well as to create connections that traversed geographical and cultural boundaries.

It draws on contemporary newspaper articles to ascertain how public talk about the Colombo Plan programme shaped initial engagements between New Zealand and the scholarship holders. The paper then analyses archival files from the Department of External Affairs to present an overview of the university courses undertaken by Colombo plan scholars. The final section of the paper draws on oral and archival sources to examine individual encounters between former Colombo Plan scholars and New Zealanders.

The paper argues that while the public aims of the Colombo Plan focused on the containment of communism and the development of post‐colonial connections in the South East Asian region, individual encounters between Colombo Plan scholars and New Zealanders played a role in changing social attitudes in what had been a deeply mono‐cultural society.

The paper draws on previously unpublished archival and documentary evidence and oral sources to examine a unique aspect of the history of international education.

The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.

This paper aims to use the technology acceptance model 2 (TAM2) to investigate the perceived ease of use, perceived benefits, barriers to use and acceptance of Arab scholars of informal communication tools in research writing.

This study adopted a quantitative approach using a questionnaire distributed among Arab scholars in Jordan, Egypt and Oman. The questionnaire based on the TAM2 model aimed to measure the acceptance of the sample of informal scholarly communication tools.

The study’s findings confirmed that the sample is considering informal scholarly communication tools are useful for their research. Informal scholarly communication tools increase the papers’ visibility, leading to a higher number of citations, building scholars’ reputation, creating new collaboration opportunities and maintaining the established collaboration.

The study’s findings can only be generalized on Arab scholars. The sample size could be one of the limitations, and the sample’s distribution was limited to three Arab universities in Jordan, Oman and Egypt. The authors recommend that future researchers use TAM2 model as a framework for studying the adoption of informal scholarly communication tools in different cultural contexts to achieve a better understanding of factors influencing the adoption of such tools.

A practical implication of this research is in drawing the attention of higher education institutions for the potentials of these scholarly communication tools in increasing the availability of publications of their scholars and increasing the citation of these publications, which would help in increasing the ranking of scholars, and the rank of these institutions which opens new opportunities of international research collaboration.

The outcomes of this research have several implications for the successful adoption of the TAM2 model. This study brings new knowledge to the literature related to informal scholarly communication adoption by the application of TAM2 constructs to determine the adoption behavior; the findings offered evidence of the TAM2 success in predicting adoption of such tools.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, adopting TAM2 in this research will add to knowledge by being one of the first studies to adopt TAM2 to measure acceptance of informal scholarly communication tools.

The present study examines entrepreneurship in established firms holistically and critically. The authors start by reviewing previous research and highlight a variety of definitional, conceptual, methodological, contextual, and temporal factors that have been confounding the research. The authors then present a multidimensional framework that specifies a more nuanced picture of the determinants, motives, activities, and consequences of corporate in established firms. Finally, the authors discuss conceptual, methodological, and practical implications, as well as outline future research avenues.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that scholars in the information behavior (IB) field should embrace the theoretical framework of the everyday to explore a more holistic view of IB.

The paper describes the theory of the everyday and delineates four opportunities offered by scholars of the everyday. The paper concludes with three examples that highlight what a more everyday-focused everyday information behavior might look like.

The theory of the everyday provides a useful theoretical framework to ground research addressing the everyday world as well as useful concepts for analysis and research methodology.

The theoretical framework of the everyday contributes to IB research by providing a theoretical justification for work addressing everyday life as well as useful concepts for analysis. The paper also outlines the benefits of integrating methods influenced by institutional ethnography, a methodology previously used to address the nuances of the everyday world.

Contemporary entrepreneurial education (EE) has global reach and impact, with a growing number of entrepreneurship courses, specializations, and degrees in all parts of the world. There is no longer a question of the significance and demand for EE in the higher education system. At the same time, the interest in scientific knowledge and proven experience of “what works” has accelerated, resulting in a rapid growth in the number of scholars and research-based publications conversing vividly about the field. This chapter elaborates on the historical evolution of EE as a scholarly field. First, an overview of important milestones and major events that shaped the field is provided. Second, by focusing on the development over the last three decades, the authors present an overview of the advances that have occurred within the field in terms of practice, social, and research-based aspects. The historical review shows how EE began in, but gradually separated from entrepreneurship as a field, which can be observed in the development of research outlets, meeting places, and teaching practice. Consequently, this historical review can serve as a point of departure for showing how the field has emerged and how knowledge has been developed and accumulated over time. The authors believe that this review can be helpful for scholars, particularly new entrants such as PhD students and other scholars entering the EE field, to learn from and contextualize their own research-based historical insight.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching scholarly documents, and then empirically test its most important functionality. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS.

The study is based on queries against different journal lists: international scientific journals from Thomson Scientific (SCI, SSCI, AH), open access journals from the DOAJ list and journals from the German social sciences literature database SOLIS as well as the analysis of result data from GS. All data gathering took place in August 2006.

The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up‐to‐dateness of the GS index. Furthermore, the study points out which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. The paper can show that there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholar's coverage of German literature as well as weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Major commercial academic publishers are currently the main data providers.

Five different journal lists were analysed, including approximately 9,500 single titles. The lists are from different fields and of various sizes. This limits comparability. There were also some problems matching the journal titles of the original lists to the journal title data provided by Google Scholar. The study was only able to analyse the top 100 Google Scholar hits per journal.

The paper concludes that Google Scholar has some interesting pros (such as citation analysis and free materials) but the service cannot be seen as a substitute for the use of special abstracting and indexing databases and library catalogues due to various weaknesses (such as transparency, coverage and up‐to‐dateness).

The authors do not know of any other study using such a brute force approach and such a large empirical basis. The study can be considered as using brute force in the sense that it gathered lots of data from Google and then analysed the data in a macroscopic way.

Previous research has shown that there are major differences in the search methods used in different disciplines, and that the use of electronic journals and databases likewise varies according to domain. Previous studies have not, however, explored whether, or how, this variation is possibly related to factors such as domain size, the degree of scatter in a domain or domain‐specific relevance criteria. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a domain analytic approach for explaining the use and non‐use of e‐journals and databases. We identify and define factors to account for disciplinary differences in e‐journal use, outline hypotheses to be tested more rigorously in future research, and test them initially on a limited data set. The empirical data was gathered as a part of a wider qualitative study exploring scholars’ use of networked resources in four different disciplines: nursing science, literature/cultural studies, history and ecological environmental science. The findings suggest that e‐journals and databases are likely to be used most heavily in fields in which directed searching is the dominant search method and topical relevance the primary relevance type, and less in fields in which browsing and chaining are the dominant search methods and paradigmatic relevance the primary relevance type. The findings also support the Bates hypothesis that domain size has an important impact on the search methods used.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the knowledge base of school-university partnerships by exploring such partnerships in terms of policy implementation.

This paper takes a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews.

To achieve a joint understanding of roles, focus, and work in the partnerships based on the schools’ needs and scholars’ competence was crucial. This was not easily achieved in all partnerships. Conflicting expectations were part of the process. Although they were demanding, the partnership arrangements also represented opportunities for the university scholars to learn.

The findings suggest that partnership arrangements require parties that understand the implications of this collaboration and that respect, mutual trust, and joint understanding are needed. It is likely that bringing different parties together will create conflicts that must be resolved. If unfamiliar to the parties, the use of partnership arrangements is itself an implementation that has its own process that operates in parallel to the work in focus.

Purpose – To advance narrative and context-based organizational research.

Approach – We detail how a research design can dynamically unfold and be adjusted based on feedback from multiple sources, with three components to this process: requisite conceptual openness, methodological adjustment, and acknowledgement of prescient issues. Three examples in existing literature are analyzed, demonstrating how this process can facilitate the development of novel lines of inquiry.

Research implications – Our framework and the practical guidelines we advocate here are a resource for scholars to allow new conceptualizations to blossom and grow in perhaps unexpected directions, which may not otherwise have been charted without this exploratory process.

Originality/Value – The process of discovery is a contribution toward research methodology and design, as a helpful method for maximizing richness in contextual research. This approach may be particularly important in emerging markets and other settings with unexplored organizational processes.