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Informed decisions about sampling are critical to improving the quality of research synthesis. Even though several qualitative research synthesists have recommended purposeful sampling for synthesizing qualitative research, the published literature holds sparse discussion on how different strategies for purposeful sampling may be applied to a research synthesis. In primary research, Patton is frequently cited as an authority on the topic of purposeful sampling. In Patton’s original texts that are referred to in this article, Patton does not make any suggestion of using purposeful sampling for research synthesis. This article makes a unique contribution to the literature by examining the adaptability of each of Patton’s 16 purposeful sampling strategies to the process of qualitative research synthesis. It illuminates how different purposeful sampling strategies might be particularly suited to constructing multi‐perspectival, emancipatory, participatory and deconstructive interpretations of published research.

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This paper introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This paper introduces topic modeling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.

While it is widely recognized that firms in an era of technological ferment exist under conditions of significant uncertainty and ambiguity, little is known about the exact processes through which firms explore their ideas and resolve uncertainty. Arguing that our understanding of the era of ferment is much less developed than other aspects of the technology life cycle, we examine the micro-dynamics of technology-based entrepreneurial firms during this period. We focus on the role of purposeful experimentation as a key form of learning for start-ups firms in the era of ferment. Our approach contrasts with the prevailing view in the literature in which the era of ferment is characterized by extensive experimentation across firms, with each firm representing a single data point in an industry-level experiment. It also extends the learning literature by focusing on start-ups and taking the perspective that learning can encompass purposeful experimentation as well as local search and chaotic adaptation in the era of ferment. Building on the literature on experimental design, we propose a definition and taxonomy of purposeful experimentation. The taxonomy defines the experimental landscape as having three domains – technological, product and business model; and two dimensions – degree of simultaneity and degree of parameter manipulation. We examine this framework using data from a technology-based start-up and find evidence for purposeful experimentation as a key element of the firm’s learning strategy. We also highlight the organizational constraints and challenges that are associated with experimentation. Our findings emphasize the importance of entrepreneurial action, choice and internal experimentation processes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of purposeful and ethical leadership in a UK county police force – referred to by the pseudonym PoliceOrg. The paper also evaluates the extent to which officers feel their values fit with those of the organisation, and the outcomes achieved by purposeful and ethical leaders.

A questionnaire survey, interviews and focus groups were conducted at PoliceOrg. The findings are compared with those from a public sector case study and with a representative sample of the UK working population.

Purposeful leaders at PoliceOrg have a positive impact on important outcomes for their direct reports and provide a sense of direction and guidance to those who do not feel a strong fit between their values and those of their organisation.

The study focuses on a new construct (purposeful leadership) that has not previously been explored in the academic literature. Consequently, the findings cannot be directly compared with those of other studies. The survey focused on the views of police sergeants and constables, and only one police force participated as a case study; hence, the generalisability of the findings is limited.

Police organisations should nurture and sustain workplace environments where leaders can translate their personal moral code and ethical values into their role behaviours to address the policing challenges of the future.

This study elucidates the concept of purposeful leadership in the context of a police force.

Breakout rooms are commonly used by lecturers as a means to achieve collaborative learning in online lessons. Although breakout rooms can be effective at encouraging student engagement, interaction and learning, many students dislike being forced to interact with peers, and for some students, it can lead to feelings of anxiety and stress. Successful collaborative learning depends upon having the “right” individuals working together, so the purpose of this research is to identify specific learner attributes that are associated with purposeful interpersonal interaction in breakout rooms.

An online survey was used to obtain data from 664 higher education students in the USA, which were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

Students' technology readiness, social identification and intercultural communication competence are each significantly related to the achievement of purposeful interpersonal interaction, which is strongly related to students' perceived learning.

The findings of this research emphasize the importance of lecturers considering learner attributes when forming breakout room groups.

The breakout room represents a unique and specific context for collaborative learning, where there may be minimal lecturer supervision and where students may choose to disengage by turning off their cameras and microphones or simply listen without participating (known as lurking). The existing literature has given little attention to how lecturers allocate students to online breakout rooms.

Robert Hauptman first raised awareness about the ethical issues of reference service in 1976. Hauptman, a library school student at the time, did a study on the culpability, or lack thereof, in reference service provided by librarians. In his study, Hauptman posed as a library patron seeking potentially dangerous information. The behavior examined was how librarians respond to the request for material on how to build a bomb that would be powerful enough to blow up a house. Hauptman tried to present himself as a person of questionable character. He used six public and seven academic libraries in this study. Hauptman first made sure that he was speaking to the reference librarian. He then requested information for the construction of a small explosive, requesting specifically the chemical properties of cordite. He then asked for information on the potency of such an explosive, whether or not it could blow up a suburban house (Hauptman, Wilson Library Bulletin, 1976, p. 626).

This study aims to provide important insights in advancing the hospitality workforce by exploring the dimensions of calling. By identifying significant calling dimensions among hospitality employees, the study is guided by work as calling theory by also examining the mediating role of employees’ professional identity on intention to leave the industry.

This study used an exploratory mixed-methods approach. Study 1 included an online qualitative survey to explore the significant dimensions of calling among hospitality employees. Study 2 measured the significance of hospitality calling dimensions on intention to leave the industry, mediated by professional identity.

Study 1 identified transcendent summons, passion and purposeful life as significant dimensions of hospitality calling. Study 2 examined calling as a second-order construct with the aforementioned dimensions and proposed calling increases professional identity and decreases intention to leave the industry. However, professional identity did not significantly influence the intention to leave the industry.

This study brings value to the calling literature by exploring the calling dimensions unique to the hospitality workforce. Findings also highlight that subjective professional identity alone cannot lower employees’ intention to leave the industry. Organizational and industry support focusing on transcendent summons, passion and purposeful life are recommended.

In order to survive, the actions of a purposeful system must be governed in such a way that its more prepotent needs are satisfied. A purposeful system's actions are largely governed by its representation of its world, and hence if it has an inappropriate representation it will not survive. Our premise is that intelligence is a property only reasonably attributable to purposeful systems which compute a representation of their world. Using this premise, we consider cognition to be the continual process of computing/recomputing representations and argue that it implies forms of computation, described in this paper, which make distinctions.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding regarding how managers attempt to make purposeful use of innovation management self-assessments (IMSA) and performance information (PI).

An interpretative perspective on purposeful use is used as an analytical framework, and the paper is based on empirical material from two research projects exploring the use of IMSA and PI in three case companies. Based on the empirical data, consisting of interviews and observations of workshops and project meetings, qualitative content analysis has been conducted.

The findings of this paper indicate that how managers achieve a purposeful use of PI is related to their approach toward how to use the specific PI at hand, and two basic approaches are analytically separated: a rule-based approach and a reflective approach. Consequently, whether or not the right thing is being measured also becomes a question of how the PI is actually being interpreted and used. Thus, the extensive focus on what to measure and how to measure it becomes edgeless unless equal attention is given to how managers are able to use the PI to make knowledgeable decisions regarding what actions to take to achieve the desired changes.

Given the results, it comes with a managerial responsibility to make sure that all managers who are supposed to be engaged in using the PI are given roles in the self-assessments that are aligned with the level of knowledge they possess, or can access.

How managers purposefully use PI is a key to understand the potential impact of self-assessments.

Personality research often has focused on how people change in response to the work environment, given that work constitutes a significant portion of the daily life of adults. However, most research has failed to consider the effect of the work context on purpose in life. This omission is surprising given that purpose research involves several characteristics that align well with the occupational psychology and organizational behavior literatures. The current research considers how one feature of the work context, work stress, may (or may not) facilitate the purpose development process. We put forth a Purpose and Work Stress (PAWS) model which explains why understanding whether work stress is perceived as harmful or challenging to employees can provide significant insight into whether that occupation is aligned with the individual’s purpose in life. Furthermore, the model highlights that the ability to monitor and interpret work stress may help an individual identify and cultivate their purpose. Implications of the PAWS model are described, including how it may help us understanding the roles for retirement and job crafting on purpose.