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Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America.

Methodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories?

Findings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value.

Implications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously.

Originality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.

Lending novels is the major service provided by public libraries. The efforts in developing search systems have been focused on retrieving non-fiction. There is a need for designing systems to support fiction searching in libraries. The aim of this study is to analyze readers’ methods of accessing fiction in a public library for informing the design of fiction search systems. This study seeks to find out which attributes of books readers perceive as indicators of a good novel, and what kind of tactics they use for finding these good novels in the public library.

The authors observed 16 adult library users by semi-structured interviews eliciting information about their literary competence, what characterizes a good novel and how they accessed and identified good novels in the library.

Based on the data this paper developed a tentative reader typology, which differentiated the attributes of good novels and major tactics for accessing them.

The typology was used for inferring user models and design ideas for systems supporting fiction searching.

This is the first empirical study to inform how readers’ literary competence is associated with the tactics used and indicators recognized in books for finding and selecting good novels to borrow.

There are five factors acting as a barrier to the effective evaluation of educational technology (edtech), which are as follows: premature timing, inappropriate techniques, rapid change, complexity of context and inconsistent terminology. The purpose of this paper is to identify new evaluation approaches that will address these and reflect on the evaluation imperative for complex technology initiatives.

An initial investigation of traditional evaluative approaches used within the technology domain was broadened to investigate the evaluation practices within social and public policy domains. Realist evaluation, a branch of theory-based evaluation, was identified and reviewed in detail. The realist approach was then refined, proposing two additional necessary steps to support mapping the technical complexity of initiatives.

A refined illustrative example of a realist evaluation framework is presented, including two novel architectural edtech domain reference models to support mapping.

Recommendations include building individual evaluator capacity; adopting the realist framework; the use of architectural edtech domain reference models; phased evaluation to first build theories in technology “context” and then iteratively during complex implementation chains; and community contribution to a shared map of technical and organisational complexity.

This paper makes a novel contribution by arguing the imperative for a theory-based realist approach to help redefine evaluative thinking within the IT and complex system domain. It becomes an innovative proposal with the addition of two domain reference models that tailor the approach for edtech. Its widespread adoption will help build a shared evidence base that synthesizes and surfaces “what works, for whom, in which contexts and why”, benefiting educators, IT managers, funders, policymakers and future learners.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the understanding of the human personality of fraudsters. This paper will explore their human personality by reviewing three characters from realist novels that have fraudsters as their leading characters. This pa[er will also contribute to literature that intersects between the humanities and criminology.

This paper reviews three fraudster characters from realist novels to explore their human personality, which includes qualitative phenomena resistant to positivist research.

Literature character review that adds to understanding of the qualitative nature of the personality of fraudsters. This qualitative nature of the human personality has been neglected in fraud research and the findings contribute to expanding understanding of the qualitative nature of fraud and fraudsters.

This paper is limited to a literature review from three characters from realist novels.

By expanding understanding of the human personality of fraudsters literary insights can contribute to fraud identification and prevention.

This paper reviews the human personality of three characters from novels to expand understanding of fraudsters, and thus contributes to the intersection of research between the humanities and criminology and fraud research.

Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and “theorizing.” Once the social sciences are taken as a whole, the notion of “sociality” will allow to grasp society as ever changing, as a becoming. I shall examine the notion of sociality in the literary criticism of Lukács, Goldmann, and Adorno, three authors who consider the essay as the adequate open form of critique in times of rapid social change. Originally adopted by the young Lukács, the essay tended to be abandoned by him when elaborating the concept of critical or socialist realism as a repository of timeless cultural values. In his studies in the European realist or the soviet novel, for example, on Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, or Solzhenitsyn, the dialectical concept of social totality becomes a sum of orientations, presenting the individual writer with the moral task to choose “progress” and discard “negativity.” The social is thus narrowed to individual choice. Different from Lukács, Goldmann's literary theory defines cultural production as a matter of the social group, the transindividual subject. Goldmann was deeply marked by Lukács's early writings from which he gained notably the notion of tragedy and the concept of maximum possible consciousness—the world vision of a social group which structures the work of a writer. Cultural creation is resistance to capitalist society, as evident in the literature of absence, Malraux's novels, and the nouveau roman. In the writings of Adorno the social is lodged within the avant-garde, provided that one takes its means and procedures literally, e.g., the writings of Kafka. By formal innovation—among others the adoption of the essay, the small form, the fragment—art exercises criticism of the ongoing rationalization process and preserves the possibility of change (p. 319).

The purpose of this paper is to explore conceptions of radical change and utopianism in the work of Philip K. Dick and Fredrick Jameson in order to challenge the neo‐liberal orthodoxy that historical change is no longer possible. The paper relates this orthodoxy to the dominance of the realist novel as a literary genre and contrasts this with the fantastic and delirious world found in Dick's science fiction.

Jameson's dialectical criticism is combined with aspects of a Benjaminian montage to explore the relationships between ideology, material social organization and the forms of specific literary genres. This approach simultaneously denaturalises the present and opens up the future to the possibility of radical change without delimiting that future by prescribing its form. In this respect the paper is concerned with utopianism rather than representations of Utopia.

The paper shows how the realist novel functioned within a conservative social ideology to prevent change. In contrast works of fantasy like Dick's science fiction open up new possibilities for change and a future that is not entirely delimited by the present but, by denaturing the present, opens it up to a virtual indeterminacy that is the space of freedom.

Theoretically, the paper extends conceptions of radical social and organizational change by considering the limits of dominant conceptions of change and of radical conceptions that seek to represent Utopia. Methodologically the paper contributes to readings of novels in organization studies by introducing Jameson's dialectical criticism and through a critique of the dominant preoccupation in the discipline with realist novels.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the relationship between novels and organizational change and to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management.

The themes of the special issue are discussed and each paper is introduced.

The relationship between novels and organizational change is a complex, iterative one that should be understood in its historical, political, economic and cultural context. If so understood, novels can enhance our understanding of organizational processes.

Although literature and representation in general have been discussed in studies of organization and management before, the specific literary form of the novel has not been theorised in relation to the question of novelty and organizational change.

Sociology has a long and ambivalent relationship with the literary and aesthetic form. Commonsense readings of the novel assume its unproblematic structure as a linear narrative. Yet every novel alerts its readers to the constructed nature of social reality and identifies many of the effects of power, privilege, gender, class, desire, resistance, subversion and so on. As such a novel has the capacity to force a confrontation with fundamental, and Jameson (1981) would suggest, enduring human concerns. The novel can strip away a sense of familiarity with everyday habits, and in so doing, it can replicate the sociological process of denaturalization or defamiliarization, and allow the reader to see how ideas come to circulate, dominate and frame the ordinary world. Accordingly, David Lodge comes to the conclusion that “narrative is one of the fundamental human tools for making sense of the world.”

By examining a controversial and much debated novel like American Psycho around which a great deal of social commentary already exists, and by applying the arguments of Lodge, Jameson and others, we understand better how a work of art simultaneously functions as a deconstructive tool of the social. On this basis, when American Psycho generated a great deal of cultural anxiety in the cultural commentators of the day, it suggests that it had succeeded in denaturalizing the world, and in revealing the residual violence in an affluent, comfortable citizenry that was not expected to harbor such hostilities. American Psycho presented a disturbing “symptomatology of the times.” This capacity of the popular novel to inform on the zeitgeist makes an author such as Bret Easton Ellis a maven of our times whose products we should thus incorporate into the conceptual tool kit of any formal human studies.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), careful plotter of the fictional region of “Wessex,” is a novelist both acutely aware of the role of space in his works and remarkably fascinated by violence. Bringing these two significant elements of his fictional method together, this chapter examines the numerous violent spaces created by Hardy throughout his fiction. It focuses in particular on the ways in which different spaces, at first presumed to be safe, become invaded by extreme acts of violence. In the course of the chapter, I ask: How does this perversion of space by violence contribute to Hardy's literary aims? How do spatial relationships and boundaries intersect with his characterization? And does Hardy leave his readers with any hope for future spaces?

I suggest that Hardy's situation of acts of violence in a range of spaces, natural and domestic alike, is purposefully disorientating. It allows him to interrogate defined social ideas of “moral” indoor spaces and “wild” outdoor landscapes during the late Victorian period. There is, in fact, no such thing as a safe space in Hardy – spaces are ambiguous, changing and shaped by their inhabitants. The effect of violent spaces in Hardy, therefore, provides a challenge both to the conventional settings of nineteenth-century realist writing and any presumed knowledge of these environments. It might be tempting to see such spatial aesthetics as rather pessimistic, yet I argue that by dispelling the illusory link between space and safety, Hardy promotes a more sensitive awareness of everyday environments and our interactions with/within them.

The purpose of this paper is to study what extent readers’ socio-demographic characteristics, literary preferences and search behavior predict success in fiction search in library catalogs.

In total, 80 readers searched for interesting novels in four differing search tasks. Their search actions were recorded with a Morae Recorder. Pre- and post-questionnaires elicited information about their background, literary preferences and search experience. Readers’ literary preferences were grouped into four orientations by a factor analysis. Linear regression analysis was applied for predicting search success as measured by books’ interest scores.

Most literary orientations contributed to search success, but in differing search tasks. The role of result examination was greater compared to querying in contributing search success almost in each task. The proportion of variance explained in books’ interest scores varied between 5 (open-ended browsing) and 50 percent (analogy search).

The distribution of participants was biased toward females, and the results are aggregated within search session, both reducing the variation of the phenomenon observed.

This study is one of the first to explore how readers’ literary preferences and searching are associated with finding interesting novels, i.e. search success, in library catalogs. The results expand and support the findings in Mikkonen and Vakkari (2017) concerning associations between reader characteristics and fiction search success.