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The purpose of this article is to describe an innovative research methods framework designed to address some of the persistent challenges to a social scientific understanding of civilian-led police oversight commissions.

The project design begins by acknowledging that oversight commissions take multiple and varied forms, which are contingent on local histories, institutional dynamics and discursive strategies for indexing racial inequality. The authors find such variation not to be an impediment to insightful research design. Rather, the methodological frame makes use of multi-sited ethnographic methods, organized at the county level across three research clusters (in this example, Milwaukee Co, WI; San Diego Co., CA; and Washtenaw Co, MI), to draw attention to the effects of such multiplicity to complicate, localize and render visible the specific practices of policing and its critique through civilian oversight.

Amongst an increasing national concern with the racialized nature of police violence, one evolving strategy for police reform among municipalities is to establish civilian oversight boards that can monitor, make recommendations for, and potentially direct police policy. However, there is very little research on such commissions, leaving many unanswered questions for proponents of evidence-based criminal justice policy. One reason for this lack is that the tremendous variability of such commissions has led some researchers to abandon hope for a comparative analysis which might offer generalizable conclusions beyond individual case studies. Lessons learned from previous reform efforts suggest that without a solid evidentiary basis, such reform efforts can easily succumb to institutional inertia or even failure. This danger is especially present when policy and practice recommendations are not based on research designs particularly attuned to making audible the experiences and concerns of the most marginalized targets of police attention.

The value of this method rests in its ability to provide comparative insights into the ways in which oversight commissions operate within a broader pluralized security landscape that both makes possible and constrains democratic participation along racial lines. The method contextualizes and renders audible ways of understanding, evaluating, and practicing democratic community as it is articulated through the issue of police and its oversight.

The purpose is to bring together all bibliographic references of the published literature on electronic books (e‐books) and related technologies in one source so that it will save time for others in conducting literature searches and reviewing the developments.

The information included in this bibliography is collected systematically from all the published sources in the world such as journal articles, conference papers, conference proceedings, books, reports and PhD theses on e‐books until the last quarter of 2004. Mainly it covers e‐books, e‐books publishing, the impact of e‐books on different types of users, e‐book publishing techniques and trends, e‐book user interfaces and other technologies related to e‐publications.

As computer usage continues to grow exponentially, the desire of users to use electronic publications (e‐publications) has also increased tremendously. This has led to the publication of materials in electronic form as e‐publications on both CD‐ROMs and web. The e‐book is one of the several forms of e‐publications and its popularity has been growing steadily for the past decade.

This bibliography will be useful to all researchers conducting research in any areas related to e‐books and e‐book publishing.

This bibliographic essay examines the scope and variety of nonfiction works in comics form with the intent of expanding librarians’ awareness of the diversity of such materials and serving as a resource for librarians.

It provides some theoretical background for understanding what constitutes nonfiction in graphic form and an overview of works available in print.

The article provides a representative (but not comprehensive) survey of graphic nonfiction works in the genres of memoir, travel, journalism, history, biography, science, essays and educational materials.

The essay focuses on materials published in books in English; the library world would benefit from subsequent research exploring the richness of materials available in other formats and other languages.

The field of graphic nonfiction is expanding, and this article serves as a guide for libraries interested in building or expanding collections in this format.

Skilled migrant (SM) women play a key role in developed countries especially in healthcare and education in easing staffing shortages and migrate expecting to gain qualification-matched employment (QME). The aim of this review is to assess whether SM women gain the anticipated QME, equitably compared to their skilled counterparts and to examine why and how they do so.

I conducted a systematic literature review to derive empirical studies to assess if, why and how SM women achieve QME (1) using SM women-only samples and comparative samples including SM women, and (2) examining whether they gain QME directly on or soon after migration or indirectly over time through undertaking alternative, contingent paths.

Only a minority of SM women achieve the anticipated QME directly soon after migration and less often than their skilled counterparts. Explaining the mechanism for achieving QME, other women, especially due to having young families, indirectly undertake alternative, lower-level contingent paths enabling them to ascend later to QME.

The SM literature gains new knowledge from revealing how SM women can gain positions post-migration comparable to their pre-migration qualifications through undertaking the alternative, contingent paths of steppingstone jobs and academic study, especially as part of agreed familial strategies. This review results in a theoretical mechanism (mediation by a developmental contingency path) to provide an alternative mechanism by which SM women achieve QME.

The purpose of this study is to examine product innovation as a means of addressing infrastructure shortages in developed economies and to improve the sustainability of infrastructure. The obstacles to product innovation in the road industry are compared between different types of participants in the supply chain to provide guidelines for interventions to improve innovation rates.

This exploratory study uses descriptive data from a large scale survey of the Australian road industry. The three top-rated product innovation obstacles for the following four types of participants are examined: contractors, consultants, suppliers and clients.

The four groups were found to disagree about the relative importance of the obstacles. Contractors and suppliers ranked “restrictive price-only tender assessment” used by clients as their number one obstacle, while consultants thought there was too much emphasis by the clients on direct costs compared with whole-of-life costs. On the other hand, clients felt suppliers do not do enough thorough testing prior to proposing a new product and disagreed with suppliers about who should carry the risk of new product failure.

The conceptual framework was found to yield novel insights with significant policy implications. The construction-specific contextual determinants that were integrated by the authors into a broad innovation diffusion process proved useful in categorising road product innovation obstacles across the four surveyed supply chain groups – without overlap or omission. The new framework also proved useful in ordering the key obstacles across groups for interpretation and discussion. In disaggregating product obstacles according to groups, these contextual determinants were proven to be mutually exclusive and to represent important focal points in promoting the uptake of product innovation in construction. Although the current study has usefully provided quantitative data concerning construction innovation obstacles, there are limitations due to its reliance on descriptive statistics. Future work by the authors is proposed to analyse the relationships between innovation obstacles and supply chain partners using inferential statistics to further develop and validate these early findings. The current study is an interim step in this work and an important contribution in identifying and addressing firm-level barriers seen to be constraining construction product innovation.

Results suggest there is a need for government clients to carefully consider the differing perspectives across the supply chain when developing strategies to encourage the adoption of mutually-beneficial innovative products on their construction projects. Inclusive focus groups examining the drivers, configuration and benefits of collaborative procurement systems are recommended to reduce innovation obstacles.

Society relies on urban infrastructure for daily living and the current study contributes to stretching infrastructure investment dollars and reducing the environmental impact of infrastructure provision.

No previous study has compared the perception of product innovation obstacles across different road industry supply chain partners. This is a significant gap, as differences in opinions across the supply chain need to be understood to develop the shared expectations and the improved relationships required to improve product innovation rates. Product innovation is important because it has been shown to improve efficiency (potentially addressing the road investment gap) and reduce deleterious environmental impacts.

The current study examines the media's depiction of demands to defund the police. Although this call to action has been a part of the public discourse for decades, the call has reached mainstream attention following the police-involved death of George Floyd in May 2020. Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, and other prominent organizations have endorsed this call. However, there is a lack of agreement on the “correct” meaning of this socio-political movement.

The authors performed an inductive content analysis of the news articles using MaxQDA, a qualitative data analysis program. The authors focus on the text and its themes and patterns in the descriptions of #DefundThePolice, both implicit (e.g. tone) and explicit (e.g. defining the movement as problematic). The codes were further refined following open coding to fully develop the existing patterns. The results are organized by the themes within the articles. The findings also include direct quotes to reinforce the themes.

In the authors' content analysis of news reports, the authors find that the US and UK news outlets report definitions that parallel the M4BL's description of the movement. In this respect, media coverage reflected the basic tenets of the movement accurately as opposed to using definitions that misrepresent the group's primary objective. Although these sampled news articles generally adhered to the basic description of the defund movement, the authors found that the overall substance and tone of coverage varied across outlets. This divergence yielded five overarching themes that included: the involvement of corporate America in the defunding debate, the frequent use of opinion pieces, mentions of history for informing the debate, the inclusion of the police perspective, and reporting that seemed to tie the defund movement to increases in violent crime.

This article explores how the mass media reports and defines the #DefundThePolice movement. Although much debate surrounds this issue, there is limited understanding of the mainstream news media's depiction of the movement. The current study addresses this research gap and informs the defunding debate by examining whether media descriptions of the movement coincide with the Movement for Black Lives benchmark delineation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the future of professional soccer by 2025. Scientific foresight studies on this industry do not yet exist despite its current position at a crossroads: toward further exploitation of profit potential? Or clear commitment to the traditional European Model of Sport?

The authors conducted a Delphi-based scenario study. In total, 62 high-level experts from sport, business, and society evaluated the probability of occurrence, impact, and desirability of 15 future projections over at least two rounds. The resulting 5,940 quantitative judgments and 670 qualitative comments were condensed into probable scenarios and surprising wildcards.

Two probable scenarios for European professional soccer by 2025 exist: in an extrapolation scenario, clubs will reap long-term gains from fulfilling public demands regarding stadium security, competitive balance, and social engagement. The less likely alternative is an extensive commercialization, including a short-term exploitation of all imaginable income sources, such as virtually augmented stadiums, financial investors, and league-owned broadcasting channels.

The findings are primarily based on qualitative research and an all-German sample. Further studies could incorporate additional quantitative data or might survey an international panel to increase predictive accuracy.

The paper is novel in that it examines a yet unaddressed research gap – the future of professional soccer – with a common scientific foresight method that is already established in sport management research – the Delphi technique.