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The purpose of this paper is to apply Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to illustrate the individual identity issues that can arise as a result of institutional complexity in organizations. Using Baum’s text to tell the story of four faculty members seeking the city of Oz, which in our story is a university athletic department, reveals how individuals and organizational units deal with the tensions brought about by institutional complexity. In addition to providing an entertaining, perhaps infuriating account of the typical public university, this essay reveals the importance of understanding individual struggles to deal with organizational pluralism.

The authors use the well-established example of the university using Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in allegorical form to illustrate the tensions that emerge from organizational units that deal with contradicting external environments as well as the sensemaking and search processes that can emerge for individuals dealing with the identity issues that can result from such tensions.

Internal tensions can emerge within organizations when there are contradictions among the various pressures such organizations generate. These tensions have implications on individual identity.

Individuals (in this case individuals from academic units) risk having their occupational identities compromised by divergent organizational units as these units attempt to legitimate their existence within the organization. The authors illustrate how individuals deal with such risks by engaging in search processes that seek to construct their identities and develop meaning for their actions.

The debate around developing online information systems has tended to focus on the technology options. These include hypertext, image processing, document management, storage, communications and expert systems. Little attention has been paid, however, to the content of the information to be put online. Without content that is user‐oriented, in terms of its organisation and presentation, an online information system is worthless. People will only be lured away from paper if the online system is more usable. Various methods have been devised for improving usability of online information. This paper will concentrate on one in particular, known as Information Mapping. Information Mapping is a research‐based method for analysing, organising and visually presenting information. Developed over 30 years by Dr Robert Horn while at Columbia and Harvard Universities and later in commercial applications, the method helps ensure that all the expenditure normally associated with online systems is maximised for user productivity. The paper will illustrate the method by comparing mapped with unmapped information, supported by empirical research findings in a variety of case studies.

What historical background Van Overtveldt offers, he primarily draws from interviews he personally conducted and memoirs of various Chicago economists, especially Milton Friedman. In the introduction, Van Overtveldt (2007, p. 15) sheds light on his methodology; he states that he based his historical analysis on three layers of sources: “The first layer includes the books, essays, monographs, and articles published in academic journals by Chicago and non-Chicago economists…The second layer consists of material that is available in the archives of the University of Chicago…and in the files of the Communications Department of the University of Chicago. The third layer [draws from]…the more than 100 interviews that were conducted from 1994 to 2003.” Regarding the third, Van Overtveldt has provided a valuable historical contribution by compiling such an extensive oral history. Of the three layers Van Overtveldt mentions, the second is relatively thin. In the endnotes, Van Overtveldt only cites, excluding newspaper citations, seven archival sources from either the Special Collections at the University of Chicago or the files in Chicago's Communications Department. Tellingly, in the endnotes, the ratio of interview citations to archival citations is roughly 120:7≅17:1.¹ While adducing interviews per se is not problematic, information in an interview (or a memoir) needs to be checked against archival sources. Historian of economic thought, Bruce Caldwell (2007, pp. 348–349), cautions “[One should] take reminiscences with a grain of salt, and whenever possible to consult multiple archival sources.”² If a reflection cannot be checked against archival sources, it should be used with guarded skepticism. Van Overtveldt, however, unquestioningly relies on interviews; in fact, a retrospective point made by Friedman sometimes trumps assertions, explicit and implicit, critical of Chicago economics and its history. Van Overtveldt (2007, p. 27) plays the Friedman trump card, for example, in the following context:[Crauford] Goodwin noted that by the end of the 1940s, prominent members of the business community backed economists who preached the advantages of free competition and capitalism and ‘were all associated with the University of Chicago.’ Friedman strongly denies the relevance of this Cold War argument and the implied patronage of economics – especially at the University of Chicago – by business interests in favor of capitalism and the free-market economy.

The Coase theorem is associated with Stigler because Stigler coined the term. The object of this paper is to show that Stigler’s Coase theorem is Stiglerian for deeper – namely, methodological – reasons. We argue that, convinced as he was by the importance of Coase’s message, Stigler also believed that this message – such as presented in “The Federal Communications Commission” (1959) or “The Problem of Social Cost” (1962) – was not scientific. Hence, he had to transform it into a theorem to give it a scientific dimension. This is what we try to show by presenting Stigler’s methodology and by confronting it to the methodology used in Coase’s articles.

The social indicator approach represents an extension and a change in direction of traditional methods of statistical assessment. Professor Raymond Bauer, a pioneer of the social indicator movement, has described them as:

The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of visualization for corporate knowledge management.

The employed methodology consists of a taxonomy of visualization formats that are embedded in a conceptual framework to guide the application of visualization in knowledge management according to the type of knowledge that is visualized, the knowledge management objective, the target group, and the application situation. This conceptual framework is illustrated through real‐life examples.

The findings show that there is much room for knowledge management applications based on visualization beyond the mere referencing of experts or documents through knowledge maps.

The research implications thus consist of experimenting actively with new forms of visual knowledge representation and evaluating their benefits or potential drawbacks rigorously.

The authors encourage managers to look beyond simple diagrammatic representations of knowledge and explore alternative visual languages, such as visual metaphors or graphic narratives.

This paper consists of two elements: first, the systematic, descriptive and prescriptive approach towards visualization in knowledge management, and second the innovative examples of how to harness the power of visualization in knowledge management.

The University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) is a principal producer of instructional simulations for preparing educational administrators. The most recent simulation product of the Council is the Monroe City Simulation, parts of which are currently being disseminated and other parts of which are still in various stages of planning and development. The authors describe in this article five generic issues which UCEA simulation developers have had to resolve and which continue to face others engaged in similar kinds of development work. The issues described include those of (1) the use of theoretical vs. empirical models, (2) realism, (3) bias, (4) complexity and (5) learning effects.

Everyone knows the story of the traveller lost in Ireland, and asking a passing local the way to Dublin. The reply was: If I were you, I shouldn't start from here. It seems to me that this Irish principle of progress is implicit in much of the discussion in Britain about the desirable future shape of further and higher education. It was certainly the key to understanding of much of the recent House of Commons debate on the universities.