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Organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to develop their capacity to navigate in uncharted waters. Our current performance culture demands instant answers, yet fast knowledge paradoxically disables us in that it tends to limit the scope of the questions we pose. Developing the imagination entails asking questions without obvious answers, listening to the unbelievable, tuning into a universe of possibilities rather than certainties. Music is a powerful metaphor to help us develop our capacity for unprotected exploration.

Late nephrology referral, a problem currently identified across many high income countries, has been associated with reduced opportunities for delaying or halting the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD), delayed dialysis initiation, reduced choice in treatment modality, increased morbidity and hospitalization, and premature death. Despite a recent finding that the progression of CKD nearly always presents warning signs, and despite the fact that all Canadians are entitled to receive medically necessary health care free at the point of patient entry, each year in the province of British Columbia (BC) a substantial number of people with CKD experience late or no referral to nephrology care prior to requiring renal replacement therapy. A subset of these CKD patients experience no referral and “crash” onto dialysis (experience an acute or emergent start). Existing research has not fully explored the range of potential health determinants that may affect the timing of nephrology referral. This paper adopts a “determinants of health” framework and assesses the impact of a variety of indicators on patients’ physical health, demographics, socioeconomic status, social support, geographic and health system characteristics. Using a late referral definition of <3 months and data on BC patients who began dialysis between April 2000 and March 2003, multiple regression analysis indicates that the following determinants have an independent effect on the timing of referral: cause of end-stage renal disease (p=<0.0001); age (p=<0.0001); race/ethnicity (p=0.0019); English ability (p=0.0158); marital status (p=0.0202); proximity to care (p=0.0118); and, “age by first language” (p=0.0244).

The purpose of this study is to diagnose the trajectory of influential conceptual articles in developing a research stream. The authors uncover the knowledge diffusion through influential conceptual articles and identify characteristics that make conceptual articles influential in their field.

This study draws on scientometrics, specifically an integrated approach combining quantitative citation counts with qualitative citation practices analysis that offers a comprehensive understanding of the nature and context of citations. The authors use the case of customer engagement – a prominent contemporary marketing and service research stream – to explore the trajectory of influential articles in shaping a new research stream.

This research shows that influential articles contribute to the reciprocal knowledge diffusion within and outside their home discipline. They provide anchor points for conceptual framing, conceptual refining and conceptual reconciliation – three application patterns of citations that are pivotal to navigate theory discovery and theory justification in a research field.

The study analyzes the early impact period of two influential customer engagement articles to understand the developments leading to the establishment of a new research stream. Future research drawing on automated citation and bibliometric methods may consider extended time periods.

This study traces the trajectory of influential articles in marketing and service research. The authors identify characteristics of influential conceptual articles, and recommend practices to develop a conceptual paper with the potential for an influential trajectory. It shows that while marketing and service research has a tradition of “borrowing” theories from other fields, seminal articles “lend” theories to other fields.

Football, or soccer as it is known in the United States, is one area in which managerial positions are hugely volatile with what is often called a ‘merry-go-round’ of managers sacked for poor performance at their club and reemployed by another club. Not only does this practice often not increase performance but it is also very costly. Considering the nature of football, that is, the relatively high impact of chance on the rare events that goals are, and the high correlation between success and the wage bill, the influence of managers on performance is often over-estimated. However, potentially better preparation of future managers might help to increase competitive advantages. In this chapter, we are looking in depth at leadership in the context of football and the lessons we can draw for other contexts.

This chapter explores the relevance of critical race theory (CRT) and queer theory to the relational aspects of program evaluation. Often conceptual binaries that undergird traditional evaluation theory and practice (e.g., internal versus external evaluation, subjective versus objective analysis, observation versus intervention, and insider versus outsider positionalities) adversely influence rigid social roles between evaluator and participant limit a study's effectiveness in supporting programs for equity in contemporary school districts. To illustrate this approach, an array of problems within a program evaluation of a district-wide ethnic studies reform initiative is presented. Approaches to these challenges rooted in tenets of CRT and queer theory illustrate how the district was able to clarify goals and develop an effective implementation plan that focused on effective ethnic studies curriculum and pedagogy.

Business realities include delays, unintended downstream consequences, exponential versus linear relationships, “hidden demons,” and virtuous and viscous feedback cycles. Executives often respond to these realities by applying nearsighted short-term solutions that contribute to long-run business failure. We provide core propositions and a framework for causal mapping and testing “micro-worlds” of real-life marketing-buying realities. A microworld is a set of explicit assumptions about how things get done, that is, how each variable in a marketing-buying system relates to other variables in the system. The framework suggests applying eight steps linking systems-thinking cause mapping, policy mapping, and systems dynamics modeling. The chapter reviews case research studies that apply the eight steps. Modeling system dynamics of business relationships aims to run simulations of the resulting microworld model of a specific reality; the main aim goes beyond description and explanation to offer prescriptions that reduce the occurrence of viscous cycles and encourage decisions leading to virtuous cycles. Hopefully, this chapter serves to awareness and use of system dynamics tools among case study researchers and executives in business and industrial marketing.

THE name is arresting, like the personality for which it stands. Cunninghame Graham: Lavery's equestrian portrait of him conveys the essential man as revealed in his writings, though the other one (somewhat reminiscent of Raeburn's Sir John Sinclair), which presents him to us afoot, lacks nothing save a horse for company. He has a passion for horses and has written many an essay in which they are leading characters and one book devoted to them—The Horses of the Conquest. William Rothenstein has recorded him in lithograph and in oils and in Men and Memories includes a reproduction of a painting of him in fencer's garb. Belcher did a charcoal drawing of him—it appeared in Punch—with a lightly indicated background of Hyde Park Corner and a horse or two, in a dexterous mere line or two, clipping past. There is a word‐picture of him in the epilogue to Bernard Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion and another in George Moore's Conversations in Ebury Street. Writer, Scots laird, Spanish hidalgo, South American ranch‐owner, he has ridden and bivouaced in Texas and Patagonia and may be found this month in Morocco, next month in London, or in Venezuela, or enjoying a braw day (or a snell day for that matter) in Perthshire.

The search for an easily installed, practicable and inexpensive information retrieval system continues unabated. This is reflected in the Aslib Library almost daily by requests for advice on the feasibility of installing this or that system, or for information on what systems are available in Great Britain. Study of the following bibliography, which covers only a narrow selection of information retrieval systems, will reveal that much original thought has been producing concrete results in this country. In fact, one of the earliest references is to a paper given at the twenty‐second Aslib Conference in 1947 by W. E. Batten, in which he describes his development of an ‘aspect’ card system—more often referred to today as ‘Peek‐a‐boo’ or ‘feature’ cards. Mr C. W. Cleverdon's Cranfield project is also adding considerable knowledge on the use of various indexing methods, including Uniterm.

I suppose that most noticeable of all the changes in our profession since I came into it has been the multiplicity of the methods by which one can become a librarian. A. E. Standley says in a recent article in the L.A.R., in 1970: “The term librarian includes the Library Association chartered librarian, the graduate with a degree in librarianship, the scholar librarian, the information and intelligence officer, the translator, the abstracter, the non‐library‐qualified subject expert”.