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Since its launch in 2007, research has been carried out on the popular social networking website Tumblr. The purpose of this paper is to identify published Tumblr-based research, classify it to understand approaches and methods, and provide methodological recommendations for others.

Research regarding Tumblr was identified. Following a review of the literature, a classification scheme was adapted and applied, to understand research focus. Papers were quantitatively classified using open coded content analysis of method, subject, approach, and topic.

The majority of published work relating to Tumblr concentrates on conceptual issues, followed by aspects of the messages sent. This has evolved over time. Perceived benefits are the platform’s long-form text posts, ability to track tags, and the multimodal nature of the platform. Severe research limitations are caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the limited Advanced Programming Interface, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts on the site.

This study focusses on Tumblr: the applicability of the approach to other media is not considered. The authors focus on published research and conference papers: there will be book content which was not found using the method. Tumblr as a platform has falling user numbers which may be of concern to researchers.

The authors identify practical barriers to research on the Tumblr platform including lack of metadata and access to big data, explaining why Tumblr is not as popular as Twitter in academic studies.

This paper highlights the breadth of topics covered by social media researchers, which allows us to understand popular online platforms.

There has not yet been an overarching study to look at the methods and purpose of those who study Tumblr. The authors identify Tumblr-related research papers from the first appearing in 2011 July until 2015 July. The classification derived here provides a framework that can be used to analyse social media research, and in which to position Tumblr-related work, with recommendations on benefits and limitations of the platform for researchers.

This article describes the third part of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, the first stage of which is described in the study by Price and Robinson (2017).

Using tag analysis as a method, a comparative case study was undertaken to explore three aspects of fan information behaviour: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging and entrepreneurship and economic activity. The case studies took place on three sites used by fans–Tumblr, Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Etsy. Supplementary semi-structured interviews with site users were used to augment the findings with qualitative data.

These showed that fans used tags in a variety of ways quite apart from classification purposes. These included tags being used on Tumblr as meta-commentary and a means of dialogue between users, as well as expressors of emotion and affect towards posts. On AO3 in particular, fans had developed a practice called “tag wrangling” to mitigate the inherent “messiness” of tagging. Evidence was also found of a “hybrid market economy” on Etsy fan stores. From the study findings, a taxonomy of fan-related tags was developed.

Findings are limited to the tagging practices on only three sites used by fans during Spring 2016, and further research on other similar sites are recommended. Longitudinal studies of these sites would be beneficial in understanding how or whether tagging practices change over time. Testing of the fan-tag taxonomy developed in this paper is also recommended.

This research develops a method for using tag analysis to describe information behaviour. It also develops a fan-tag taxonomy, which may be used in future research on the tagging practices of fans, which heretofore have been a little-studied section of serious leisure information users.

Du Bois's interest in the Japanese empire points us in the direction of examining non-Western imperial policies and discourses and how they relate to racialization. For Du Bois, Japan was an exemplar of a nonwhite empire. This chapter reconstructs a Du Boisian conception of race that identifies it closely with ethnicity, against the belief that the African-American intellectual held on to a merely biological conception of race. I argue that his thought evolved towards a social-construction approach in which race must be understood historically and in particular global contexts. By analyzing Japan's policies and discourses around the boundaries of the Japanese, I explicate how Japan carried out a process of self-racialization owing to its dialectical relationship with the West. It also racialized its colonial subjects in a process of in-group delineation according to Japan's imperial imperatives. The case of the Japanese empire demonstrates how a global/transnational approach to racialization is valuable. It also evinces how white supremacy and universalism are not the only logics of imperialism. Moreover, it shows that Du Bois believed white supremacy could be transcended. However, Du Bois was too idealistic about Japan's empire, ignoring how oppressive nonwhite imperial rulers can be toward their subjects even when there are phenotypical similarities between them.

This paper explores the reporting of the Russian American Company (RAC), from 1840 to 1863. Trading in fur, company fears of animal extinctions viewed from a monetary perspective led to early extinction reporting practice. These were not altruistic reports; they were generated by a wish to use natural resources. Despite the motivations, these reports present an example of successful extinction management by a for-profit company and a workable example of emancipatory extinction accounting.

Using thematic analysis, this study demonstrates how moving from transparency to accountability driven accounting can assist in biodiversity reporting, by exploring this historical business case of extinction management through the lens of Atkins and Maroun's (2018) extinction framework.

The application of the framework to the RAC's set of reports indicates that this offers a viable proposal for development of extinction management, providing a reporting tool for a for-profit company.

Exploring RAC's reports focusing on their extinction management processes and reporting, the paper contributes to the contemporary debate on the development of extinction reporting frameworks. These historical examples of extinction accounting, show extinction management and reporting is not a unique contemporary development in accounting. The research uses historical data as the empirical foundation for exploring applicability and further development of this extinction framework.

Systems intelligence (SI) (Saarinen and Hämäläinen, 2004) is a construct defined as a person’s ability to act intelligently within complex systems involving interaction and feedback. SI relates to our ability to act in systems and reason about systems to adaptively carry out productive actions within and with respect to systems such as organizations, family and everyday life. This paper aims to develop an inventory to measure the SI construct.

A combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out using data from self-report questionnaires.

Eight factors labeled systemic perception, attunement, attitude, spirited discovery, reflection, wise action, positive engagement and effective responsiveness are identified as the main components of SI. SI has associations with emotional intelligence but also captures additional dimensions. People in supervisor positions are found to score higher in a number of the SI factors.

A new measure is developed to evaluate and develop our ability to succeed in systemic contexts. The new measure is suggested to be particularly applicable in organizational contexts. It is directly related to the original core disciplines of the learning organization as described by Senge (1990), in particular personal mastery and systems thinking.