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“It's all jargon”, I hear you say. Well, don't put up with that, get an explanation which you understand. With all the following questions, where appropriate, make sure you get your answers in writing and preferably in the contracts!

LOOKING BACKWARDS IN 1986 That this editorial is almost wholly serious must not be taken as heralding a change in the editorial tone of voice for 1986. Normal demotic style will resume in February.

The coming year will see many enthusiastic librarianship graduates emerging from colleges and universities up and down the country and taking their first professional posts. Successful job applicants will be seeking to make their mark with an attitude of enthusiasm, efficiency and professionalism. However, so many newly qualified librarians fail to maintain such an attitude. Why? At a recent conference, Pat Coleman warned librarianship students that they “would feel frustrated in their first professional post after completing their courses, and that they would have difficulty in trying to bring about change”. Anna Smyth also expressed some concern at the fate awaiting many of our young colleagues; “If they remain unfulfilled, unstretched and uninterested for long they may well become bored, frustrated and cynical — a well known syndrome within librarianship”.

The purpose of this article is to examine a little some of the ways in which the principles of librarianship may be producing beneficial effect in other fields, owing to the mobility of trained librarians caused partly by those dark aspects of the body economic, job stagnation and redundancy, and partly by growing opportunities.

This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.

To extract the secrets of the marketing of Dan Brown's world‐wide bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.

Case study research based on secondary sources and close reading of relevant texts.

The staggering success of The Da Vinci Code is contrary to conventional marketing wisdom, but conventional wisdom is increasingly inappropriate intoday's entertainment economy.

Case study research. Needs replication in additional domains. The accepted approaches to best marketing practice need re‐evaluation.

Approaches topic from unconventional direction. Tries to capture the spirit of Brown's writing.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodological usability evaluation approach for e‐commerce websites in developing countries.

A multi‐faceted usability evaluation of three Jordanian e‐commerce websites was used, where three usability methods (user testing, heuristic evaluation and web analytics) were applied to the sites.

A four‐step approach was developed to facilitate the evaluation of e‐commerce sites, mindful of the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in identifying specific usability problems.

The approach was developed and tested using Jordanian users, experts and e‐commerce sites. The study compared the ability of the methods to detect problems that were present, however, usability issues not present on any of the sites could not be considered when creating the approach.

The approach helps e‐commerce retailers evaluate the usability of their websites and understand which usability method(s) best matches their need.

This research proposes a new approach for evaluating the usability of e‐commerce sites. A novel aspect is the use of web analytics (Google Analytics software) as a component in the usability evaluation in conjunction with heuristics and user testing.

This paper highlights that the strategic use of design, a competitive pattern typically associated with creative industries, those creating and trading meanings, also characterizes industries that produce functional or utilitarian goods not typically considered creative. The paper explores the origins of this phenomenon in the context of three industry settings: cars, speciality coffee and personal computers. The analysis theorizes three distinct strategic paths that explain how design may become an institutionalized aspect of competition in industries that are not creative. We explain how firms link their products to the identities of their users, how design is linked to stakeholders' emotions and visceral reactions to products and how intermediaries are relevant to enhancing attention to design. Illuminating these strategic paths allows harnessing some of the well-established understandings about competition in creative industries towards understanding competition in noncreative industries.

Briefly maps the intellectual terrain of a generic system of enquiry — the metatheory of case study research. Draws a distinction between a generic research design and a methodology: the former is an overarching research plan, the latter refers to data‐generating processes and cognitive procedures for discerning datal patterns. Methodology is an integral part of every generic research design. General systems theory informs the metatheory on the case under study. Describes the armamentarium of case study research: topical loci in case study research; researcher's a priori notions and values; ideology/epistemology interrelations; data‐generating instruments and procedures; cognitive datalpattern processes and characteristics of case study discourse. Delineates the influences of the pragmatic unity of fact and value, the reciprocal relations between knowledge and practice, and the constraints of the researcher's intellectual vision and values. Presents the character and significance of the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle for the epistemology of the social/behavioural sciences.