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Purpose – To investigate the potential future role of information delivery in terms of reducing transport-related emissions. The assumed response of travellers to information and the notions of content and context are provided, together with factors that can determine an individual's propensity to seek and engage with travel information.

Methodology/approach – A review of information use, the behavioural stages of change and context design is undertaken, incorporating a research case study in the use of framing.

Findings – Recent theoretical and empirical insights into behavioural change provide new insights into the role of information in reducing transport-related emissions. Traveller information offers many benefits to the user and could be influential in affecting travel behaviour change, although there are socio-psychological factors outside the control of information service designers that also need to be considered, such as the ‘stage of change’ people are at in relation to a change in behaviour.

Originality/value – The chapter examines how travel information could go beyond the provision of trip choice data and incorporate contextual elements to make it more effective. Concepts related to the Transtheoretical Model (stages of change) and the latest thinking in behavioural economics are discussed in relation to an increase in the likelihood of environmental travel alternatives being considered and chosen.

Thus far, I have introduced the reader to evidence based practice in a broad sense, and evidence based relationships across important variables. In this chapter, I further build on this by extending the need for evidence based responsiveness as applied to client factors. While the practitioner brings themselves and their bag of tools to the therapy encounter, the client brings not just their presenting problem, but their characteristic way of thinking about their problems and how they manage distress and change. Therefore, the supportive practitioner will be best served to understand how these client factors manifest for each individual that they work with. The purpose of this chapter then, is to discuss coping style, reactant level, stage of change, attachment style, and client preferences, within the context of the practitioner being responsive to these factors as they impact on therapy outcomes.

In the context of organizational change, identifying, and organizing the various roles of change agents remains a challenge for practitioners and scholars alike. This chapter examines how different agents can enable an effective change process. Empirical evidence from three hospitals illustrates the process of transformation and its underlying arrangements to identify agents and their roles. The findings underline the importance of designing a coherent system of agents, determining where they come from, their role during the process, and how this may change throughout the change process. Managerial choices in the cases are discussed, leading to implications for theory and practice.

Understanding the complexity of the change process is critical if early childhood improvement initiatives are to result in lasting change. One of the keys to effective programs and efficient use of resources is an understanding of readiness to change. This chapter presents a theoretical approach to understanding readiness to change in the field of early education and care. We describe applications of this approach used within a community-wide initiative in Rochester, New York, funded by an Early Childhood Educator Professional Development grant. The goal of the initiative was to create an integrated professional development system from entry level through the completion of a bachelor degree, with the priorities of increasing access, alignment, and articulation. We describe interventions at the community, organization, and individual level, and explore the impact of readiness to change at each of these levels.

Evaluation results show that educators enrolled in the research-based mentoring program offered by this grant became involved in other types of professional development programs, made significant gains in the quality of the classroom environment, and had children who made gains in overall development and vocabulary beyond developmental expectations. We conclude with a discussion of these results as well as implications for policy, practice, and future research.

The literature on change is characterized by an opposite, dichotomist view on the subject. Many authors describe only one or some of these characteristics and attribute a normative value to it. When discussing one of these attributes they will make a deviating classification in the way in which change arises. Although types and attributes of change are largely studied in the change literature, there is no general agreement on the attributes that can best describe the different types of change. The purpose of this chapter is to try to consolidate the vast literature on the types and attributes of change in order to find a more homogeneous set of attributes.

From an extensive literature research on change articles and books from 1970 onward, eight dimensions of change attributes were found that are able to describe the characteristics of a change in a dynamic way.

In order to overcome the dichotomist view, organizational change is approached not as a process changing a system but as a system by itself. Although the borders between the change system and the system to be changed are not always easy to perceive, this view seems to create a richer picture on change. A systems approach allows to define the attributes of change in a holistic way that captures the always paradoxical state change is in.

Existing research has identified a number of drivers of organizational change, such as leadership, participation, communication, and training. It has typically explored the impact of a single change driver, such as leadership, in a given organizational change, but has not sufficiently explored the relative effect of multiple drivers or their relationship to individual adoption of change initiatives within large-scale organizational change. In this paper we look at the relative impact of four change drivers in a planned organizational change in a large U.S. bank. We used a multi-method research approach, involving survey, interview, and case data, to examine the relative effect of leadership, participation, training, and communication as change drivers and to understand their relationship to individuals' adoption of the change initiatives. Our results show statistically significant differences in the perceived average significance of change drivers to individual adoption of change initiatives and statistically significant differences in their association with individual adoption of change. We discuss our results in terms of contextual vs. individual change drivers, the relationship between change drivers and the stages of change, and the characteristics of change drivers. We conclude with a discussion of directions for future research and change practice.

Changes in the traditional values, institutional context, and choice of change programs are currently shaping the postmodern science and practice of organization development (OD). These changes manifest themselves in powerful new value orientations, intervention frameworks, and practices that challenge OD's long-held beliefs in ethical and justice-based treatment. In this effort, traditional and new paradigm ethical dilemmas are explored, as well as their relationship to four postmodern practices and five emergent intervention techniques. Components of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are explained relative to change management programs generally, and to emergent techniques specifically. Published case illustrations are used to depict new paradigm ethical dilemmas and opportunities to create a “just change.”

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

This chapter explores the work of a library adult literacy programme working closely with other education providers in Risdon Prison in Australia. The Literacy Service operates as a form of outreach to the prison population who have low literacy levels and are not yet engaged in education or using the prison library. In this context, it is a form of radical inclusion, creating opportunities for those most disadvantaged to access learning. The library services help to create a literate environment for prisoners and provide opportunities for prisoners to increase their engagement in lifelong learning and everyday literacy practices, giving them a better chance of developing their literacy skills. Strategies explored for engaging this cohort include a range of creative projects, small group work and one to one tutoring. The Literacy Service has developed best practice approaches to deliver effective literacy support using strategies and approaches that align with research and these are adapted for work in the prison context. The Literacy Service approach is aligned with the wider prison goals of rehabilitation and reintegration and the chapter explores a theory of change to identify how prison education may be most effective in supporting rehabilitation (Szifris, Fox, & Bradbury, 2018). The library Literacy Service offers safe spaces, opportunities to create social bonds, reshape identity, engage in informal learning and set new goals – key elements found to be critical in rehabilitation. The Prison Library Impact Framework, developed by Finlay and Bates (2018), connects these elements with the theory of change model to propose a tool that may be useful to evaluate prison library services in the future.