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This inspiring article describes a series of activities that have taken place in the UK over the past year (2001) aiming to generate interest in user/survivor/consumer‐run social enterprises. The writers want to let others know about these activities, about the survivor‐run businesses in Ontario, and hopefully to create more interest in this type of work/community initiative. As editor of this journal I hope that the article will provoke those of you already running user/survivor‐led businesses in the UK to rise to the challenge and write about your work for future issues. Can't let the Canadians have things all their own way… Bob Grove.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Businesses are under pressure to ensure social responsibility in their globalised supply chains. However, conventional factory audits are not providing adequate data about production workers’ well-being. Industry attempts to measure working conditions have shown bias and inconsistency, and there is no consensus on what to measure, or how. Well-being can be intangible and difficult to capture without appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks. This paper investigates factors influencing the well-being of a Chinese factory’s workers, tests an innovative research method, and proposes interventions to improve well-being in factories.

This is a longitudinal study using the diaries of production workers at a large assembly manufacturing site in China. Workers left daily digital voice diaries about their day, which were analysed to identify factors related to their well-being at work.

The picture is more complex than the concerned Western narrative suggests. Workers’ personal and professional concerns extend beyond the criteria currently measured in audits, tending to be more relational and less about their physical state.

The current approach of auditing management practices neglects workers’ well-being. This study offers a more comprehensive view of well-being and tests a new method of investigation.

This is the first study to use diary methods in a Chinese factory. It addresses an issue supported by little empirical evidence. It is the first longitudinal study to hear from factory workers themselves about how they are and what impacts their well-being daily.

Companies are concerned about the well-being of workers in their supply chains, but conventional audits fail to uncover critical problems. Yet, if the happy worker – productive worker thesis is correct, it would benefit factories in fast-developing countries, particularly China which is key to many global supply chains, to ensure the well-being of their workers. The authors set out to better understand the relationship between well-being and performance in four Chinese factories.

Over 12-months the authors collected digital diaries from 466 workers in four factories, and monthly data about the performance of their factories. The authors used this data to gain insights into the well-being of workers in these factories; to design experimental interventions to improve this; and to consider any effects these had on factory performance.

The experiments showed that training interventions to improve workers' well-being through their work relationships and individual skills improved not just a factory's general worker well-being, but also some aspects of its performance and worker retention. Thus, it brought benefits not only for the workers but also for the factory owners and their client companies.

While there is a significant body of research investigating the happy worker – productive worker thesis, this was not conducted in Chinese factories. The authors’ work demonstrates that in this and similar environments, workers' eudaimonic well-being is more important than might be assumed, and that in this context there is a relationship between well-being and performance which can be practically addressed.

The Tilley Awards for Problem‐Oriented Policing ‘recognise and reward the most intelligent, courageous and effective approaches to dealing with the problems police encounter on the streets’ (Home Office website). They are open to the police and crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Entrants have to submit a description of their project and its achievements. Following the publication of Safer Hastings Partnership's winning entry in Volume 6, Issue 4, another winning entrant's submission is reproduced here, and the next issue will feature the other winner's submissions.

Regional policy instruments are typically driven by economic rationales, from either a firm or industrial perspective. Yet too often, these rationales are taken as ex ante to the contexts within which firms and industries compete. Recent regional development research has urged a better link be developed between the individual, the firm, and their context, so as to understand the role of regions in supporting effective competitiveness of organizations. In this article, recent research themes are explored that may shed light on the nature of this relationship and that can be developed into an investigative methodology that could aid policy practitioners in generating policy instruments that reflect differing societal constructions of SME reality.

Patient and public involvement (PPI) is increasingly central to the delivery of health services research. However, it has proved challenging to evaluate the impact of PPI on the implementation of research into clinical practice and health service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a conceptual model explaining how PPI in the research process might impact on implementation.

A scoping review of knowledge translation and implementation science literature was performed to develop a conceptual model of the impact of PPI in research on implementation. A retrospective case study of a research project was used to illustrate the model.

The authors identified five domains in which PPI can impact on the implementation of research into practice. The review demonstrated that successful implementation depends on developing relational models of knowledge production, valuing experiential knowledge, engaging in collaborative practice, making use of knowledge brokers or tools for knowledge facilitation and embedding these factors into the implementation context. In the case study the authors were able to find examples that illustrated each of the five domains of the model.

The paper builds on existing endeavour to evaluate the impact of PPI in research, demonstrating that it is possible to model, conceptually, the processes whereby PPI in research might impact on practice and service delivery. By illustrating those processes through the exemplar case the authors also demonstrate the potential for the model to be “operationalised”, allowing the impacts, on practice, of PPI in research to be systematically and directly evidenced.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of podcasts, online radio broadcasts, YouTube channels, and other technology medium to deliver information and professional development to peers in the field and professionals in librarianship.

This paper explores five case studies of librarians and library professionals who have created online programs specifically geared to the field using technologies such as podcasting, YouTube channels, Twitter Chats, and Google Hangouts. The case studies include librarians in the public, academic, and school settings as well as one professional from The American Library Association. Interviews via Google Hangouts took place to gather information for each narrative. NVivo 10 qualitative data analysis software was used to pull out themes and commonalities among narratives. Some examples include, intended audience, program focus, platform topics, technology, and challenges.

Face-to-face delivery of information and professional development can be difficult with librarians and professionals located across the USA and the world. These five interviewees share new opportunities and examples in the delivery of training and information in the field of librarianship without ever needing to leave an office or desk.

Podcasting in librarianship is a topic of modest popularity but it is typically used with students and at the academic library level where the topics of podcasts and libraries are addressed. The topics of podcasts, online radio broadcasts, and other technologies in librarian peer-to-peer instruction and professional development are uncharted territory in the field of scholarly research. This piece opens research to multiple opportunities in both practice and scholarship in how technology can aid in professional development and information delivery to peers and practitioners in the field.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a theory-driven realist evaluative research approach to better understand complex technology implementations in organizations.

An institution wide e-learning implementation of lecture capture (LC), within a UK University, was chosen, and a realist evaluation framework was used, tailored for educational technology. The research was conducted over four, increasingly focused, evaluation cycles combining engagement analytics, user interviews and theory to refine what works (or does not work), for whom, in which contexts and why.

Despite explicit demand and corresponding investment, overall student engagement is lower than expected. Increased student use appears linked to particular staff attitudes and behaviours and not to specific disciplines or course content. The main benefits of LC are providing reassurance to the majority, aiding revision and understanding for the many and enabling catch-up for the few. Recommendations for future research are based on some unexpected outcomes uncovered, including evolving detrimental student behaviours, policy development based on technological determinism and future learner-centred system development for next-generation LC technologies.

The realist approach taken, and evaluation framework used, can be adopted (and adapted) for future evaluative research. Domain specific reference models, categorizing people and technology, supported analysis across multiple contexts.

This study responds to a call for more theory-based research in the field of educational technology. The authors demonstrate that a theory-driven approach provides real and practical recommendations for institutions and allows for greater insight into the political, economic and social complexity of technology implementation.

Purpose: The study makes use of situational crime prevention framework for analyzing online community reactions to the banning of deepfake pornographic content from Reddit.

Methodology/approach: Qualitative text analysis of user comments posted to Reddit’s rule-change announcement (N = 582) was carried out. Analysis relied on the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention that were adapted into a table of activities and mechanisms meant specifically for use with online platforms.

Findings: Analysis indicates that Reddit users voiced several shortcomings that are currently present in Reddit’s platform management approach. In particular, users emphasized issues related to the lack of a consistent and transparent approach to community rule enforcement, as users believed the rule changes to be sudden and poorly reasoned. The general reactionary nature of Reddit’s approach to moderating community-harming actions also was a point of emphasis, alongside the platform’s continued rigid stance on freedom of expression, even with regard to illegal and demeaning content. Regarding Reddit and the new rules on involuntary pornography and the sexualization of minors, enforcement of sitewide policy appears contingent on external influences, such as attention from mainstream media or financial matters, rather than stemming from an inherent stance on decreasing community-harming activities.

Research limitations: The study only pertains to a specific rule change by Reddit and subsequent reactions from the platform’s community. Future research is needed to test the applicability of the adapted table of 25 techniques of situational crime prevention in the context of other online platforms.

Originality/value: First, the study applies the situational crime prevention approach in the context of moderating online platforms. Second, results from the study shed light on current practices in online content moderation from the perspective of criminological theory, as well as inform specific actions that can be taken to decrease the presence of community-harming phenomena and improve the enforcement of sitewide policy rules in general. Finally, by adapting the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention to online content moderation, the study suggests a tentative roadmap for similar research in the future.