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Access to high-speed Internet is essential for full and consequential participation in the civic, economic, and education systems of modern life. Yet 30% of Californians continue to lack “meaningful Internet access” at home. This digital divide is worse among already disadvantaged communities and prevents rural, lower-income, and disabled individuals from fully participating in the civic, economic, and education systems of life in 2018. This chapter establishes the magnitude of the digital divide, examines the factors that contribute to the Divide, and looks at which groups are most affected. Successful government programs that invested in utility infrastructure and adoption, such as the Rural Electrification Act, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the California Advanced Services Fund, are examined to provide a foundation for broadband specific policy recommendations. The chapter sets up a framework for policy recommendations by segmenting the population based upon the concepts of material and motivational access and establishing meaningful Internet access as the goal for policy-makers. The chapter puts forth a number of specific policy recommendations to address the technological disparity and prevent it from furthering the economic and educational divides.

The history of the public library is long and rich, and continues to reflect this institution's initial mission: to respond to the needs of an evolving democratic society. From its early days as a subscription service for the middle-class, through its evolution to become an educational site for the lower-classes and new immigrants, the public library has served as a touch-stone for urban industrial society in North America (Lerner, 1998, p. 138; Shera, 1974). Over the past century, public libraries have evolved to respond to the growing needs of the communities they serve and continue to do so with recent advances in technologies (such as DVDs, electronic books, the Internet, etc.), and with a more global outlook on the ways that people seek and share information. Indeed, the public library's constituents today are exceedingly diverse, including children and adults from a broad range of socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, all of whom seek information for a variety of personal and work-related purposes. The fact that public libraries have been fulfilling patrons' information needs for well over a century is a testament to their enduring success and versatility as information providers, and also points to the overall effectiveness of public librarians as intermediaries in the provision process.

While the popular image of the Sherman Act is that of a “trust-busting” statute, conduct remedies have been more common than structural relief. This paper evaluates the effect on economic welfare of conduct remedies that have resulted from ten prominent Sherman Act monopolization cases. In general, we find that in some cases the behavioral relief has had no consequence other than the cost of litigation and cost of compliance; in other cases, the remedies probably reduced consumer welfare. Cases studied are United Shoe Machinery, AT&T, Std. Oil of California, IBM, United Fruit, Kodak, Safeway, GM, Jerrold, and Blue Chip Stamp.

The expansion of connectivity on a national scale in Brazil, whether through mobile Internet or fixed broadband, is described as one of the factors that can lead to social and economic benefits for large parts of the population who do not have a network connection. It can also help to reduce poverty by improving the infrastructure of services and increasing Internet use for education purposes. It also provides people with the ability to communicate with online administrative services – local, regional, and national. In Brazil, the main difficulty facing an effective universalization of telecommunications has been limitations in accessing services. This chapter demonstrates the relevance of small Internet providers for the expansion of fixed broadband in less commercially attractive regions (in terms of subscribers, income, and distance) who have been growing over recent years and are now present in 70% of Brazilian municipalities and whose role is paramount to reducing the digital divide.

There was a mistake relating to a roaming network service package that my sister bought from one of the telephone networks in Thailand. She paid 2,000 Baht (the Baht is the currency of Thailand) for this package. She and her friends were going on a self-“guided” and organized tour to Japan and wanted to use the internet as an integral part of travelling. She or her friends did not speak Japanese. Unfortunately, the internet did not work using that roaming package. Not having roaming facility greatly affected the travelling quality of my sister’s vacation trip to Japan. It also completely messed up her itinerary. My sister used hotel Wi-Fi to contact me and asked that I call the telephone service and solve the problem.

This chapter analyzes and considers new business strategies in the area of ICT, where competition is intense, in regard to mechanisms for companies to achieve ongoing change as a means of realizing corporate innovation. As a case study, the chapter takes a look at Japan’s Softbank, which in recent years acquired Sprint Mobile, a major U.S. carrier, to become the largest mobile communications carrier in the world. When the only vital element for achieving ongoing corporate innovation is the demonstration of top-down leadership as centralized leadership through the presence of certain charismatic leaders or a management team, it will be difficult for a company to achieve ongoing strategic innovation. The presence of not only leaders, managers, and staff who have centralized leadership to assist and foster the development of autonomous, distributed knowledge integration (creation) activities that occur locally in every department within a company, but also leaders, managers, and staff who apply dialectical thinking to various contexts and who promote creative knowledge integration (creation) activities locally through distributed leadership is essential. This chapter analyzes and contemplates mechanisms for achieving corporate innovation through the implementation of dialectical leadership where practitioners at every management layer dynamically differentiate between centralized leadership and distributed leadership or allow for both forms of leadership to coexist to respond to changes in the environment through holistic leadership.

The primary aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of corruption and state capture in Albanian public administration and to describe the solutions adopted to fight corruption by the government since 1998. Conflict of interest is a new aspect of concern in the policy agendas. OECD countries have recently adopted some guidelines for managing the phenomenon, which will be then transferred to eastern European countries. Given this novelty, this chapter does not deal directly with conflict of interest situations. Corruption is rarely treated as a management problem, in part because for obvious reasons as data are scarce and also because the literature is thin and tentative, with few theoretical frameworks. Also rare is analysis of how corruption has been or might be reduced. The state of research on corruption is such that there is little inductive theory or statistical evidence about the kinds of policies that work under particular conditions.

Despite the volumes that have been written on America's correctional crisis – the peerless incarceration rate, disproportionate confinement of minority group members and democratically untenable policies of disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions – criminal justice policy has changed little within the past decade or more. An important voice has been left out of these correctional policy formulations – that of prisoners. This paper proposes convict labor unions as one way to address this issue. It utilizes the United States Supreme Court majority's arguments in Jones v. North Carolina to assess the feasibility of inmate labor unions in light of current federal, state and local institutional operations; and provides a very tentative outline of how a prisoners’ labor union could be structured and function – exploring the potential democratic ramifications of such unions for corrections and in broader social policy.