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Smith & Wesson negotiated a settlement that signified changes in its gun marketing and manufacturing practices. An opportunity to lead the industry in public safety resulted in a public relations blunder. “Topical transformation”, a concept that applies structuration theory to explain the importance of signification, is used to illustrate that S&W failed to show its actions as significant for its stakeholders, resulting in isolation from its peers, consumers and supporters.

During the last decade of the Twentieth Century the advanced North Atlantic economies performed in a markedly profitable way seen from the perspective of corporate business. This has neither led, however, to the impediment of a deepening social crisis, nor to the arrest of a crisis for liberal political values and norms of citizenship. On the contrary social exclusion was exacerbated, increasingly racialized and associated with immigrants and new visible ethnic minorities. A perhaps more conspicuous, but closely related, manifestation of this crisis of welfare and political values has, within the European Union, been the upturn of new nationalist, racist-populist political movements centered on the “problem of immigration.” This change of the political spectrum, brought about by the new right nationalist-populist upsurge, may eventually jeopardize the whole project of European integration, and the current tightening up of European regimes of both immigration and the societal incorporation of immigrants obviously reflects such worries. Simultaneously, however, influential employers, politicians and public servants have, time after time, cried out for the need for continued and increased large-scale import of low- as well as high-skilled migrant labor, seen as a remedy to Europe’s imminent “demographic crisis.”

The public libraries face several challenges. The most important is probably the economic situation. A second is discrepancies between the profession's perception of the roles of the libraries in the local community and the users' much more traditional views of the constituting elements of a public library service. The third challenge is the rather overwhelming introduction and proliferation of new services and the prioritising of these services. Recent research indicates a possible gap between the public library users and their perceptions of the elements constituting a library and the library profession's struggle to place the public library in the centre of the perceived development of society. This paper seeks to analyse this gap and address questions concerning the traditional roles of the library and the discourses in the profession concerning the public library as a place and an agent for social capital, integration, entrance to the public system, a player in the field of emerging social technologies, and to discuss possible consequences in relation to the significance users, and non‐users, place on different types of service provision. Further, the paper aims to analyse and discuss how public libraries can bridge the gap between the traditional roles and the role as an agent of change or innovation using existing data and user surveys.

The primary data for the study consist of three large surveys. The first was a nation‐wide survey of high school students' use of libraries and information resources. The second was an in‐depth survey of users and non‐users in a municipality in the Copenhagen area. The third survey is an analysis of perceptions of citizens' services in the public libraries. Supporting data draw from the National Library Statistics and analyses of statements and opinions in the professional literature.

The results of the surveys analysed in‐depth indicate a clear, very marked and possibly increasing discrepancy between the users' rather traditional perceptions of what constitutes a public library. The analysis employs different segmentation methods, and offers a differentiated view of behaviour and perception in segments of users and non‐users, indicating a very diversified picture of behaviour, perceptions and priorities for different kinds of services. The paper focuses especially on the possible gap between the perceived importance of traditional services and new services and discusses these problems in relation to declining resources and use.

The paper addresses the problem about balancing users' traditional views on public libraries and the need for innovation of both services and service delivery.

The paper presents a dramatic appraisal of trends in Danish public library use, which are applicable to modern public library services worldwide.

The paper describes the ideas and assumptions underlying the development of a new method for the evaluation and testing of interactive information retrieval (IR) systems, and reports on the initial tests of the proposed method. The method is designed to collect different types of empirical data, i.e. cognitive data as well as traditional systems performance data. The method is based on the novel concept of a ‘simulated work task situation’ or scenario and the involvement of real end users. The method is also based on a mixture of simulated and real information needs, and involves a group of test persons as well as assessments made by individual panel members. The relevance assessments are made with reference to the concepts of topical as well as situational relevance. The method takes into account the dynamic nature of information needs which are assumed to develop over time for the same user, a variability which is presumed to be strongly connected to the processes of relevance assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the development of the digital transformation literature and to the systematic literature review methodology.

The authors run a systematic literature review, followed by a rigorous thematic analysis of both academic and grey literature dataset, in order to develop a conceptual map of organizations' digital transformation. The authors aggregate the concepts and topics identified across the literature to find that they overwhelmingly tackle digital business models. At the same time, the authors identify a major blind spot resulting from ignoring the organization itself as a unit of analysis.

The findings show that developing a digital theory of the organization or the theory of digitally transformed organization is a major challenge to management researchers. The analysis exposed numerous research gaps that can be helpful for future research directions.

Digital transformation research enjoys an increasingly rapid rise to recognition across many academic disciplines and strongly impacts the management domain. adopt the view that published documents reflect the collective understanding of a phenomenon. This paper contributes to filtering the digital transformation literature, clarify complex relation between digital transformations of organizations and identify the key blind points.

While the dynamic capabilities perspective is the most cited strategic theory in the information systems field of research, little effort has been made to review and integrate the associate literature of this perspective in the field. Accordingly, this paper aims to systematically analyze the information systems literature on dynamic capabilities and provide a holistic understanding of the topical composition and trend of dynamic capabilities studies in information systems research.

Using latent Dirichlet allocation as the text analysis algorithm, the author conducted a topic modeling of the dynamic capabilities corpus in the information systems field of research to quantitatively review, summarize and classify the prior literature. The review covered 191 articles published on dynamic capabilities between 1998 and 2018 in pioneering information systems journals and conference proceedings.

In accordance with the topic modeling results, the topical composition of the dynamic capabilities corpus in information systems research dominantly includes seven themes titled T1. Information systems value, T2. Information systems change, T3. Digitalization, T4. Information systems agility, T5. Big data, T6. Information systems innovation and T7. Information systems alignment. Also, the overall and topical trend of dynamic capabilities studies in the information systems field of research were revealed. The trends indicated that the investigated domain and its prominent sub-domains have generally had positive productivity over the past years.

The current study contributes to the domain by developing knowledge and improving literature on dynamic capabilities in information systems research, discovering the main topics of interest for information systems researchers to deploying the dynamic capabilities perspective in their studies, and prioritizing the future information systems research on dynamic capabilities based on the identified trends of topics.

The purpose of this paper is to apply pragmatic and practical perspectives to the transferability of research findings by examining the potential of structuration to serve as the relationship marketing meta‐theory.

The paper revisits the advanced subjectivist critique of functionalism as the dominant research paradigm before challenging the apparent fortification of the interpretivist paradigm and, in so doing, highlights interpretivism's weaknesses when dealing with social structures.

With the proposed model, relationship marketing researchers, using structuration theory, can recognize the temporal and spatial specificity – and thereby transferability – of interactions and relationships. Structuration is academically rigorous and pragmatic, because it avoids the distraction of the largely academic paradigm wars.

By addressing the often‐noted spatial and temporal limitations of relationship marketing research, this research responds to calls for longitudinal research. The model offers the potential for examining historical interactions and relationships to gain insight into the constraining and enabling forces of social structures.

The use of a multi‐paradigm perspective is more pragmatic than a single paradigm investigation. Using structuration as that multi‐paradigm perspective, a relationship marketing researcher can gain greater insight into the spatial and temporal specificity and transferability of research findings. Researchers thus may assess the limitations of implementing marketing practice on the basis of the findings they gain from one space and time context in a different space and time context.

A paper discussing structuration is a rarity among marketing literature. This paper is the first to outline the potential use of structuration as the meta‐theory in relationship marketing research.

This paper adopts a sensemaking lens to explore the process of entrepreneurship-driven organizational transformation for sustainability.

Analysis is based on an in-depth case study of a large European meat company. Sensemaking by top and middle managers is analyzed over the period of 18 months.

The findings show how, over time, bidirectional sensemaking, that is, sensemaking for and of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship, directed and accelerated organizational transformation for sustainability. The case company transformed with regard to organizational strategy, structure, operations and identity. The process revealed temporally different involvement of top and middle managers in sensemaking.

This paper offers unique insights into fast and emergent sustainability-oriented change in an established organization within a highly topical context. The results highlight how continuous and increasingly shared sensemaking can help top and middle managers navigate organizational change for sustainability in dynamic environments over time.