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Gives an informed account of the authors’ experiences with different Tempus/Phare projects in East European countries. The paper is not therefore a scientific piece of research but a reflection of experiences in dealing with colleagues from Hungary and Lithuania. Emphasises the benefits that Western institutions can obtain from participating in these types of projects and co‐operation. Also points out some of the difficulties. Gives an account of experiences with the East European Library scene and tries to underline the differences and dissimilarities. Overall, the paper is about the joys and the frustrations of international co‐operation.

Lifelong learning is high on the Government's agenda. More than at any other time, there is a need for libraries from all sectors to work together, in particular to exploit the potential of the National Grid for Learning to make information and learning accessible to many more people. In this article, Vilas Edwards describes the distinctive partnership between library services in the City of Sunderland to support learning communities, focusing on IT developments and in particular, the provision of a City‐wide electronic journals service.

The purpose of this paper is to present an example of pedagogical strategy, called innovation pedagogy, and study whether its learning environments (activating teaching and learning methods, working life orientation and research, development and innovation (RDI) integration, multidisciplinary learning environments, flexible curricula, entrepreneurship and internationalization) can be associated with students’ innovation competences (creativity, critical thinking, initiative, teamwork and networking).

In this case study, the electronic self-assessment questionnaire was distributed to third- and fourth-year bachelor students (n=236) from one Finnish university of applied sciences at the end of the Spring semester in 2017.

Two profiles of students concerning their level of innovation competences can be identified. The level of students’ innovation competences is associated with all the six elements of learning environments. The more students have experience with learning environments of innovation pedagogy, the higher they scored when assessed for their innovation competences.

Because of the case study setting and a limited sample, there are limitations to the generalizability of the findings.

Focusing on different levels of innovation competences of students and approaching their study path in more detail, it could be better understood how to develop more effective education, and thus, respond to the demands of an innovation society. This study extends approaches on research in education and innovation and strengthens the understanding that learning environments should be versatile and include many-sided learning opportunities. It also shows that implementing pedagogical strategy needs lot of work to be revealed in practice.

The purpose of this study is understanding how companies can improve sales force performance is a key issue. Despite this, the study of the impact that corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices might have on salespeople’s performance has been neglected in the sales literature.

Using data provided by 176 salesperson–supervisor dyads and through structural equation modeling and conditional process analysis, empirical evidence confirms the hypotheses.

Certainly, the findings confirm that salespeople’s performance is influenced by their CSR perception, not directly but through their pride and organizational commitment. Furthermore, the results improve when considering the intervention of a responsible leader. The paper also identifies the management implications and makes some recommendations for upcoming studies.

This paper contributes to fill this gap by examining the effect of salespeople’s CSR perception on their job performance through organizational pride and organizational commitment. Additionally, it is suggested that the exercise of responsible leadership by the supervisor strengthens the previous indirect relationship, moderating the influence of salesperson’s organizational pride on their commitment.

Throughout Latin America, policy-makers are struggling to reconcile two conflicting political pressures: (i) the push to become more globally competitive on the basis of international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and (ii) the simultaneous need to address long-standing, entrenched inequities in both educational quality and access throughout much of the region. This chapter documents how policy-making elites throughout Latin America are trying to address these two goals by incorporating “evidence-based” policy solutions that can be empirically defended as promoting equity. However, scholars throughout Latin America argue that instead of promoting equity, an increasing focus on accountability in educational policy at the national level throughout the region has resulted instead in a shift in priorities from the governance of educational systems to evaluation of those systems, with the state functioning primarily as an Evaluative State. This argument is developed through secondary analysis of the Hispanophone and Lusophone academic education literatures of Latin America, whose robust and rigorous studies of these trends at both national and regional levels remain little explored within the Anglophone academic tradition.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the user's assessment of the level of quality of the library services of the Portuguese University of Trás‐os‐Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) in order to identify its potential improvement.

Following a literature review on library service quality assessment focusing on the ServQual, Lib Qual, or Biqual conceptual tools, a survey was designed and applied to a sample of the UTAD library's users, and then subjected to statistical analysis.

The literature review on library quality service assessment points out an array of dimensions that must be taken into account. The conceptual tools recently developed for that assessment showed that the services provided by the UTAD library needed to be redefined in order to enhance its user's autonomy. The results of the survey follow the findings of the literature review and, in particular, show that for the UTAD case study: gender is an important variable to take into account; the access to new technologies and to its convenient use is of the outmost importance; and face to face relation between users and service providers must be deepened.

The data survey clearly indicates the areas in which UTAD library has to direct its efforts in order to improve the quality of its services and meet users' expectations.

The results opened up the way to future comparative investigations with other services provided by other university libraries.

The implementation of European data protection is a challenge for businesses and has imposed legal, technical and organizational changes for companies. This study aims to explore the benefits and challenges that companies operating in the information technology (IT) sector have experienced in applying the European data protection. Additionally, this study aims to explore whether the benefits and challenges faced by these companies were different considering their dimension and the state of implementation of the regulation.

This study adopts a quantitative methodology, based on a survey conducted with Portuguese IT companies. The survey is composed of 30 questions divided into three sections, namely, control data; assessment; and benefits and challenges. The survey was created on Google Drive and distributed among Portuguese IT companies between March and April of 2019. The data were analyzed using the Stata software using descriptive and inferential analysis techniques using the ANOVA one-way test.

A total of 286 responses were received. The main benefits identified by the application of European data protection include increased confidence and legal clarification. On the other hand, the main challenges include the execution of audits to systems and processes and the application of the right to erasure. The findings allow us to conclude that the state of implementation of the general data protection regulation (GDPR), and the type of company are discriminating factors in the perception of benefits and challenges.

This study has essentially practical implications. Based on the synthesis of the benefits and challenges posed by the adoption of European data protection, it is possible to assess the relative importance and impact of the benefits and challenges faced by companies in the IT sector. However, this study does not explore the type of challenges that are placed at each stage of the adoption of European data protection and does not take into account the specificities of the activities carried out by each of these companies.

The implementation of the GDPR is still in an initial phase. This study is pioneering in synthesizing the main benefits and challenges of its adoption considering the companies operating in the IT sector. Furthermore, this study explores the impact of the size of the company and the status of implementation of the GDPR on the perception of the established benefits and challenges.

A growing body of research finds that gig economy platforms use gamification to enhance managerial control. Focusing on technologically mediated forms of gamification, this literature reveals how platforms mobilize gig workers’ work effort by making the labour process resemble a game. This chapter contends that this tech-centric scholarship fails to fully capture the historical continuities between contemporary and much older occurrences of game-playing at work. Informed by interviews and participatory observations at two food delivery platforms in Amsterdam, I document how these platforms’ piece wage system gives rise to a workplace dynamic in which severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ game strategies to maximize their gig income. Reminiscent of observations from the early shop floor ethnographies of the manufacturing industry, I show that the game of gig income maximization operates as an indirect modality of control by (re)aligning the interests of couriers with the interests of capital and by individualizing and depoliticizing couriers’ overall low wage level. I argue that the new, algorithmic technologies expand and intensify the much older forms of gamified control by infusing the organizational activities of shift and task allocation with the logic of the piece wage game and by increasing the possibilities for interaction, direct feedback and immersion. My study contributes to the literature on gamification in the gig economy by interweaving it with the classic observations derived from the manufacturing industry and by developing a conceptualization of gamification in which both capital and labour exercise agency.

Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

This paper sets a case study of missing children in the Republic of Ireland against a review of international research to explore broader understandings and responses to the problem.

The study begins by reviewing the literature on pioneering American initiatives dating back to the 1970s and more recent literature from Great Britain where a series of high-profile scandals involving sexual exploitation of teenage girls provoked a number of controversial inquiries into the police and social work professions. The present study was prompted by an evaluation of the 116 000 Missing Children Hotline which was introduced to Ireland in 2012 under the auspices of the European Union (EU) Daphne III Programme by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC).

The central conclusion emerging from analysis of the evidence is that Missing Children Hotlines remain rooted in representations of ‘stranger danger’ and disconnected from repeat runaway children who feature prominently in police reports from formal care settings or family homes and who are actively targeted by sexual predators and criminal gangs. The implications are that systemic change requires grounding in research strategies which combine police data with anthropological studies to give legitimacy to the voices of runway and sexually exploited children.

The study offers original international perspectives on missing children to epistemological research communities in the fields of social work, criminology and policing with recommendations that Missing Children and Runaway Safe-lines are targeted systemically at keeping runaway children, homeless children and at-risk-youth safe and off the streets.