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The aim of this study is to explore whether and to what degree community development of teacher teams takes place and how community development comes about, that is, what community‐building efforts teacher teams undertake.

Using a multi method approach, quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from seven interdisciplinary teacher teams in a secondary school during one school year. Teachers' perceptions of community development were complemented with video‐observations of team meetings by relative outsiders.

Data showed that the teacher teams undertook a wide variety and amount of community‐building efforts. However, community development of the teacher teams as perceived by the teachers was limited. Relative outsiders observed some community development.

From the findings the authors conclude that school managers could play a more proactive role in supporting teacher teams' community‐building efforts. Strategies embedding community‐building into the culture and policy of the school, including diagnosing, custom‐made support and making efforts explicit, could be effective.

The current study takes a long‐term approach, investigating the community development of teacher teams during the course of one school year. In addition, community development is measured using two perspectives, i.e. that of the community members and that of the relative outsider.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of Participatory Action Research (PAR), reporting on a collaboration, communication and disaster resilience workshop in Sydney, Australia. The goal of the workshop was to explore the challenges that organisations perceive as blockages to building community disaster resilience; and, through collaborative practitioner-led activities, identify which of those challenges could be best addressed through a deeper engagement with communication research.

The authors link communication, collaboration and disaster resilience through the lens of PAR, detailing how communication and resilience experts can collaborate to improve disaster prevention, management and mitigation practice.

The authors identify a number of theoretical considerations in understanding horizontal and vertical interfaces for improved communication. The authors also highlight how practical collaborative workshops can draw on communication researchers to facilitate collaborative resilience activities. PAR is shown to help move participant focus from resolving inter/intra-organisational tensions to facilitating public good, offering evidence-based recommendations which will foster a more reflexive and communicative approach to building disaster resilient communities.

This paper does not seek to apply community resilience to the general public, no community representatives were present at the workshop. This does not mean that the focus is on organisational resilience. Rather the authors apply PAR as a way to help organisations become more engaged with PAR, communication research and collaborative practice. PAR is a tool for organisations to use in building community resilience, but also a means to reflect on their practice. Whilst this should help organisations in building more resilient communities the take up of practice by participants outside of the workshop is a matter for future research.

This method of collaborative resilience building could significantly improve the shared responsibility amongst key organisations, mobilising skills and building awareness of integrated resilience thinking in practice for stakeholders in disaster management activities.

This paper provides original evidence-based research, showing the linkages between communication theory, collaboration practice and the tools used by organisations tasked with building community resilience. This innovative synthesis of skills can aid in building PAR led disaster resilience across prevention, preparation and mitigation activities for all potential hazards, threats and/or risks, however, it will be particularly of interest to organisations engaged in community resilience building activities.

The building sector contributes one-third of the energy-related carbon dioxide globally. Therefore, framing appropriate energy-related policies for the next decades becomes essential in this scenario to realize the global net-zero goals. The purpose of the proposed study is to evaluate the impact of the widespread adoption of such guidelines in a building community in the context of mixed-mode buildings.

This study decentralizes the theme of improving the energy efficiency of the national building stock in parcels by proposing a community-based hybrid bottom-up modelling approach using urban building energy modelling (UBEM) techniques to analyze the effectiveness of the community-wide implementation of energy conservation guidelines.

In this study, the UBEM is developed and validated for the 14-building residential community in Mumbai, India, adopting the framework. Employing Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) compliance on the UBEM shows an energy use reduction potential of up to 15%. The results also reveal that ECBC compliance is more advantageous considering the effects of climate change.

In developing countries where the availability of existing building stock information is minimal, the proposed study formulates a holistic framework for developing a detailed UBEM for the residential building stock from scratch. A unique method of assessing the actual cooling load of the developed UBEM is presented. A thorough sensitivity analysis approach to investigate the effect of cooling space fraction on the energy consumption of the building stock is presented, which would assist in choosing the appropriate retrofit strategies. The proposed study's outcomes can significantly transform the formulation and validation of appropriate energy policies.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

Middle leaders are educators whose practices of building relational trust are critical for generating the kind of strong and sustainable professional learning communities necessary for leading productive site-based education development in their school. This chapter specifically focuses how building an ethic of relational trust, experienced in five interrelated dimensions, aligns with establishing core foundational conditions for building community. Building trust and communities of professional learners are not mutually exclusive – in fact, each reciprocally facilitates, progresses, supports, and sustains the development of the other. The foundations for community building, described as cornerstones, form over time and progressively involve, and achieve, contextuality, commitment, communication, collaboration, criticality, and collegiality. Reflection questions are provided throughout; these are designed to directly focus the attention of middle leaders towards understanding and developing their own trust practices, that with time, create conditions for generating strong viable communities of professional practice.

Although the value of community capacity building is widely accepted within scholarly literature, these initiatives thus far appear to have achieved very little impact in the achievement of community development aspirations. This paper aims to increase knowledge regarding specific priority areas which when targeted will result in more effective pathways towards sustainable development.

This study was performed through utilization of a qualitative strategy, which involved the combination of a number of qualitative methods and techniques including individual interviews, surveys, focus groups, literary review and policy analysis.

The investigation found that improving identified CSD priority areas, aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), seems to be the most effective strategy to enhance the ability of local communities to overcome sustainability challenges over time. SDGs 9, 4, 15, 16, 17 and 8 were identified as the areas of greatest significance for practical community capacity building for sustainable development (CSD).

This paper answers scholarly literature’s call for greater investigation into bringing sustainability research closer to society, to clearly define research direction and agenda. It also recommends ways to action the global goals locally.

Retailer brand communities exist between a franchisor brand and individual retailers, with retailer‐based brand equity and brand‐building activities being key drivers of their success. This paper aims to introduce retailer‐based brand equity and examine its relationship with brand‐building activities and retailer brand community.

Individual stores in a variable format franchise from the retail hardware industry were studied at annual conventions in two North American cities. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and regression.

Results show that retailer‐based brand equity mediates the relationship between brand‐building activities and brand community identification and demonstrates the importance of branding in retailing contexts. The franchisee's continuation as part of the retailer brand community is influenced by the retailer‐based brand equity, with increased identification leading to increased purchase and higher performance.

The practical demands of the field study constrained the ability to examine other issues relevant to this research. There is also need to develop and refine further the items that measure the relationships.

Increased brand‐building activities do not automatically translate into higher commitment by franchisees, and franchisors need to increase the value of the brand. Engaging the franchisee as a member of the brand community has important outcomes for both parties. While franchisor brands benefit through increased sales, franchisees benefit through increased profit.

This is the first paper that has applied brand community principles to understand the franchisor‐franchisee relationship. The results from a field study have important implications for both brand building and franchising areas.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a domain model for online community building and collaboration in e‐government and policy modelling.

The authors followed a structured approach including five distinct steps: define the domain to be investigated; collect domain knowledge from both existing online community building and collaboration platforms and domain experts; analyse the gathered knowledge; develop and evaluate the domain model.

A domain model was developed for community building and collaboration in eGovernment and policy modelling, including the domain definition, the domain lexicon and the conceptual models modelling its basic entities and functions of the domain. In particular, the UML class diagram was used for modelling the domain entities and the UML use cases diagram for modelling the domain functions.

A literature search revealed a lack of domain models for online community building and collaboration, not only in e‐government and policy modelling but also in general. The proposed model provides a better understanding of the domain. It can also be used in the development of relevant platforms, leading to the reduction of software development costs and delivery time, as well as the improvement of software quality and reliability, by minimising domain analysis errors.

Metadiscourse is an important dialogue technique used in productive knowledge building to help a group evaluate and advance their knowledge progress. Previous studies have identified and defined various types of metadiscourse. However, there is scant knowledge about how different metadiscourse types emerge among different groups or what implicit correlations lie between progressive discourse and metadiscourse. Moreover, research on how different types of metadiscourse influence groups' knowledge advancement and artifacts is still inadequate. Therefore, this study aims to further examine the roles that different types of metadiscourse play in the collaborative knowledge building community on both a fine-grained (i.e. progressive discourse) and coarse-grained (i.e. group knowledge advancement and group artifacts) level.

Data for this study are drawn from the behaviour of undergraduate students participating in a 12-week course at a key university in China. On the fine-grained level, epistemic network analysis (ENA) is applied to illustrate how metadiscourse promotes the development of progressive discourse. On the coarse-grained level, two different chi-square tests are conducted to examine the roles of different types of metadiscourse in groups' knowledge advancement and artifacts.

The analysis allowed several conclusions to be drawn. First, the types of metadiscourse that students most often adopted were reflecting on ideas development (RD) and commenting on ideas (CI); they less frequently adopted setting group goals (SG) and making group plans (MP). Second, most types of metadiscourse correlated with developments in progressive discourse, particularly RD and CI. Third, the metadiscourse types RD, CI and coordinating group efforts (CE) played essential roles in knowledge advancement. Fourth, higher-quality artifacts could be created by using the metadiscourse type reviewing the state of knowledge building progress (RP).

A more profound comprehension of the role that metadiscourse plays in the collaborative knowledge building community not only contributes to the literature in the knowledge building field but also carries a significant meaning in regulating community, promoting learner agency and sustained knowledge, and consequently improving collaborative learning performance.

Building disaster‐resilient communities is one of the strategies of reducing the impact of disasters in marginalised communities. In Zimbabwe, the role of Rural District Councils (RDCs) as facilitating agencies in the realisation of this agenda cannot be overemphasised. However, at present, RDCs are unlikely to be effective towards the realisation of the disaster risk reduction agenda because, in effect, this means finding ways of tackling well known development problems for which there are no easy or obvious solutions. Using case study material from Binga RDC in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe, this paper seeks to argue that building institutional capacity for RDCs is fundamental if the disaster resilience agenda has to be realised.

The paper is based on the author's experiences in Binga District in Zimbabwe to show how disaster resilience is linked with capacity building, decentralisation and internal organisational structures of RDCs.

RDCs are facing a number of challenges, which include inadequate financial and human resources; unstable political system; problems related to decentralisation and the nature and role of RDCs in Zimbabwe. Capacity building, full decentralisation package and internal organisational structure of rural local authorities are some of the central fundamentals for building disaster‐resilient communities

With capacity building being at the centre of the building community resilience, coordination by donors as well as government agencies is fundamental. The circumstances under which RDCs are operating in Zimbabwe, highlights the implicit demand for the government to further consider fiscal and administrative aspects of the decentralisation. Proffering a devolved structure‐participation outcome scenario leaves RDCs in a miserable fiscal and administrative position to tackle issues related to long‐term disaster risk reduction and sustainable development.

The paper introduces the concept of disaster resilience focusing on Rural Local Authorities. It illuminates the complexities surrounding the delivery of the resilience agenda and how governments, local government authorities, donor community and civil society are implicated.