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The value of the liberal arts and humanities has increasingly been called into question on multiple fronts. Attempts to bridge the practical and liberal arts through forms of civic professionalism have been gaining traction in larger spheres of influence. This article outlines the results of a deliberative civic engagement forum (n = 42) that created a space for community members from business, education, and non-profit sectors at the National Conference on Service and Volunteerism, to consider the role civic leadership education and development has in liberal arts and humanities programs. The forum was intentionally designed to have participants consider the role of the liberal arts and humanities in redefining the purposes and process of democratic engagement through a lens of civic leadership education and development. This forum was able to gather a group of people from sectors that do not normally speak to the intersection of leadership education and the liberal arts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore academic library leadership behaviors and the methods for integrating the democratic and transformational leadership styles.

Eleven structured interviews were conducted with academic deans and directors. A thematic content analysis was conducted on their responses, analyzing the frequency of certain topics and identifying emergent themes. These themes were then used to construct a democratic communication model.

The interview responses were grouped into five general leadership themes: participation in decision-making, relationship building, frequent and honest communication, equality and knowing the environment.

The structured interview format did not permit for unplanned follow-up questions, and some topics may not have come up in every interview unless specifically asked by an interview question. Due to the qualitative nature of this study, the perspectives of the participants may not be generalizable to the larger population.

This study identifies core themes of leadership practice that extend beyond the focus of transformational leadership alone. It suggests a democratic communication model to assist in integrating democratic leadership methods with transformational practices and goals.

This study suggests a greater emphasis on the communication and engagement practices of democratic leadership. In doing so, it suggests that the American Library Association's emphasis on transformational leadership alone should be reconsidered and that library science schools should increase focus on democratic leadership practices.

Most library leadership style studies emphasize transformational leadership. While there are some studies that explore elements of democratic leadership such as engagement and a flattening of organizational hierarchy, there is limited research on the integration of democratic and transformational leadership practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese microblog users’ psychological motivations and the association between users’ motivations and their offline civic and political engagement. Specifically, this study examines what the psychological impetuses of Weibo use are and how they promote the young citizens’ civic and political involvement.

The data were collected through the web-based survey with a total sample of 426 people. Principal components factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regressions were sequentially carried out to address the research questions.

The findings reveal that there are four major motives for using Weibo: information, socializing, recognition seeking and entertainment. Interestingly, seeking social needs is positively and significantly related to increasing young people’s civic participation, but not political participation.

Theoretically, the research demonstrates that the uses and gratifications is a suitable approach for analysis of psychological antecedents of Weibo use and subsequent outcomes. Practically, it will help understand the dynamics of how the new media technology may engender democratic development and change.

Although the growing significance of social media has drawn considerable attention, little research has been conducted to assess the political consequences of Weibo. The current study fills the void by investigating whether Weibo functions as an effective tool to facilitate democratic engagement in contemporary China. The obtained results may provide insight into the relationship between the gratification structures and engagement in other social settings.

This article attempts to highlight the defining role that community media engagements play during times of the pandemic. It is argued that the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic forced community news media houses to reinvent their news reporting practices to cover issues pertaining to the marginalized and underprivileged sections of the society. It explores the role of community media in engaging and empowering the citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to our study is the analysis of the news model of “Video Volunteers” (henceforth VV), an independent community-based online news platform based in India. To understand the level of citizen participation and engagement in the making and dissemination of news during the pandemic, the authors conducted 13 interviews with different stakeholders of VV, including founders and news audiences.

It seeks to reveal that when the mainstream media have failed to represent the issues of a local community, it is the independent media platforms like VV which function as a veritable source of information and sharing of knowledge. Most importantly, this paper emphasizes that the communicative model of independent community-based online platforms has been most successful in the coverage of the pandemic and the level of engagement with the citizenry.

The study contributes to the aspects of reciprocity and collaborative journalism in community news media and its potential impacts on news creation and dissemination.

The financial crisis of 2008 resulted in calls for change. Commentators suggested that co-operatives, in particular credit unions, could provide accountability and sustainability through their open governance and mutual status. However, such suggestions assumed that co-operative principles and practice continued to underpin the efficacy of co-operative banking, and that credit unions, one of the most prevalent forms of co-operative banking, could offer a viable financial alternative. Instead, in the case of Cyprus, the financial crisis and the associated aftershocks triggered the nationalisation and demutualisation of credit unions. This prompted the researchers to question both the viability of a co-operative banking future and the extent to which co-operative principles were shaping decision making, governance, accountability and sustainability. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A case study approach was adopted to explore the degree to which co-operative principles still shaped credit union thinking and stakeholder relationships.

As is the case elsewhere within the co-operative movement, the findings point the fact that governance is weaken by the low membership participation and that the principles are no longer universally applied. Credit unions, if not co-operative banking, may not offer the financial assurances that commentators have called for. Moreover, the guiding principles may no longer be embedded within the fabric of the movement.

Findings are important for practitioners/supervisory body as they highlight possible impacts on co-operative’ future and especially on their governance model and level of autonomy and independence in case of state intervention.

The research undertaken is original as it is the first time credit unions in Cyprus were examined for adherence to co-operative principles.

This study aims to examine the relationships between the rules that a cooperative membership decides upon and members' motives for action. It considers individual self-interest in relation with motives that are consistent with the values of cooperation.

This paper comprises two parts. The first is theoretical and discusses cooperative governance's features in the context of individual motives. The second part is empirical and based on survey data from Italian multistakeholder, worker-run social cooperatives. It uses cross-sectional data gathered from 4,134 workers and 310 managers in 310 cooperatives in Italy to provide evidence of rules and individual motives. Regression analysis confirms the existence of a linkage between individual self-interest and motives.

Rules mainly, but not exclusively, play an enabling function, which implies responding to both nonmonetary and monetary individual motives. With greater articulation within institutions – through the definition of multiple rights for accessing decision-making – the authors expect increases in individual capabilities to match motives with specific organizational rules in pursuit of consistent ends. This is confirmed by the association that the authors found between individual motives and commitment.

The authors’ illustration is limited to one specific type of cooperative, the social cooperative, in which prosocial motives are expected to be stronger than in other cooperative forms, although one could say that all cooperative models emphasize procommunity and prosocial aims. Data are cross-sectional and do not allow for the identification of causality, only of statistical relations' strength.

The continuous scrutiny and adaptation of motives and means imply that cooperators communicate and engage in a learning process.

While the institutional spheres that support investor-owned organizations and self-interested profit-maximizing behavior have been analyzed, a framework that accommodates personal control rights and a richer view of individual motives is lacking. The value added from the paper is to suggest one.

This account aims to introduce contrasting perspectives on teaching and learning methods, and to detail the growth of new forms and vocabularies of access to learning. As we move towards the new millennium, the development of national, yet diversified, credit frameworks and systems will provide an essential underpinning for the organisational culture that will be needed to sustain the wellbeing and growth of the educational system. These new systems are already being incorporated into the practice of ‘virtual’ education. Lifelong learning has widespread support across the social and political spectrum and its importance can hardly be over‐stated as we seek to maintain competitiveness in a changing world. Increasing knowledge and understanding to serve both the needs of the economy and of individuals to play a major role in democratic life has become an agenda of necessity as well as desire. An open society requires open systems of knowledge. A prognosis for the future is submitted where the significance of part‐time modular and open flexible learning is evaluated in terms of a curriculum rooted in useful knowledge and competences, acquired at different sites of learning, including the workplace. It is argued that modular structures, using the potential offered by credit accumulation and transfer to different institutions with different missions, can transcend and transform the learning opportunities for students in a mass system of higher education which is rapidly becoming part of a global market economy and society. Continuous lifelong learning involving its key features of open access, recognition of learning wherever it takes place and the growth of new learning networks and partnerships, is at the conceptual heart of the development of the virtual university.

The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of the requirements for public sector organizations to implement benefits realization practices. The research compares benefits realization practices as suggested by the literature with actual practice with the goal of identifying both insufficiencies in the current literature and challenges in practice that must be overcome to improve the current situation.

The case study approach is used to study benefits realization across national and local government organizations.

Five major challenges that are not dealt with by existing literature were identified: benefits realization requires not just organizational capabilities, but also inter-organizational capabilities; coordination of benefits realization across organizational units, local and central government and across internal organizational levels is both essential and very challenging; managing benefits realization includes much more than integrating benefits realization practices in IT projects; different benefits realization practices are needed at central government level, local management level and case worker level; and different uses of technology require different levels of benefits realization capabilities and different practices. The case also illustrates that under certain conditions, organization can actually realize significant improvements with limited benefits realization capabilities: When IT is used not to change but to fully automate processes, the reliance on formal benefits realization practices is decreased.

The findings are based on a single case.

There is only little empirical research studying benefits realization in a public sector context. Furthermore, the research studies benefits realization from an organizational process perspective, and not from the perspective of IT projects.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the role of social networking sites (SNSs) in the 25 January 2011 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the “Arab Spring”.

The research methods used were an adaptive form of snowball sampling of a heterogeneous demographic group of participants in the Revolution, used to select focus groups to explore a range of relevant issues.

SNSs are shown to have played a central and pivotal role in the events known collectively as the Arab Spring. Their importance as a source of non‐governmental information and as a means of informing the external and internal community of internal events is highlighted by all participants.

The paper outlines research into contemporary events of global significance.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize work in the emerging field of how accounting and accountability can be reoriented to better promote pluralistic democracy which recognizes and addresses differentials in power, beliefs and desires of constituencies. An agenda for future research and engagement is outlined, drawing on this and insights from other papers in this special issue of the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) aimed at taking multiple perspectives seriously.

The paper reviews and synthesizes the central themes associated with accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies, especially with respect to the research studies in this AAAJ special issue, and it identifies possibilities for future research and engagement.

Three central themes are identified: the challenges of achieving critical, pluralistic engagement in and through mainstream institutions; the possibilities of taking multiple perspectives seriously through decentred understandings of governance and democracy; and the value of an agonistic ethos of engagement in accounting. The articles in this issue contribute to these themes, albeit differently, and in combination with the extant social science literature reviewed here, open up pathways for future research and engagement.

This work seeks to encourage the development of pluralistic accounting and accountability systems drawing on conceptual and practice-based resources across disciplines and by considering the standpoints of diverse interested constituencies, including academics, policymakers, business leaders and social movements.

How accounting can reflect and enact pluralistic democracy, not least to involve civil society, and how problems related to power differentials and seemingly incompatible aims can be addressed has been largely neglected. This issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material to advance further work in the area.