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The purpose of this paper is to understand the agricultural knowledge and information systems (AKIS) of small‐scale farmers in Kirinyaga district, Kenya by identifying the key agricultural actors, establishing the information needs of farmers and how they access, share and exchange agricultural knowledge and information.

The study adopts a triangulation of qualitative, quantitative and participatory methodologies and methods for sampling, data collection and data analysis. The methods combine Relaxed Appraisal of Agricultural Knowledge Systems (RAAKS) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), focus group discussions with farmers groups, observation and analysis of secondary data. The sense‐making methodology is used an alternative approach to study information behaviour, while the soft systems methodology is used to link up the different activities by diverse agricultural actors.

Richer and deeper data are collected through mixed methodologies and methods. The study identifies more than 100 active information and knowledge providers in Kirinyaga district, with extension emerging as the most important source of information. However, linkages between the various actors and farmers are weak. In particular, the findings of the study demonstrate that the AKIS of small‐scale farmers is location specific and varies with the enterprise(s) produced.

Triangulation of methods is expensive hence the study is limited to only one district in Kenya. The paper suggests further research into ways of strengthening and formalising linkages between key actors.

The study points to the need to strengthen and formalise linkages between farmers and extensionists, private sector, media, farmers' groups, civil society organisations, researchers, educators and microfinance institutions.

The study findings could inform policy development and reforms in agriculture, extension services and help to improve linkages and the flow of agricultural information and knowledge. Consequently, this would translate to improved farming methods and increased agricultural productivity.

The study contributes empirical data that builds on to the existing body of knowledge on AKIS among small‐scale farmers. The paper presents a useful mix of methods (RAAKS, PRA, focus group discussions and observation) for studying the management of agricultural knowledge and information.

This question of community has always been a preoccupation for the human sciences and, indeed, is a practical concern for us everyday humans in our variety ways of being. As such a preoccupation with community traverses vast territories of intellectual discourse in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth. Recent developments in continental philosophy, innovations in information and communication technology and the emergence of “virtual” communities afford an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of community in what is believed to be a rather fundamental way. Virtual communities are often critiqued for being “thin” and “shallow” lacking the depth that local proximity in face‐to‐face communities brings. It is suggested that such a critique privileges a certain view of community premised upon shared values, or shared concerns, embedded in local situated face‐to‐face interaction and practices. The paper agues that such a view of community, based on categorical and physical proximity or sameness, can be problematised by a notion of community that is based on the ethical proximity of the stranger, the otherness of the Other.

The paper draws upon Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

The paper demonstrates that community premised upon a categorical and physical proximity can be problematised by a conception of community based upon the ethical proximity of the stranger – the otherness of the Other. In developing this notion of community, the paper argues that communities always face an insider/outsider problematic that mirrors Levinas' tension between ethics and justice. Furthermore, the paper suggests that the continual working out of this problem, our ethical concern, is differently constituted in virtual communities and face‐to‐face communities. In particular, the paper draws attention to the importance of the encounter with the stranger in virtual environments.

Contributes to debates on community by developing an ethical and political philosophy through which a shared sense of community can be rethought through the primacy of the Other.

This paper aims to examine the development and use of a scaffolded‐social learning network (S²LN) called Remix World. The local aim is to increase understanding of how Remix World is integrated into programmatic and curricular structures as a way to support learning. The broader aim is to contribute to conversations about learning opportunities that S²LNs afford for participants.

Remix World was integrated into the Digital Youth Network (DYN) in‐school and after‐school digital arts curriculum. DYN used Remix World to display and comment on media, artifacts and designs, and to post original work. Two of the authors were given accounts on Remix World, where they logged in to respond to comments and note site activities and conversations.

The data suggest that students across the grade levels regularly used Remix World to post commentary, post media, and critique peers. Students used Remix World across ecologies (home, after school, and school day). Mentors' efforts to integrate the site into their classes increased the number of users and activities on Remix World.

Integrating a media‐based curriculum that encourages critique and production requires some formal feedback and guidelines. It is essential to explore how mentors and teachers pedagogically leverage the students' posts to reach curricular and programmatic learning goals.

This study explores how features and affordances of social networking sites can be redesigned to intentionally support in‐school pedagogical use that promotes transformative communication and the development of critical, new media literacies.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

In describing these projects, the authors hope to encourage academic librarians and archivists to participate in, and even facilitate, similar work at their own institutions. Although both of these projects began in the library and included readings and discussions related to library and archival practices, the most generative conversations rapidly shifted from “how should the library handle these materials?” to “what might this institution do to reckon with its history?” When traditional library practices were de-centered and community perspectives were sought on the college archive, the authors were able to have more inclusive, authentic conversations about the college's history and future.

This case study explores two projects undertaken at a liberal arts college: a working group and a credit-bearing course intended to reckon with racist, xenophobic or otherwise harmful materials in the college archive. Both projects were informed by the authors' engagement with Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture and guided by inclusive pedagogies and practices that participants had explored in workshops and within the context of the college's Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

The working group and the course underscore the centrality of relationships, trust-building and time to the work of addressing difficult histories. The “campus-wide conversations” the authors had hoped to have about the college archive evolved into smaller spaces developed with intention and care. The diverse perspectives of working group members and students in the course demonstrate the value of bringing together viewpoints from outside the library and beyond institutional or disciplinary silos, to consider far-reaching systemic issues.

Many US colleges and universities have begun, or will begin, to investigate the myriad ways in which racism, racial exclusion, or racial violence have marked their institutions and how these troubled legacies persist in the present day. This case study proposes possible approaches that academic libraries and librarians may take to contribute to this essential work.

These two projects propose that work that typically happens solely within libraries and archives (cataloging and description of potentially harmful materials) or within institutional or disciplinary silos (reckoning with legacies of racism and bias) can be discussed, debated, and shared among the campus community. All of the participants in the working group and the course, regardless of their title, role, or academic credentials, bring necessary expertise and experience to these projects. Inclusive practices, when paired with grassroots energy, suggest ways in which a college archive can be used as a site of evidence, reflection, interrogation, and repair.

While the literature on migration highlights the reshaping of host and immigrant population in countries, there is a paucity of research in marketing investigating the evolving dynamics for acculturation. The purpose of this study is to further the understanding of the emerging phenomenon of acculturation and identity negotiation.

Three experiments examined situational ethnicity, self-construal and identity negotiation in home and host culture work and social settings. Study 1 and Study 2 were conducted in the United Kingdom (UK), where the host country is the majority population. Study 3 was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the host country is the minority population. Study 4 utilized qualitative interviews in both countries.

Results from all four studies show that ethnic consumers deploy “indifference” as an identity negotiation mechanism when the host society is the majority population (UK) and when the host society has the minority population (UAE).

The authors offer new insights into identity negotiation by ethnic consumers when the host society is the majority population as well as the minority population. “Indifference”, i.e. preferring to neither fit in nor stand out as an identity negotiation mechanism, is deployed in work and social settings of home and host societies. The authors also advance the existing literature on acculturation by examining whether independent and interdependent self-construal influence identity negotiation.

This paper aims to examine the discursive constitution of leadership identities by senior women leaders working in the City of London. This study draws on postfeminism as a critical concept to explore this constitution, as it has produced the cultural conditions for the reconfiguration of masculine and feminine gender norms in leadership.

In a qualitative study, 13 women leaders in positions of power in the City of London were interviewed. Discourse analysis techniques were used to unpack the postfeminist shaping of leadership identities

At the heart of the leadership identities that senior women leaders construct is a gendered hybridity that is a multifaceted calibration of masculine and feminine attributes and behaviours. Postfeminist discourses of individualism, choice and self-improvement are entangled with discourses of authenticity, relatability and connectivity as particular leadership assets. The gendered hybridity of leadership identities unfolds the possibility for a fundamental makeover of leadership by opening-up space for a transformative change that accommodates women leaders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the very few studies that foreground the leadership identities that women leaders construct within the confines of postfeminist gender regimes. It shows how these women invoke authenticity, unfolding possibilities for the transformational change of and political challenge to traditional gendered leadership in their organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to share lessons learned and tools developed that teachers can use to build pedagogically sound online courses. Transitioning to online instruction is not learning to teach all over again, and it does not have to feel that way either. Through the lens of three common questions new online teachers ask, the principal of a university-run online high school offers practical advice for transforming current pedagogical practices into effective online teaching. This transformation is structured with an innovative “multi-level” approach to assessment. This structure helps organize the transformation, letting teachers focus on building and/or maintaining crucial relationships and meaningful learning experiences with their students.

An innovative assessment lens structures the transformation of practices from brick-and-mortar to online settings, clearing the opacity of the online teaching context so that teachers can return their focus building relationships and meaningful learning experiences with their students.

The paper offers immediately-implementable strategies for designing online courses that facilitate relationship building, meet curricular goals, and are pedagogically sound.

Teachers can adapt the tools, resources, and advice included in this paper to fit their unique teaching needs as they move to online teaching contexts.

This paper uses the pedagogical model and assessment lens developed by the university-run high school and its principal to offer unique, practically implementable strategies for transitioning from brick-and-mortar to online teaching in this tumultuous time.

This study aims to examine the effect of opinion leadership on individuals’ susceptibility to social influence, which eventually affects their adoption behavior and assess how these relationships vary with gender in new product adoption.

Data were collected based on a survey of young consumers regarding the adoption of new consumer electronics. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and multiple sample analyses.

The study finds that opinion leaders are more sensitive to influence from others when the mechanism of status competition is at work. Although consumers who are more susceptible to normative influence tend to adopt new products later than others, those who are more susceptible to status competition are more likely to adopt earlier. The results also provide evidence for gender differences. Female leaders are more susceptible to status competition, whereas male leaders are less sensitive to informational influence. The effects of susceptibility to normative influence and status competition on adoption behavior are stronger for female than for male consumers.

The overall structural model predicts an interesting relationship between individual influence and susceptibility, as well as the effects of these factors on adoption behavior. This study also provides deeper insights into the dynamics of the social influence mechanisms at work for each gender in new product adoption.