The purpose of this paper is to analyse managerial approaches of a selective group of national library directors, examining their views and perceptions of successful library…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse managerial approaches of a selective group of national library directors, examining their views and perceptions of successful library leadership in the twenty-first century in different sociocultural contexts. This study was carried out based on a series of semi-structured interviews with ten top-level directors of national libraries located on different continents.
Design/methodology/approach
The data collection method for this study consisted of the narrative analysis of the ten interviews coupled with the participative leadership theory, which highlights the leaders’ desire to create a more democratic culture within their library organisations.
Findings
The analysis of these interviews reveals that many of the directors’ responses were supportive to the concepts discussed in participative leadership. National librarians, through their participative leadership philosophies, values and beliefs, contributed to the development of an institutional culture that fostered improving trust, communications, engagement as well as promotion of inter-team relationships by breaking down the traditional “hierarchical” barriers within their organisations.
Research limitations/implications
The participants were predominantly from Europe; only one participant represented the USA, Middle East (Israel) and Northern Africa (Egypt). As a result, there are not many diverse viewpoints from national library directors outside of Europe. Further studies would be needed to obtain a more international perspective in the national library sphere. Furthermore, this study only examines the views and attitudes of ten different library directors. In comparison with the totality of national library directors across the world, this is a relatively small sample. This study may not be representative of all national library directors around the world.
Originality/value
The results of this study would be of interest to library professionals and educators interested in management, as well as Library and Information Science students who want to understand how national library directors view successful traits of participative leadership in different sociocultural contexts.
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Sections 7 and 8 are directed against the practice of misbranding or misdescribing foods and drugs. According to the report on the working of the Act they have proved extremely…
Abstract
Sections 7 and 8 are directed against the practice of misbranding or misdescribing foods and drugs. According to the report on the working of the Act they have proved extremely useful, and might with advantage be applied in this country in which case statements to the effect that a jam, for instance, has been “ improved ” by the addition of fruit juice other than the juice of the fruit from which the jam is presumably made would in all probability not be allowed, nor would the introduction of synthetic esters and dyes be allowed.
Canada's institutions, by comparison with America's, have created a unique normative regime. When it comes to conflict of interest, the main problem in Canada has not been that…
Abstract
Canada's institutions, by comparison with America's, have created a unique normative regime. When it comes to conflict of interest, the main problem in Canada has not been that private interests encumber governmental judgment, but that government itself, and in particular the publicly sourced emoluments controlled by the prime minister, can encumber the judgment of ministers and legislators. When it comes to campaign finance law, the problem is that parties are treated as if they are self-interested entities, while interest groups have often been treated as if they are parties. I explore the institutional causes and regulatory consequences of Canada's unique normative approach.
One of the strengths of this symposium is its focus. All of the articles in this volume concentrate on economically developed nations, with stable polities, traditions of popular…
Abstract
One of the strengths of this symposium is its focus. All of the articles in this volume concentrate on economically developed nations, with stable polities, traditions of popular government, legal systems grounded in common law, and relatively low levels of corruption. Moreover, they all deal with countries that to a greater or lesser degree have embraced the so-called New Public Management, which implies a degree of skepticism about the governance arrangements grounded in bureaucratic norms derived from the rechsstaat tradition. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they all deal with countries, which, as Denis Saint-Martin explains in his introductory essay, are increasingly distressed about the ethics of public officials despite a paucity of lapses on their part. This makes the case comparisons reported in the symposium especially telling: there is enough variance to be informative, not enough to overdetermine the findings. Consequently, what holds for one case may reasonably be presumed to apply to all.
Alexandra L. Ferrentino, Meghan L. Maliga, Richard A. Bernardi and Susan M. Bosco
This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in…
Abstract
This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.
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In May 2000, Robert A. (“Bob”) Eckert, a former vice‐president at Kraft Foods, Inc., walked into the world’s largest toy company to face a monumental challenge. Mattel Inc. was…
Abstract
In May 2000, Robert A. (“Bob”) Eckert, a former vice‐president at Kraft Foods, Inc., walked into the world’s largest toy company to face a monumental challenge. Mattel Inc. was losing over 1 million dollars a day, and it was obvious that significant measures were needed to rescue it. A little under two years on and Mattel’s position has considerably improved. Eckert’s magic formula? There wasn’t one. Faced with big problems, he merely stuck to the basics and turned the tide by keeping it simple.
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Jacques Bourgault and Stèphane Dion
Many relationships between politicians and bureaucrats are based on an energy‐equilibrium model where the politicians provide energy and the bureaucrats, equilibrium. According to…
Abstract
Many relationships between politicians and bureaucrats are based on an energy‐equilibrium model where the politicians provide energy and the bureaucrats, equilibrium. According to this model, conflicts occur when one partner does not adequately fulfill his or her expected role. This model may be fruitfully used to study the relationship between the politician, the career bureaucrat, and the political appointee. The division of roles among this “ménage à trois” is particularly difficult and often generates tension. The situation is most prone to conflict when the government is in a period of change. At such times, the newly elected politicians have a tendency to mistrust the established bureaucracy and to depend almost exclusively on their political appointees. The dysfunctions induced by this phenomenon, in regard to the capacity of the bureaucracy to adequately fulfill its equilibrium role, are very clearly illustrated by the Canadian political transition of 1984, when the federal government was handed over to the Progressive Conservative Party. A series of interviews with ministers, senior civil servants, and senior policy advisors, all of whom had ringside seats to this transition, shows how the extensive power granted to ministerial offices aggravated the difficulties usually associated with a period of transition. This particular transition illustrates how important it is for the newly elected to ensure that their partisan policy advisors play their roles without getting in the way of the indispensable cooperation which must be established between ministers and senior civil servants.