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This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.

Taylorism and scientific management, as significant components of productive relations in the USA during the early twentieth century, have been examined by accounting historians representing the major paradigms that hold sway in contemporary historiography – the Foucauldian, the Marxist (labour process), and the economic rationalist (Neoclassical). The great bulk of this work has assumed that the major tenets of scientific management, such as time study, incentive wage schemes, standard costing, and variance analysis, were in common usage during the first two decades of the current century. This paper intends to set the record straight by demonstrating that theory was running far ahead of practice in that the number of actual adoptions of the new methods were not concomitant with the prevalence of scientific management literature. Subsequently, the paper will endeavour to show how the three major paradigms combine to enhance our understanding of Taylorism. Much of what Taylor wrote can be interpreted within a Foucauldian framework; the negative reaction of organised labour was much in the Marxist tradition; and, finally, the lack of applications in practice reflected economically rational action on the part of entrepreneurs (thereby completing the triangle).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the enacted mental models, the types of thinking and action, of assessment held by faculty and staff in higher education.

This research approaches the question: in what ways are “learning outcomes assessment” understood (thinking) as part of a system and assessed in the individual’s work (practice)?” Interviews and concept maps were used to identify influences, descriptions of actions, and connections to environments for 12 participants, known to have engaged in learning outcomes assessment.

By connecting individual perspectives to broader organizational understanding, a goal of this research was to identify and analyze how educators understand and practice learning outcomes assessment in higher education. Influences on assessment presented in the literature are confirmed and several behavioral types are defined and categorized.

The findings focus attention on the ways individuals act on influences in systems of higher education. The findings yield opportunities for new ways to utilize assessment knowledge. The study is small and has implications for similar type institutions.

Faculty and staff can use these findings to create training and development protocols and/or adjust their own practices of assessment. Assessment professionals can apply findings to consulting on an array of assessment projects and with staff who have varying skill levels.

The ways in which assessment is practiced is deeply influenced by training but is also shaped heavily by current environments and accountability structures. Policies and practices related to such environments can make a difference in preparing for scaled-up assessment practices and projects.

This research offers insight into possible archetypes of assessment behaviors and presents applied influences on assessment.

Researchers in information studies have examined fictional depictions of libraries in various mediums because these images can reflect and influence real-life experiences and attitudes. Video games, despite being relatively overlooked, are increasingly culturally relevant and can indicate library users' real needs and desires. This study investigates the ways in which video games depict characters using libraries to seek and use information.

A qualitative content analysis approach incorporating methods from information studies and game studies was applied. Tancheva's (2005) semiotic analysis of fictional libraries and Carr's (2019) textual approach provided the framing for the unique aspects of video games and their meanings. Carroll (2021)'s character analysis and Chatman (1996)'s theory on insiders–outsiders dynamic underpinned the data collection and analysis. The purposive sample included 15 video games released since 2010.

Video games depict game characters visiting libraries to solve short-term problems, to gain knowledge to improve themselves or to bond with others. Protagonists are often depicted as adventurers or outsiders who must adapt to unfamiliar places and situations to achieve their wider objectives. In these games, libraries provide useful documents, spaces or helpful guides and intellectuals who assist the protagonists. As outsiders, the protagonists seek information in libraries to help them learn about their environments and to immerse themselves in the local histories and cultures in their worlds. Overall, these depictions highlight both short- and long-term benefits of library use.

As with existing studies, the ways in which fictional library use appear in video games can suggest real needs and desires among library users. The findings from this study emphasise the importance of library services and spaces that help users both address short-term problems and immerse themselves in local concerns, with longer-term goals. Applying different research methods or lenses to analysing video games could deepen our understanding of what library users think and feel when they seek and use information in libraries.

This paper aims to investigate the merit of Fred Taylor's claim that he did not conceive the notion of time study on his own. He insisted that he acquired it while a student at Phillips Exeter Academy and identified the particular individual to whom, he claimed, he owed his earliest exposure to time study – George A. “Bull” Wentworth.

Drawing on archival material, including a recently discovered letter by Taylor, this paper substantiates Taylor's claims regarding his association with Wentworth. By corroborating existing and new evidence of the Wentworth‐Taylor link, it probes into the nature and the scope of the influence of the “Old Bull” of Exeter on the father of scientific management.

Taylor did not conceive of time study on his own but acquired it early in his life via traceable socialization influences, many of which came from Wentworth. Such influences were both substantive and lasting: the residue of Wentworth's methodology is distinct in Taylor's early and later time study work. Taken together, both internal and external consistency of the evidence has led me to assert that it is plausible that Wentworth had a traceable and lasting socialization impact on Frederick Taylor.

This paper is a rare inquiry into the part of Taylor's life history that precedes his pioneering of the industrial, managerial, and economic applications of time study. It grounds the matter of Taylor's conceiving the time study idea into the context of his early‐in‐life socialization – an important subject left largely unexplored by Taylor's biographers and the historians of the scientific management movement.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new way to distinguish a firm’s dynamic capabilities from operational capabilities.

Conceptual paper/literature review.

Current literature on dynamic capabilities posits that dynamic capabilities are those firm capabilities that can induce change in other capabilities, while operational capabilities are static. Distinguishing between these capabilities in this manner is not helpful because changes occur continuously in all capabilities to at least some extent. In addition, empirical studies show that even task-level operational capabilities can change on their own and can induce change in other capabilities. In contrast to focussing on the presence or lack of change to determine if a capability is dynamic or operational, this paper distinguishes between them by determining a priori the expected nature of the outcome. By focussing on the outcomes of change rather than the changes themselves, this paper proposes that capabilities should be considered operational if they produce outcomes that can be predicted using probability distribution while those capabilities that produce outcomes that cannot be predicted using probability distribution should be considered dynamic.

Future research on dynamic capabilities should not only investigate whether or not change is occurring, but the outcome of change to understand whether a change is precipitated by dynamic or operational capabilities.

Existing dynamic capabilities literature is unclear about how to distinguish between dynamic capabilities from operational capabilities. Previous research attempts to distinguish these capabilities by arguing dynamic capabilities are those firm capabilities that can induce change in other capabilities, while operational capabilities are static and do not induce change. This is not particularly helpful. A clear distinction between dynamic and operational capabilities could facilitate further advancement of the dynamic capability literature; this study makes a rudimentary effort to distinguish between them.