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The aim of this paper is to document how two university libraries determined whether mystery shopping is an effective and statistically feasible instrument for evaluating customer service at public service desks.

Mystery shopping exercises were conducted at both libraries during the 2008 spring and fall semesters. Trained mystery shoppers recorded staff behaviors and the answers given to their reference questions and open‐ended comments about their reference experience. Using ClinTools, Excel, and Atlas.ti, the authors conducted a meta‐analysis of the data.

Mystery shopping is an effective method for evaluating customer service in libraries. The shoppers observed staff behaviors that were generally in line with the libraries' guidelines, but their comments revealed suggestions for improvement. When the behavior rubric results were combined with the comments, the authors learned that shoppers were somewhat unsatisfied.

The results are approximate since the two instruments used were not identical, requiring the combination of common elements with some loss of accuracy. In this study, the authors used meta‐analysis to compensate for the differences in the instruments. However, another solution would be to create one instrument for both institutions that contained common elements for inter library comparison and local elements for local customization.

Other libraries can adapt this mystery shopping methodology and data analysis to measure customer service in their libraries.

No other study of mystery shopping has included the questionnaires used at both institutions, the aggregated data, and the method of analysis for meaningful evaluation.

Colleges and universities conduct regular surveys that provide space for local questions, including library‐related items. Unfortunately these surveys often use incomparable metrics and scales. This study seeks to examine techniques to take advantage of such surveys to supply practical results.

Effect size meta‐analysis is a statistical method used to combine such disparate results. This method and other statistical tools were used to extract significant findings from the survey results, looking at such library constructs as physical access, analysis (the ability to determine information quality and relevance), collection quality and quantity, retrieval, hours and staff.

The paper describes the meta‐analysis of three separate surveys which contained library‐related data responses, and conclusions subsequently drawn from that analysis.

This paper assumes that the reader possesses some understanding of basic statistical concepts, such as means, variance, standardized scores, and null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). It assumes a “good‐enough” approach to library assessment, one that strives for the greatest possible statistical accuracy, reliability, and validity given the time and resource limitations within which most academic libraries operate.

The method provides a practical, sustainable, and effective library assessment technique using data from Radford University. The use of freeware to undertake the analysis also makes it financially viable.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.

To consider the role of technology in knowledge management in organizations, both actual and desired.

Facilitated, computer‐supported group workshops were conducted with 78 people from ten different organizations. The objective of each workshop was to review the current state of knowledge management in that organization and develop an action plan for the future.

Only three organizations had adopted a strongly technology‐based “solution” to knowledge management problems, and these followed three substantially different routes. There was a clear emphasis on the use of general information technology tools to support knowledge management activities, rather than the use of tools specific to knowledge management.

Further research is needed to help organizations make best use of generally available software such as intranets and e‐mail for knowledge management. Many issues, especially human, relate to the implementation of any technology. Participation was restricted to organizations that wished to produce an action plan for knowledge management. The findings may therefore represent only “average” organizations, not the very best practice.

Each organization must resolve four tensions: between the quantity and quality of information/knowledge, between centralized and decentralized organization, between head office and organizational knowledge, and between “push” and “pull” processes.

Although it is the group rather than an individual that determines what counts as knowledge, hardly any previous studies of knowledge management have collected data in a group context.

During the summer of 2018, the world was captivated by news about the Wild Boars soccer team, trapped in a cave in Thailand. This paper analyzes instances of leadership in the internationally-coordinated rescue effort. We share a lesson plan to support critical thinking in the roles of different leadership approaches and theories to apply this knowledge in a similar context. We present our methodology for developing this lesson plan and identification of leadership within the case; highlighted approaches include followership, servant leadership, situational leadership, and team-based leadership. We also pose three ethical issues that emerged within rescue operations. Educators can incorporate analysis of emergency response cases in their teaching to public sector officials to learn about various leadership styles that describe their approach. Our paper includes a risk management development plan exercise, incorporating a real-life emergency response incident.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a method that the authors call stakeholder cross-impact analysis (SCIA), which is aimed at analyzing how a given set of stakeholders influence one another and also how such stakeholders relate to a given set of issues.

The authors first identify, in the current literature, a lack of analytical tools for assessing mutual influences among stakeholders. The authors then identify cross-impact analysis, a method that was initially developed in the field of futures research, as a suitable method to be applied in the present research. Its application, which the authors call SCIA, is described in detail through a fictitious case.

SCIA permits to assess the direction and the strength of relationships between stakeholders. Furthermore, it allows for the classification of stakeholders based on their level of dependence and influence on others. Also, it is possible to integrate SCIA with social network analysis in order to understand the degree to which stakeholders agree on how issues influence one another, as well as to identify which issues most stakeholders consider to be central and which stakeholders have the most shared opinion on how issues are related.

This method can be used, along with traditional segmentation techniques, by corporate communication and public relations practitioners in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of organizations’ environments.

SCIA represents a much-needed and novel way of understanding the complexity of organizations’ environments.

While there is an established body of literature that discusses the importance of stakeholder management, and also the need for involvement of all stakeholders so that all values of a heritage site can be captured in a heritage management plan, the concepts are not generally developed in ways that make them useful in practice. This research seeks to bring greater clarity to the practice of stakeholder engagement in built heritage, so that organisations can manage their stakeholders in ways that meet their strategic goals. This study proposes a novel method to identify stakeholders, a stakeholder preference mapping approach, which will depict their influence on decisions based on a of power-interest scale.

This research posits a stakeholder preference mapping approach. Virtual Stakeholder Groups (VSG) were identified and stakeholder's significance impacts were measured using the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 to determine in-depth consideration of each stakeholder's power and interest against differing stages of a heritage project. Participants were convened through a 5-day workshop, consisting of 20 Malaysian and 19 international participants (80% academics and 20% Malaysian civil servants). The Multi-Attribute Decision Analysis (MADA) technique was then used to demonstrate how stakeholder identification and analysis can be used to help heritage teams meet their mandates.

The research identified eight virtual VSG (Extremist, Expert, Economic, Social, Governance and Tourists) and their scale of power-interest influence at different stages of the heritage management process. The findings reveal varying levels of engagement from each of the different groups of stakeholders at each work stage – with Stage 5 (Construction) being the least engaged.

It is anticipated that through stakeholder preference mapping, heritage teams can increase the robustness of their strategies by identifying and effectively managing the important concepts; heritage teams can effectively manage the interface between the many (often competing) demands of differing stakeholders. Using Georgetown as a case study, the research team were able to delineate the interaction and interplay between the various stakeholders in the complex decision-making processes for a UNESCO heritage site. Applying the RIBA 2013 Plan of Work as a framework to the heritage management process enables a formalised mapping approach to the process.

The Journal of Leadership Education (JOLE) has been a primary outlet of leadership education publishing and research dissemination since 2002. The purpose of this study was to assess the first five years of literature cited in JOLE. The study used a quantitative content analysis design. Analyzed in the study were 45 articles with research methodologies published in JOLE from 2002 through 2006. Seven hundred eighty-one cited literature works were identified in the journal. The average number of citations per article was approximately 17. The most frequently cited journal sources were from leadership, management, and psychology. Additional cited works are defined. Citation analysis indicates that JOLE relies heavily on books, journals, conference proceedings, and other literacy works outside leadership education. JOLE does not exhibit compactness, indicating that it reaches past its citation boundaries and into interrelated areas of other disciplines. However, it does exhibit extremely weak self-identity meaning it does little to build upon research previously cited in JOLE. Future research in JOLE should strive to cite articles from within its journal and determine what drives citations in leadership education.

The use of film as a teaching methodology in an undergraduate personal leadership development course helped students apply strengths-based leadership concepts. The film Temple Grandin was utilized to illustrate key concepts from Buckingham and Clifton’s (2001) text, Now, Discover Your Strengths. After completing the Gallup Clifton StrengthsFinder^® assessment, students viewed the film Temple Grandin and identified Dr. Grandin’s perceived top five strengths in relation to scenes from the film. Several lessons were devoted to the exploration and development of students’ strengths. This practice paper describes the teaching methodologies employed and provides recommendations for leadership educators seeking to implement the use of film in their courses.