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The explosive growth and overwhelming use of World Wide Web resources have led to the often misguided, but understandable belief that one can find any information on the Web. In businesses, direct marketing on the Web produced big success stories in sales and marketing. This led to the conclusion that the process of “dis‐intermediation” has begun. Do we need intermediaries such as libraries (especially small special (medical) libraries) anyway? As librarians, how should we position ourselves for this change? The author draws a parallel analogy from knowledge management literature and highlights the importance of adding value to the process of the transformation of data to information, and from information to knowledge. The trend towards supporting evidence‐based practice in health care is a good example of how librarians could use their skills and knowledge to give better support and added value to the health care process. In participating in knowledge building and application in the local environment, the traditional role of a library in being a repository and a provider of information is no longer adequate. New roles in publishing, marketing, teaching, researching, collaborating and building up the knowledge emerge. Continuous education and training in new skills will better equip librarians with the new roles, while at the same time, librarians should preserve the traditional and professional value of providing quality information to those in need.

Buildings erected in ancient China were often of wood and thatch and were particularly flammable. The ancient world developed a number of ways to minimize the damage caused by fire. An analysis of the architecture of ancient construction and urban planning, has revealed over a hundred fire prevention features. These items could be categorized into three groups, namely: symbolic features, building construction and urban planning. In the earlier literature of ancient China in which people had limited knowledge of fire, symbolic features based on their religious belief were emphasized. With the increase in construction experience, more tangible means of fire prevention were included in building design and urban planning. This paper briefly explores the changes of fire prevention means from early ancient period to Qing Dynasty. The reduction of damage caused by unwanted fire revealed the effectiveness of the evolution of fire prevention from symbolic features to urban planning.

The purpose of this paper is to open up a deeper, more complex discussion about ethical issues in queer autoethnography, by moving beyond either an outline of seminal autoethnographic thinkers, instigators, and writers, or a simple rearticulation of the key issues currently under discussion within the field of autoethnographic ethics.

The author’s intention is to queer autoethnographic ethics – that is, to employ queering as a verb, and to queerly examine autoethnographic scholars through the problematizing lenses of unexamined privilege, and of potential ethical violence to the researcher. After this, the author turns to theological writers to help us to queer the notions of ethical certainty, challenging our fear of ideological uncertainty, our fear of the body, and our fear of ambiguity.

This paper offers a more expansive and challenging approach to traditional autoethnographic ethical guidelines. It also raises several significant questions for ongoing scholarly discussion in the field.

It is hoped is that this paper will open up new possibilities and trajectories in the ongoing debates about autoethnographic ethics.

As universities are human capital intensive organizations, practices followed by a university for enhancing the satisfaction of its teachers can be of great help in attracting, retaining and managing highly qualified and competent teachers. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of job satisfaction (JS) on organizational commitment (OC) of university teachers in India.

A total of 396 academicians are surveyed to assess the subjects’ responses to JS and commitment questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used in the process of statistical analysis.

The results confirmed a significant impact of JS on OC of university teachers in India. With 1 percent increase in estimates of pay and job security (PJS), organizational support (OS) and job challenge (JC), there would be 21, 36 and 49 percentage increase, respectively, in OC of university teachers. Of all the factors of JS, JC is the most significant contributing factor, followed by OC and PJS that help in motivating and retaining the teachers in higher education institutions in India.

The sample of the study has been chosen from the higher education sector in Northern India, and so it still needs to be explored whether the findings of this study can be replicated in different geographical areas and organizational settings for further verification and generalization.

Encouraging greater satisfaction among the faculty members may positively influence work-related behaviors, especially commitment among the teachers. The paper may benefit the decision makers in universities to follow the proactive practices to improve the satisfaction and commitment of teachers as educational performance is of priority on the national agenda.

The study provides useful insights about a JS-OC relationship model and informs the stakeholders on how to create an enabling environment at the policy and practice level that would help in attracting and retaining teachers in universities in India. It contributes to enriching the JS and OC literature in a sector and a country poorly addressed so far in research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers of bankrupt firms are more or less conditionally conservative in their financial reporting relative to non-bankrupt firms. The study further examines the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

The study employs a sample of US firms to investigate conditional conservatism in firms that experience financial distress and go bankrupt relative to non-stressed non-bankrupt firms. The study also uses switching regression models to identify the drivers of the cross-sectional difference in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

Empirical results show that bankrupt firms are timelier in recognizing bad news than good news when compared to non-bankrupt firms. The higher level of conditional conservatism in bankrupt firms is mainly driven by their higher levels of leverage and tax-reduction incentives. The cross-sectional analyses show that these results largely hold for more leveraged firms and firms with higher tax costs. Taken together, these results suggest that the conservative tendency of managers of bankrupt firms can stem from the agency problem between lenders and managers and from tax-decreasing motivations.

The novelty of the authors’ research stands in studying the drivers of the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism between bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms and specifically, the demonstration that taxation also induces conditional conservatism in the setting of ex post bankrupt firms.

Focuses on integrating the theory and practice of organizational transformation through the metaphors of chaos theory and self‐organization. Case study data were collected through in‐depth interviews of three practitioner/theorists ‐ Peter Senge, William Torbert and Ellen Wingard ‐ all of whom have formulated theories of organizational change which they use as practitioners for generating transformations in organizations. The interviews suggest that all three of them utilize the logic of their (very different) theories to rationally set up the conditions for organizational change, but that the transformations they describe were sparked not through rational efforts but, in their words, through “grace”, “magic”, and “a miracle”. The new sciences of chaos and self‐organization provide a number of useful metaphors that can help us understand these non‐linear events. Describes the case studies in some depth and then identifies commonalities across the interventions in terms of a three‐phase model of dynamic order, thresholds at the edge of logic, and the self‐organized emergence of new order. Uses metaphors from new science to explain this process, aiming to identify a “chaotic logic” that links rational theory and intuitive practice in transformations of groups and organizations.

Drawing on self-determination theory, this paper compares the effects of QR code payment method (autonomous vs dependent payment) on payment pleasure, its mechanism and the boundary condition in the mobile payment setting.

Four studies were conducted to examine the effect of QR code payment method on payment pleasure. In study 1, 108 undergraduate students were asked to recall a recent experience when they made either autonomous payment or dependent payment. Study 2 assigned 74 undergraduate students to either the autonomous or dependent payment. Study 3 replicated study 2, but recruited 75 customers in the field. For study 4, a total of 134 undergraduate students participated in a 2 (payment method: autonomous payment vs dependent payment) × 2 (product involvement: high vs low) between-subjects design.

The results of these four studies demonstrate that (1) customers derive more payment pleasure from autonomous payment, compared with dependent payments (study 1); (2) the sense of control mediates the effect of the payment method on payment pleasure (study 2 and study 3); and (3) product involvement moderates the mediating effect of the sense of control (study 4).

These findings contribute to the literature on mobile payment and payment experience. These findings also provide insight to merchants when they select an appropriate payment method and manage the customer payment experience.

In an effort to enhance the student experience and achieve complex learning outcomes the use of gamification in higher education is increasing. Using two case studies, this paper explores the efficacy of two discrete inclusions of gamification in entrepreneurial education.

In the first case study, students leveraged their taught knowledge about gamification to develop a gamified business concept. In the second case study, students played a humanitarian game and provided feedback about its design and efficacy.

The students' overall engagement with entrepreneurial education was significantly influenced by two factors: their perceived learning about gamification; and their perceived engagement with the gamification. It was observed that highly engaged students considered the gamification component of the course challenging.

This study demonstrates the potential of gamification to enhance engagement and to foster higher-order learning in the context of entrepreneurial education.

This chapter employed a systemic meta-synthesis literature review to reflect on the transactional variables of the theory of transactional distance (TTD) in addressing barriers to student engagement in the open and distance learning (ODL). Literature sources were obtained from unlimited databases around the globe; however, articles published before 2015 were not included in this review. Through the literature review, the authors identified barriers to student engagement in the ODL through the lens of TTD. The identified barriers to student engagement are presented according to three transactional variables of the TTD and later classified concerning student engagement dimensions. Findings suggest that key instructional dialogue barriers emanate from the teacher and student personality. For program structure, the authors found the poorly designed courses while for learner autonomy there are situational, institutional, and dispositional barriers. The identified barriers to student engagement in ODL revealed the interrelatedness of the transactional variables and the strong link with the student engagement dimensions. By integrating the transactional variables of TTD and student engagement dimensions, this chapter identified possible strategies to address barriers to student engagement in the ODL.