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The purpose of the paper is to produce new knowledge about the positions that public libraries both take and are given in the conflicts over politics and identity that play out in contemporary cultural and library policy debates. Using conflicts over drag story hour at public libraries as case, the study seeks to contribute to an emerging body of research that delves into the challenges that public libraries as promoters of democracy are confronting in the conflictual political landscape of today.

The paper presents an analysis of debates reported in news articles concerning Drag story hour events held at Swedish public libraries. Utilizing the analytical lenses of discourse theory and plural agonistics, the analysis serves to make visible the lines of conflicts drawn in these debates – particularly focusing on the intersection of different meanings ascribed to the notion of the reading child, and how fear is constructed and used as an othering devise in these conflicts.

Different imaginings of the reading child and the construction and imagination of fear and safety shapes the Drag story hour debates. The controversies can be understood as a challenge to the previous hegemony regarding the direction and goals of Swedish cultural and library policy and the pluralistic democratic society these policies are meant to promote.

The paper offers new insights into the consequences of the revival of radical right politics, populism and societal polarization, and the different responses from public libraries.

This article explores how public librarians understand and perform the democratic mission of public libraries in times of political and social turbulence and critically discusses the idea of public libraries as meeting places.

Five group interviews conducted with public librarians in southern Sweden are analyzed using a typology of four perspectives on democracy.

Two perspectives on democracy are commonly represented: social-liberal democracy, focusing on libraries as promoters of equality and deliberative democracy, focusing on the library as a place for rational deliberation. Two professional dilemmas in particular present challenges to librarians: how to handle undemocratic voices and how to be a library for all.

The analysis points to a need for rethinking the idea of the meeting place and offers a rare example of an empirically based argument for the benefits of plural agonistics for analyzing and strengthening the democratic role of public libraries.

This paper analyses how neighbourhood governance of social care affects the scope for frontline workers to address health inequities of older ethnic minorities. We critically discuss how an area-based, generic approach to service provision limits and enables frontline workers' efforts to reach out to ethnic minority elders, using a relational approach to place. This approach emphasises social and cultural distances to social care and understands efforts to bridge these distances as “relational work”.

The authors conducted a two-year multiple case study of the cities of Nijmegen and The Hague, the Netherlands, following the development of policies and practices relevant to ethnic minority elders. They conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with managers, policy officers and frontline workers as well as 295 h of participant observation at network events and meeting activities.

Relational work was open-ended and consisted of a continuous reorientation of goals and means. In some cases, frontline workers spanned neighbourhood boundaries to connect with professional networks, key figures and places meaningful to ethnic minority elders. While neighbourhood governance is attuned to equality, relational work practice fosters possibilities for achieving equity.

Further research on achieving equity in relational work practice and more explicit policy support of relational work is needed.

The paper contributes empirical knowledge about how neighbourhood governance of social care affects ethnic minority elders. It translates a relational view of place into a “situational” social justice approach.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how meaning is assigned to online searching by viewing it as a mundane, yet often invisible, activity of everyday life and an integrated part of various social practices.

Searching is investigated with a sociomaterial approach with a starting point in information searching as entangled across practices and material arrangements and as a mundane part of everyday life. In total, 21 focus groups with 127 participants have been carried out. The study focusses particularly on peoples’ experiences and meaning-making and on how these experiences and the making of meaning could be understood in the light of algorithmic shaping.

An often-invisible activity such as searching is made visible with the help of focus group discussions. An understanding of the relationship between searching and everyday life through two interrelated narratives is proposed: a search-ification of everyday life and a mundane-ification of search.

The study broadens the often narrow focus on searching in order to open up for a research-based discussion in information science on the role of online searching in society and everyday life.

This paper investigates the experiences of school teachers of supporting pupils and their apprehensions of how pupils search and assess information when search engines have become a technology of literacy in schools. By situating technologies of literacy as sociomaterial the purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss these experiences and understandings in order to challenge dominant views of search in information literacy research.

Six focus group interviews with in total 39 teachers working at four different elementary and secondary schools were conducted in the autumn of 2014. Analysis was done using a sociomaterial perspective, which provides tools for understanding how pupils and teachers interact with and are demanded to translate their interest to technologies of literacy, in this case search engines, such as Google.

The teachers expressed difficulties of conceptualizing search as something they could teach. When they did, search was most often identified as a practical skill. A critical perspective on search, recognizing the role of Google as a dominant part of the information infrastructure and a co-constructor of what there is to know was largely lacking. As a consequence of this neglected responsibility of teaching search, critical assessment of online information was conflated with Google’s relevance ranking.

The study develops a critical understanding of the role of searching and search engines as technologies of literacy in relation to critical assessment in schools. This is of value for information literacy training.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch out the general tendencies, gaps and opportunities within the body of research studying the social web as a new facet of public librarianship in order to delineate the findings so far and suggest directions for future research.

Literature searches were conducted through the Library, Information Science and Technology Abstract database, The ISI Web of Science database and the Directory of Open Access Journals. A selection process in two steps resulted in 44 articles that were subjected to a two-stage analysis and coding process: a coding analysis based on the stated aims or research questions of each article and analysis of the articles as clusters around a shared theme.

The articles, exhibiting a richness and diversity in research directions, are dispersed in a wide range of journals and the topics addressed cover a variety of segments within Library and Information Science. Despite this diversity, research exploring the consequences of the social web for public libraries in situ and considerations of research on the broader political economic conditions of the public library institution in late modernity is largely lacking. Furthermore, the status of librarianship and the professional expertise of librarians, in light of the social web, need to be further addressed.

The rising interest and investment of library professionals into the practices, principles and technologies of the social web calls for further studies into the consequences of this ongoing development for public library services. This paper gives a preliminary overview of the research done 2006-2012 and identifies gaps in the literature that may serve as a point of departure for future research.

This chapter explores an aspect of voluntary childlessness that has been neglected in previous research; how voluntarily childless (i.e. childfree) women engage in partnership formation processes and how they perceive that these processes become influenced by their voluntarily childless status. Drawing on interviews with 21 voluntarily childless, heterosexual, Swedish women, this chapter highlights how their childfree decision(s) impacted their partnering behaviour, their chances to form an intimate relationship and their preferences concerning partners and partnerships. The results show some of the challenges these women faced as they engaged in partnership formation processes concerning; for example, constraints in partner availability and potentially conflicting preferences regards autonomy, reproduction and intimacy. In addition, partnership formation was complicated due to a lack of communication, misunderstandings and disbelief in their childfree choices. The analysis illustrates that it was of utmost importance to these women that their intimacy goals were respected and protected during these processes but that some of them were also willing to negotiate their partner ideal. Nevertheless, this chapter ends with a discussion of relationship dissolution due to ambivalence concerning childfree choices and intimacy goals both on behalf of the childfree woman and her partner.

Employing the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) framework, this study examines the potential differences between two groups of hotel guests – business and leisure travelers – in terms of factors influencing their intention to purchase hotel products on Douyin (TikTok) in China.

Data gathered from 700 Chinese hotel guests was analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and multigroup analysis (MGA).

The MGA results reveal that three newly added variables – personalization, perceived interactivity and perceived creativity – significantly influence the purchase intention of leisure travelers but not business travelers. Regarding the conventional UTAUT2 variables, leisure travelers are more influenced by hedonic motivation and price value in their purchasing decisions. In contrast, performance expectancy and effort expectancy have a greater impact on the decision-making process of business travelers than their leisure counterparts.

Theoretically, this paper is among the first to explore traveler types as moderators in the purchase of hotel products on Douyin. Practically, the findings offer valuable guidance for hotel marketers aiming to leverage Douyin to promote hotel products to these two different traveler segments.

Instead of using “one-size-fits-all” strategies, hotel managers should design marketing strategies that address the diverse needs of business and leisure travelers on Douyin. By implementing this strategy, they can effectively attract target customers and, in turn, increase hotel revenue.

This study expands the UTAUT2 framework and contributes to the scarce knowledge about the differences between business and leisure travelers regarding the relative importance of factors that influence their purchase intention for hotel products on Douyin among business and leisure travelers.