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Sheffield is a high crack area. Tackling Crack: A National Plan identified it as such and several studies have highlighted the problems the area faces (Home Office, 2002; McGauley, 1994; Foers, 2001; Heal, 2002). Though much is being done to address the problem, little is known about who is using what and how. Strange and McGauley uncover a worrying increase in crack use among the homeless and the increasing use of crack among problem alcohol and opiate users.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how automation in the ever-changing technological landscape is increasing integrated into, and has become a significant presence in, our personal lives.

Through post qualitative inquiry, the authors provide a contemplation of automation and its effect on creativity, as a contemporary expression of dis/locations, the simulacrum, performative work and a toxic digital presence in socio-cultural-technical spaces.

The authors discuss how we behave, contribute, explore, interact and communicate within and across automated digital platforms, has salience for understanding and questioning the ways that dominant discourses in the contemporary construction and enactment of subjectivity, creativity and agency are being modulated by the machine.

This paper offers a nuanced consideration of creativity, by considering the way creativity is being performed and situated within the effects of automation and its role in dis/locations, performative work and its potential as a the simulacrum in socio-cultural-technical spaces.

Despite the abundant research on social movements, there is sparse scholarly investigation of the link between community settings and how they contribute to persistent protest participation. This paper illuminates the cultural and social mechanisms within a religious retirement community that engender members’ sustained commitment to a ten-year long peace protest. A shared religious-based collective identity also deepens activists’ commitment to this cause. This study draws on semi-structured interviews with 14 peace protesters who reside in this community at two points in time: 2010 and 2013.

This paper aims to identify and categorise the values expressed in women-led social entrepreneurship based on a typology of universal values. It explores the influence of gender and religious faith on the values that inspire social entrepreneurial organisations to engage in positive social change.

Inductive multiple case study research investigates the values manifest in five social entrepreneurial organisations founded and led by women in three Southeast Asian countries.

Organisations and their women-leaders express values related to benevolence, universalism, self-direction and security. Gender and religious faith are found to be mediators that influence approaches to social transformation.

Purposive sampling and interpretive research design favour rich description but limit the generalisability of the findings. Further enquiry is needed into the gender-values-religion nexus in social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship is shown to be a process embedded in and motivated by prosocial values of benevolence and social justice and other values of self-direction and security. Findings provide evidence for the critical but often overlooked influence of gender and religious faith on the values foundation of social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurial organisations led by women contribute to positive social change through the values they incorporate and express.

Research on the link between gender, values and religious faith in social entrepreneurship is virtually non-existent.

This chapter presents a brief historical overview of Czech libraries and librarianship with special attention paid to the ways in which this history laid the foundations for present postcommunist developments. This is followed by a more detailed discussion of important changes in the wake of the “Velvet Revolution” from my perspective as library user and as active participant in the process of postcommunist change in the library world of the Czech Republic.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

The purpose of this case study was to increase the knowledge base of how research librarians experience and cope with the turbulence of change within their library system. A library belonging to the Association of Research Libraries was selected for case study investigation. Seventeen librarians participated in on-site interviews, utilizing a protocol composed of a clustering technique and semi-structured interviewing. Instrumental case studies of each individual were then developed through a collective case method. The findings presented in this chapter include: the competing tensions between the physical and virtual environments, the speed of change, the search for professional meaning, and coping with the experiences of professional change. Analysis of the findings suggest: the emergence of a hypercritical state, the limiting nature of negative feedback, a complex systems framework for professional thinking, and coping in the hypercritical organization.

This paper aims to propose a method to determine which mass customization (MC) characteristics should be prioritized in mass-customized service design.

Looking at manufacturing MC systems and conducting a literature review, it is not possible to observe a methodological step to define customized service design as the one we propose in this work. Results show a systematic classification of MC characteristics based on MC enablers and service enablers. These enablers are related by a quality function deployment (QFD) matrix and rewritten using a reverse QFD procedure.

In the end, it was possible to determine which characteristics should be prioritized in mass-customized services.

Two case studies were performed: one with an electric power supplier and another one with a university.

It shows that despite easy customization, organization is not always interest in service features customization. The explanation in these two cases is customization cost, which compared to the benefit does not seem advantageous for the organization.

This paper creates a methodology to design a first phase in customized services in Latin American services and that is the original contribution.

Money, time and brainpower are being frittered away in the search for knowledge and in reinventing the wheel, all at the expense of efficiency and innovation. Moreover, there is very little understanding of the causes. Proposes to investigate this situation.

Acknowledges that a substantial part of human behaviour is determined by the instinct to survive.

Knowledge management rationalises or idealises human behaviour. However, a large part of human behaviour is driven by the instinct to survive. This instinct makes people egoistic and lazy in a smart way, as they try to achieve the maximum result with the minimum of effort. The same instinct urges them to look after their offspring and their territory, and it makes people as passionate as they are.

It is important to use information technology systems not so much to secure knowledge as to visualise traces of knowledge that people leave behind in their territory and to bring specialists in contact with one another. In organisations, one must make sure that the human scale is preserved and capitalise on people's pride and the way they care for their “offspring”. One must utilise the survival instinct in organisations as it leads to the smarter recycling of knowledge and to innovation.

Knowledge management so far involved technical, business, and learning perspectives. This is the first work on knowledge management acknowledging that a substantial part of human behaviour is determined by people's instinct to survive.