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This article offers insight on how to effectively help incumbent organizations prepare for global business shifts to open source and digital business models.

Discussion related to observation, experience and case studies related to incumbent organizations and their efforts to adopt open source models and business tools.

Companies that let their old culture reject the new risk becoming obsolete if doing so inhibits their rethinking of their future using powerful tools like crowdsourcing, blockchain, customer experience-based connections, integrating workflows with artificial intelligence (AI), automated technologies and digital business platforms. These new ways of working affect how and where work is done, access to information, an organization’s capacity for work and its efficiency. As important as technological proficiency is, managing the cultural shift required to embrace transformative industry architecture – the key to innovating new business models – may be the bigger challenge.

Findings are based on original research and case studies. Insights are theoretically, based on additional study, interviews, and research, but need to be tested through additional case studies.

The goal is to make the transition more productive and less traumatic for incumbent firms by providing a language and tested methods to help senior leaders use innovative technologies to build on their core even as they explore new business models.

This article provides insights that will lead to more effective ideas for helping organizations adapt.

This article is based on original research and case experience. That research and experience has then been analyzed and viewed through the lens of models that have been known to work. The result is original insights and findings that can be applied in new ways to further adoption within incumbent organizations.

This paper aims to explore the recent introduction of directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales, and to consider to what extent this new innovation should be considered as a positive contribution to the achievement of democratic policing.

The paper draws on a range of key sources of academic literature on police accountability and the sociology of policing, as well as considering the content of government pronouncements and legislation.

The central argument of the paper is that the introduction of PCCs needs to be examined within the context of the hegemony of neo-liberal logic in public services reform. It is argued that some enduring myths of policing, including the myth that the police impartially uphold an impartial law, lend themselves to the depoliticisation of policing which is necessary in order to facilitate neo-liberal colonisation of the service, which is inimical to democratic policing.

The paper builds upon and contests some of the early critiques of the introduction of PCCs which have emerged and proposes a new direction for the development of critique in this area. It will be of interest to policing scholars as well as anyone concerned about the relationship between democracy and policing under current conditions of deep public service cuts and the colonisation of service provision by neo-liberal values.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a contextual analysis that helps explain how socio-cultural factors are negatively impacting the evolution of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a struggling regional economy.

A case study method is used to provide a detailed contextual analysis triangulating primary and secondary data.

This paper provides insight into a region impeded from embracing the benefits of innovation-driven entrepreneurship in fostering economic development. The authors show that socio-cultural factors may be inhibiting the region from having a functional entrepreneurial ecosystem that can support innovation. Specific aspects of culture and social capital weaknesses are identified and insight into the potential causes of these impediments were offered. As well, the paper shows how the fundamental nature of culture may be affecting other elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem from maturing.

This paper adds to a small, but growing, body of literature that is illustrating the evolutionary nature of entrepreneurial ecosystems and the significant impact of socio-cultural attributes to that evolution. This paper responds to calls to investigate contexts in which innovation does not thrive and where economic challenges prevail. The value of this research paper is to provide conceptual contributions in a contextual analysis from which other researchers can draw comparisons, insights and inspiration for similar approaches. Despite the abundance of research discussing the importance of culture, there are very few actual case studies showing concrete examples of culture and its influence on a region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is now much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances, making up particular genres, equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach.

Current Genre Studies, as encountered in RGS, is an impressive and highly organized body of knowledge. By re-introducing literary and high rhetorical subject matter, which has been under-studied in RGS, into it, the chapter demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than the “homely discourses” usually discussed in RGS. Formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable simply as derivations from function alone. But this is not limited to works of literature. The chapter finds that though more complex genres, literary and high rhetorical, most consistently invite utterance-based interpretations, other genre-based studies can benefit from them as well.

The chapter offers a perspective on genre which gives renewed weight to formal and thematic interpretations of genre, by allowing the utterances themselves to re-enter center stage. This enables an improved understanding of complex genres. It also revives close reading as a viable approach to understanding genre and thus to inform the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. Finally, it improves our understanding of genre in both a systematic and a historical perspective. The chapter demonstrates, thus, that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances, as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them.

It all began a very long time ago, sometime before 1876, that annus mirabilis of librarianship during which the American Library Association was founded, Library Journal debuted, and Samuel Green published in its pages the first article about reference librarianship. And it continues today. In April 1994, an unidentified library school student from the State University of New York at Buffalo queried the participants of the LIBREFL listserv, asking them, “Can you give a summary of the ‘hot’ library reference issues of the week? I'm working on a project for my Reference course, and would like to find out what is REALLY vital to refernce (sic) librarians out there today.” I was tempted to reply that all of that week's “hot” issues were identified in Green's 1876 article. In that article describing the phenomenon we today call reference service, Green touched on issues such as the librarian's obligation to provide information without injecting personal values, the inability of any librarian to know everything, the need sometimes to refer a patron to another information agency, SDI services, the value of proactive rather than passive service, the challenges of the reference interview, and, of course, what has come to be called the “information versus instruction debate.”

FORTY‐EIGHT years in any profession or business is a fairly long record. In my case this period of time stretches from 1882—when library influence was just beginning to make itself felt—to 1930, when that influence had become a real factor in modern educational systems throughout the world. After graduation from Dartmouth College in 1876, having in mind no business or profession, I drifted from one thing to another; first studying medicine for a few months (the sight of a slight operation turning me from this profession), then as a chain‐bearer for a civil engineer, and finally as a clerk in a hardware store, until 1882, when I seemed to get my bearings.