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Every businessperson has repeatedly heard myriad reports and newscasts about the huge market opportunity in Asia. But western business managers will be caught flat‐footed if they do not update their notions of the new competitive capabilities of Asian companies and the rate at which they are evolving.

Nine conventional notions are presented in this article that are critical for business leaders to change.

Western businesses must reassess the strengths and weaknesses and update their competitive posture. First they need to jettison outdated conventional wisdom.

Western companies need to start including Asian players and industry clusters in their competitor screening process, if they have not already. They must evaluate how these rivals could encroach on their businesses and develop strategies now to preempt them.

To compete, western companies are learning new capabilities to develop products around consumer preferences and to engineer a cost structure to deliver them profitably at local price points.

The decade of the 1980s was unique for the sheer quantity of education reform reports and legislation. Virtually every state enacted education reform legislation, including reforms of teacher education, licensing, and comprehension. According to Darling‐Hammond and Berry, over 1,000 pieces of legislation related to teachers have been drafted since 1980, and “a substantial fraction have been implemented.” As I discussed in my 1989 RSR article, “Five Years after A Nation at Risk: An Annotated Bibliography,” two waves of 1980s reform reports were identified in the enormous body of primary and secondary literature dealing with education reform. The reform publications of the early 1980s stressed improvements in curricular standards, student performance outcomes, and changes to the education programs, such as salary increases, teacher testing, and stricter certification requirements. The second‐wave reform publications emphasized more complex issues centered around the concepts of restructuring the schools and teacher education programs, as well as empowering teachers to become more involved in curriculum and governance issues.

The study of children's books has always been a mixed affair in which reader response and classroom methods jostle with the parameters used by librarians. In recent years, research into children's books has exemplified this well: such research, at home and abroad, has ranged widely in spheres as diverse as sociolinguistics and descriptive bibliography. It has become a major growth area in literary research, and a profitable avenue for personal advancement for entrepreneurs and academics concerned with children and their reading.

Survey results of active research bioscientists invited to a summer conference are presented. A ranking of the sources used by respondents to obtain current and retrospective information shows that interactive searching is not a major source. Profiles are given of searchers, potential searchers, and non‐searchers. Causes of low search activity are discussed, and strategies are suggested to increase searching in academic environments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine two significant political advertising campaigns which used the “It’s Time” slogan and to reflect on how these related to official, popular and commercial nationalism in Australia. The paper is primarily concerned with two main issues: identifying and examining the variety of images of Australia in two key television advertisements, and exploring the methods by which advertising agencies created positive images of Australia and Australians in the two campaigns. It specifically highlights the significance of the “It’s Time” campaign, which is relevant for scholars and advertisers seeking to understand effective political communication.

This paper examines television advertisements by using semiotics as the principal methodology. The research methodology devised for the advertisements consists of two main components: a shot combination analysis, also known as a shot-by-shot analysis, and a semiological reading of the visual and acoustic channels of the advertisement.

This paper examines the use of commercial nationalism in television advertising. As one of many social and cultural influences, advertisements assist the individual in understanding their notion of themselves and their relationship with the wider community – be it local, national, regional or global. The primary focus of this research is the phenomenon of commercial nationalism – the adoption of national signifiers in the marketplace. However, by examining the more general discourse on nationalism, particularly the voice of official nationalism – the promotion of nationalism by the nation-state (or those aspiring to power), the symbiotic relationship between these two complementary brands of nationalism is explored.

The methodology adopted for analysing the two political advertising campaigns offers conceptual and practical value. It provides a consistent set of terms and concepts for further research to build upon. The paper provides insights for the marketing or examination of advertising campaigns. The paper demonstrates the power of market research to inform a framing strategy for a political campaign. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge in this area and thus society’s understanding of these important periods in the nation’s history. In particular, the paper provides an exploration into the “It’s Time” campaign and how it mobilised a broader cultural awakening to engineer success at the ballot box in 1972. The two case studies examined in this paper are relevant to political scientists and media and communication scholars.

Discusses the long existing and confusing problems of establishing the relationship of who is, and who if not, a dependent worker. Reflects developments which have occurred in British law as it affects the employment field, plus an evaluation and analysis of some of the different types of employment relationships which have evolved by examining, where possible, the status of each of these relationships. Concludes that the typical worker nowadays finds himself in a vulnerable position both economically and psychologically owing to the insecurity which exists.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the research practices of biology researchers and to assess the suitability of the OJAX++ Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for these researchers.

Usability testing was used to evaluate the usability of OJAX++ in relation to biology researchers. Interviews with biology researchers in a large Irish university were conducted to investigate their research information behaviour, to establish user requirements in their discipline and to evaluate the feasibility of using OJAX++ in their research.

The results show that biology researchers used online tools extensively in their research but do not use social networking tools. E-mail and phone conversations are the preferred methods of collaborating with colleagues. The biology researchers found that OJAX++ was easy to use, intuitive and professionally presented but in its present format, OJAX++ does not fit in with current research practices as they do not use Web 2.0 tools that facilitate tagging. A list of requirements of a VRE for biology researchers is presented.

The findings of the study will assist developers of VREs and other web tools to better understand how researchers, in particular biologists, collaborate during the research process and what they require from online research tools. This study gives an important insight into the information behaviour of life science researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of the emergence of virtual research environments (VREs) and related e‐research tools for scholarly work and communications processes.

The concepts of VREs and of e‐research more generally are introduced and relevant literature is reviewed. On this basis, the authors discuss the developing role they play in research practices across a number of disciplines and how scholarly communication is beginning to evolve in response to the opportunities these new tools open up and the challenges they raise.

Virtual research environments are beginning to change the ways in which researchers go about their work and how they communicate with each other and with other stakeholders such as publishers and service providers. The changes are driven by the changing landscape of data production, curation and (re‐)use, by new scientific methods, by changes in technology supply and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research in many domains.

The paper is based on observations drawn from a number of projects in which the authors are investigating the uptake of advanced ICT in research. The paper describes the role of VREs as enablers of changing research practices and the ways in which they engender changes in scholarly work and communications.

Librarians and other information professionals need to be aware of how advanced ICTs are being used by researchers to change the ways they work and communicate. Through their experiences with the integration of virtual learning environments within library information services, they are well placed to inform developments that may well change scholarly communications fundamentally.

The paper contributes to emerging discussions about the likely trajectory and impact of advanced ICTs on research and their implications for those, such as librarians and other information professionals, who occupy important support roles.