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A BIBLIOGRAPHY may seem to many to be as dry as dust and I must admit to having subscribed to that view about some bibliographies in the past. This is one, for a number of reasons, about which I feel differently. For me, after nearly a quarter of a century's involvement in a particular area of librarianship, browsing through the pages is an evocative experience, like a meeting with friends. Some whose work is recorded here I never knew but reading about them and studying their writings over the years has produced an illusion of their being old and close companions; and there are those who were friends whose voices can still be heard in memory. Some authors cited I hope yet to meet because their views and ideas are challenging and awaken a sympathetic response or make me want to start an argument. Still others are former colleagues from whom I learnt much and whose example has been inspirational, and then there are those who are staunch friends, without whose support and co‐operation my professional existence would be very dull indeed.

ZMTKU! This, so far as I am aware, is not an African word, but merely the initial letters of the five countries I recently visited as a Commonwealth Foundation scholar. The names of the countries had to be typed so often during the planning stages that it was easier to think of them as ZMTKU rather than as Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. But even if ZMTKU isn't a word, you can't be in East and Central Africa very long without learning at least a few words of Swahili, if only ‘Jambo’, and ‘Mzuri’.

ENVY, GREED and a desire for possession are not particularly attractive qualities to display in print but if they are recognised and acknowledged in what follows, then at least my argument may not suffer unduly.

IT WAS DIFFICULT to believe the tidings that have only just reached me, the news that Stanley Snaith died in Dorset on December 19 last, a few days after his 73rd birthday. The rising generation of librarians may say ‘Who was Stanley Snaith?’, so all the more reason for this tribute.

This study aims to explore a new restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity, thereby explaining the rationale for category innovation strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative case study analysis of the New Chinese-style Fusion Restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity. Thematic analysis was conducted on data collected from semi-structured interviews and textual information.

A new restaurant category’s maturation is determined by the formation of society’s shared knowledge about the category’s crucial attributes, which is an outcome of market participants’ category-related social practices. The authors develop a novel, four-stage framework for the socialized construction of this shared knowledge: a knowledge creation (KC), knowledge diffusion (KD), knowledge integration (KI) and knowledge structuralization (KS). This knowledge evolution along this KC–KD–KI–KS sequence can holistically describe the category maturation process. This framework can help understand the rationale for a restaurant category’s maturation by analyzing the interrelationships among market participants’ social practices, knowledge-related activities and market development.

This study explains how market participants’ knowledge-related activities facilitate a new restaurant category’s maturation. This can help restaurant managers cope with increasingly homogeneous competition by applying a category-innovation strategy.

This study extends product categorization research on restaurants by articulating a product category’s maturation process from a knowledge perspective.

Civil aviation authorities from some 40 countries will meet in Singapore (at the Mandarin Singapore Hotel) from 11 to 29 January 1983 under the auspices of ICAO to plan the future development of the aviation infrastructure in Asia and the Pacific — a region which has seen the fastest growth of traffic in the world.

This study develops a framework to examine how, why and when different traits of employee curiosity affect service creativity by considering the roles of knowledge sharing and task autonomy.

To reduce common method bias, this work separated the variables investigated into three parts, each of which was randomly used to collect data at three different periods. A total of 822 matched questionnaires obtained from frontline employees of service firms provided useable data for hypothesis tests. A moderated mediation approach was employed to analyse the data.

Results are as follows: (1) Deprivation sensitivity, joyous exploration and social curiosity have positive effects on knowledge collecting (KC) and knowledge donating (KD). (2) KD mediates the relationships between the three curiosity traits and service creativity. (3) Task autonomy enhances and suppresses the mediating effects of KC and KD, respectively, on the curiosity–service creativity relationship.

This study has two main research implications: First, as different types (traits) of employee curiosity have different effects on service creativity, a single-dimensional view of employee curiosity may mask the differences of individual dimension and lead to a oversimplified conclusion. Second, lifting the vein from employee curiosity to service creativity has to consider the roles of knowledge sharing and task autonomy.

This research is the first to contribute to the service innovation literature by revealing the underlying mechanisms through which different types of employee curiosity affect service creativity and uncovering the moderating roles of task autonomy in the process mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine how different supply chain attributes as determinants of the openness of supply chain affect organizational performance (OP).

Data were collected from 259 supply chain executives in Pakistan. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that organizations may take the selective view of their supply chains resulting in a varying focus on different SC attributes. The results show that though all identified supply chain attributes positively relate to OP, some attributes such as combined agility and cooperation among supply chain partners have a weak correlation coefficient. This indicates that overall the relative openness of supply chain among selected sample of Pakistani organizations is low.

Supply chain executives may not have a selective focus on some attributes; rather, they may consider to have a broader perspective drawing upon a wider range of supply chain attributes as identified in the current study. In order to remain competitive, Pakistani manufacturing organizations need to learn more about opening up their boundaries and enhance the openness of their supply chain.

The contribution of the current study is two folds. First, drawing upon the current literature, it proposes the instrument to measure the relative openness of supply chain. Second, it empirically tests the selected conceptual model which highlights the relevance of supply chain attributes and their role in the resulting relative degree of supply chain openness. The empirical examination of the selected conceptual model of supply chain openness tends to make contribution to the wider literature on supply chain management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of environmental characteristics, business partnership relationship, knowledge complementarity, organizational characteristics on knowledge management practices and innovation performance.

The research used primary data, i.e. data obtained directly from the distribution of questionnaires to respondents, namely, the company’s managers/leaders/directors in the companies that became the research sample. Data were collected by sending questionnaires either by mail or email to the respondents. To examine the effect of environmental characteristics, business partnership relationship, knowledge complementarity and organizational characteristics on knowledge management practices and innovation performance.

Environmental characteristics, business partnership relationship, knowledge complementarity and organizational characteristics partially have a significant effect on knowledge management practices. Environmental characteristics and business partnership relationship partially have a significant effect on innovation performance, while knowledge complementarity and organizational characteristics have no significant effect. For other constructs, knowledge management practices are able to be a moderator variable, which can relate these constructs with innovation performance.

The research using the diffusion of innovation paradigm, the combination of market-based and knowledge-based paradigms is expected to fill the previous research gap and become the first uniqueness and originality, as well as characteristic of this research. The second originality is this research examines the role of the knowledge management practice variable as the moderator variable. Then, the third originality is this research investigates the relationship between business partner relationship and innovation performance. These three originalities are still rarely studied in previous studies, so this research will further complement, expand the study, especially in the knowledge management, innovation performance area.