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This paper documents findings from a qualitative research project on flourishing in schools using a positive organizational research approach. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and bring to description educators’ experiences of the conditions, forces and influencing factors for flourishing in their context. The main objectives were to inform research and practice in school improvement from a positive perspective, provide knowledge and practice about noticing and growing well-being for educators and to encourage an attention on individual and collective well-being as an organizational imperative.

To gain a rich description of what it means for educators to feel a sense of flourishing in their work, the researchers used qualitative, case study methods and appreciative research activities. For the case study reported on in this paper, data were collected through open-ended, appreciative, focus group conversations and researcher observations in the participants’ classrooms. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. The researchers analyzed the transcripts using an iterative process of coding, categorizing and abstracting data.

Participants grew their adaptive communities through balancing structures (collaboration, purpose, administrator support) with flexibilities (synergy, creativity, tinkering, friendships) for adaptation and co-creation. Well-being was connected with feeling collegial support, care, shared meaning and engagement and where positive relationships were central in their work. These relational conditions seemed to contribute to building a social container that promoted flourishing. This led to innovation as teachers worked together in ways that promoted their learning and growth as a group, and increased their sense of vitality in their work. The researchers found that the principal plays a vital role in fostering, encouraging and sustaining conditions for teachers to cultivate adaptive community.

While small in scale and not generalizable across contexts, this research offers particular examples of what is working well for these teachers. Insights from these examples are intended to be generative, potentially resonating with and inspiring others to examine the possible benefits and potentials that may come from a positive approach to research and practice in school improvement in their own contexts. Engaging in positive organizational research in schools led to new insights on the work of teaching, learning and leading in schools. The researchers suggest that this positive, appreciative and generative perspective offers potentials and benefits for new understandings on school improvement.

The findings from this case study indicate that more attention is needed to supporting educators to cultivate the conditions necessary to experience rich and meaningful relationships within which they will thrive, grow and innovate in their teaching. At a system level, the authors argue for a re-orientation of schools toward well-being and a more holistic and human-development perspective on schooling.

Currently and internationally, schooling is under re-design as the authors learn more about the need to organize the schools in ways that encourage the kinds of teaching and learning necessary to prepare young people for an increasingly unpredictable future. The findings from this study highlight the importance of attending to teacher well-being as a fundamental aspect of encouraging the kind of teaching needed for the kinds of learning desired in schools across all contexts.

This case study provides the findings that illustrate the potential and benefits of research on school organizations from a positive organizational perspective. Additionally, this study is a reminder of the systemic nature of all living systems, such as schools, and the associated need to ensure well-being for all members of the learning community.

The purpose of this study is to provide a full understanding of library use patterns in their full temporal and spatial environment. By analyzing individuals' daily travel activity, this study seeks to measure the travel distance and travel time of library users in multi‐destination trip settings.

The data set for analysis was collected from the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive, which stores 79 household daily travel data sets. Daily activities of 409 people who visited public libraries were extracted from the Puget Sound Region data set.

Through the analysis, four library access patterns were identified: single‐destination, en route, base camp, and trip‐chaining trips. Only 20 percent of library users made single‐destination trips, while 80 percent of users made trips of a multi‐destination nature; these are depicted by the latter three listed patterns. In particular, 62.2 percent of the activities fell into the trip‐chaining travel pattern. Such a pattern is defined as “discretionary activities which include a library visit.” Findings indicate that although travel distance is still a constraint to library access, travel time is a more informative factor than travel distance for gaining a richer understanding of the nature of library visits.

This study develops new measurements of travel distance and time, D_library and T_library respectively, enabling more accurate measures of travel distance and time, and further supporting precise measurements of the portions of multi‐destination trips most relevant to library visits.

Towns and cities across Canada face rapidly changing economic circumstances and many are turning to a variety of strategies, including tourism, to provide stability in their communities. Community Economic Development (CED) has become an accepted form of economic development, with recognition that such planning benefits from a more holistic approach and community participation. However, much of why particular strategies are chosen, what process the community undertakes to implement those choices and how success is measured is not fully understood. Furthermore, CED lacks a developed theoretical basis from which to examine these questions. By investigating communities that have chosen to develop their tourism potential through the use of murals, these various themes can be explored. There are three purposes to this research: (1) to acquire an understanding of the “how” and the “why” behind the adoption and diffusion of mural-based tourism as a CED strategy in rural communities; (2) to contribute to the emerging theory of CED by linking together theories of rural geography, rural change and sustainability, and rural tourism; and (3) to contribute to the development of a framework for evaluating the potential and success of tourism development within a CED process.

Two levels of data collection and analysis were employed in this research. Initially, a survey of Canadian provincial tourism guides was conducted to determine the number of communities in Canada that market themselves as having a mural-based tourism attraction (N=32). A survey was sent to these communities, resulting in 31 responses suitable for descriptive statistical analysis, using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). A case study analysis of the 6 Saskatchewan communities was conducted through in-depth, in person interviews with 40 participants. These interviews were subsequently analyzed utilizing a combined Grounded Theory (GT) and Content Analysis approach.

The surveys indicated that mural development spread within a relatively short time period across Canada from Chemainus, British Columbia. Although tourism is often the reason behind mural development, increasing community spirit and beautification were also cited. This research demonstrates that the reasons this choice is made and the successful outcome of that choice is often dependent upon factors related to community size, proximity to larger populations and the economic (re)stability of existing industry. Analysis also determined that theories of institutional thickness, governance, embeddedness and conceptualizations of leadership provide a body of literature that offers an opportunity to theorize the process and outcomes of CED in rural places while at the same time aiding our understanding of the relationship between tourism and its possible contribution to rural sustainability within a Canadian context. Finally, this research revealed that both the CED process undertaken and the measurement of success are dependent upon the desired outcomes of mural development. Furthermore, particular attributes of rural places play a critical role in how CED is understood, defined and carried out, and how successes, both tangible and intangible, are measured.

This paper aims to address two questions related to the magnetism or drawing power of suburban malls: first, does physical size matter, and second, what is the externalities effect of housing a Cineplex within a shopping center?

The study was carried out through an extensive survey covering 1,283 shoppers in nine selected suburban shopping centers in Singapore. The effects of physical size and the presence of Cineplex on the magnetism on the selected suburban shopping centers are evaluated using analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests. Their effect on shopping duration and expenditure pattern is also empirically tested using a recursive simultaneous equations model.

The survey results affirm that both physical size and the presence of a Cineplex enhance the magnetism of suburban shopping centers. A larger shopping center can facilitate a greater variety of shops and create a more pleasant environment for the shoppers, thus enticing shoppers to visit and stay longer. Cinema patrons prefer to watch movies at Cineplex located in shopping centers. Controlling for the endogenous relationship between duration of visit and amount spent in the shopping center, the regression results show that, while physical size and Cineplex have a positive effect on the duration of visit, they do not necessarily have a direct effect on the amount spent by the patrons in the shopping center.

One of the main challenges for mall owners and managers located outside the traditional shopping belt is how to attract shoppers to patronize their malls. While the impact of shopping center size on retail rents and center attractiveness has been addressed in the literature, this paper adds some new insights into the field. The focus on whether the presence of a cinema complex within a shopping center affects its magnetism or not is novel.

Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.

This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).

We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.

We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

Children experience toxic stress if there is pronounced activation of their stress-response systems, in situations in which they do not have stable caregiving. Due to their exposure to multiple poverty-related risks, African American children may be more susceptible to exposure to toxic stress. Toxic stress affects young children’s brain and neurophysiologic functioning, which leads to a wide range of deleterious health, developmental, and mental health outcomes. Given the benefits of early care and education (ECE) for African American young children, ECE may represent a compensating experience for this group of children, and promote their positive development.