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This paper aims to conceptualise the interplay of strategic design and market-shaping capabilities.

Drawing on the emergent scholarly discourses related to strategic design and dynamic markets, this paper merges a contemporary view of markets and market-shaping capabilities with a conceptual exploration of strategic design.

This paper proposes that the strategic design process can shape markets through orchestrating and leveraging market-shaping capabilities. Specifically, it highlights how these capabilities trigger and facilitate purposeful intent; situated and systemic understanding; and collective collaboration.

Furthering the notion of strategic design, this paper contributes to clarifying how to interpret and use design as a strategic practice in business management.

This paper identifies strategic design as an innovative approach for creating future value-creating systems or markets, and as such, it develops a process framework for market-shaping capabilities, addressing the “how” of market shaping.

IN his admirable survey of library methods and problems in Great Britain, read—unfortunately by proxy—at the St. Louis meeting of the American Library Association, which the author of this paper had the pleasure of hearing, Mr. Bond, in writing of open access, was courageous enough to say that the system in question was the system of the future. It is true that he put that future a long way off, but it is none the less creditable to Mr. Bond's fairness and foresight that he recognises and admits that some time the system of shelf access—perhaps a better term than open access—is bound to prevail, and become the rule rather than the exception in the library administration of this country. One has therefore a shrewd suspicion that much of the fierceness with which the system and the personalities of those who have adopted and approved it, have been assailed, is due to an uneasy feeling on the part of its opponents that time is on the other side, and that they can at best only put the clock back, not stop it.

TO those who have been accustomed to think of Newcastle only as the home of coal and “The Keel Row,” its general aspect will be found disappointingly clean and brisk. Although there is a lively air of business about the place, yet its crowds of pretty and well‐dressed women, its fine shops, and imposing institutions, all contribute towards removing the wholly‐erroneous impression which most strangers cherish, that Newcastle is the home of dirt and smoke and general unloveliness. Indeed, we know of only one other town of similar size, which has been visited by the L. A. which can be compared to it for the energetic bustle of its streets, keenness of its air, and good looks of its women, and that is Aberdeen, where, if possible, the energy is more energetic, and the air even more keen. We shall not compare the ladies! Leaving the Tyne to trace its unlovely course to the sea, and dealing only with that part of the town which, for one busy week, formed the camp of all kinds of librarians, it maybe stated that the institutions of Newcastle which possess interest for librarians are many and varied. The Lit. and Phil. is one of the principal centres of literary and social activity, and its library, lecture rooms, social departments, and other features make it one of the most influential institutions in the town. Its appearance is impressive, and its well‐ordered and well‐classified shelves appeal to every librarian who has the slightest progressive instinct. It has historic memories over a century old, and in many ways attracts readers and supporters in a manner which no municipal library can as yet pretend to emulate. Perhaps the secret lies in the amount of selectness which such an institution can afford its members, and the feeling that one can mix with other subscribers without any fear of accidentally consorting with a slum‐dweller or ambitious pitman ! With all its merits, and they: are many, the Lit. and Phil. has not yet learned the supreme secret of making a conversazione attractive and bright. But this slight criticism applies to other Newcastle institutions visited by the L. A. No doubt the failures arose from a misunderstanding on the part of the local committee, in assuming too confidently that Librarians could amuse themselves. They cannot. They are the dullest dogs on earth, unless someone takes them in hand and amuses them. But this is all by the way, and may seem a little ungracious, though it is only meant as a guide for the future.

LIBRARIANS in charge of small municipal collections are sometimes apt to forget, when enviously regarding some of the larger libraries, that, in many ways, a small library has advantages over its larger rivals, and may even carry out ideas and suggestions which are too laborious to be carried out on a very great scale. As an illustration, I wish to cite the experience of my own library at Bingley, and show how, by working out these suggestions, the membership has been raised from 700 to 1,600, and the annual issues from 24,000 to 54,000 volumes.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

THE Fourth European Work Study Congress, held in Paris during the third week of May, was a well‐organized affair. A tribute is due to M. Loubert and his colleagues for the way in which they devised such well‐lubricated machinery for the convenience of their guests and for the imaginative touch of holding the official dinner aboard a bateau‐mouche as it sailed for two hours up and down the Seine.

In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a pre‐specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured representations called templates. Here we describe the nature of the IE task, review the history of the area from its origins in AI work in the 1960s and 70s till the present, discuss the techniques being used to carry out the task, describe application areas where IE systems are or are about to be at work, and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing the area. What emerges is a picture of an exciting new text processing technology with a host of new applications, both on its own and in conjunction with other technologies, such as information retrieval, machine translation and data mining.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.

Frank Lloyd Wright's famous house Fallingwater has been the subject of enduring scholarly debate centred on the allegedly clear parallels between its form and that of its surrounding natural setting. Despite these claims being repeated many times, no quantitative approach has ever been used to test this argument. In response, this paper uses a quantitative method, fractal analysis, to measure the relationship between the architecture of Fallingwater and of its natural surroundings.

Using fractal dimension analysis, a computational method that mathematically measures the characteristic visual complexity of an object, this paper mathematically measures and tests the similarity between the visual properties of Fallingwater and its natural setting. Twenty analogues of the natural surroundings of Fallingwater are measured and the results compared to those developed for the properties of eight views of the house.

Although individual results suggest various levels of visual similarity or difference, the complete set of results do not support the claim that the form of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater exhibits clear visual similarities to the surrounding landscape.

In addition to testing a prominent theory about Wright's building for the first time, the paper demonstrates a rare application of fractal analysis to interpreting relations between architecture and nature.