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James March's highly influential article on organisational learning underpins the studies of exploration and exploitation collected in this issue. What is less well known is that March's article, which is based on a computer simulation of collective and individual learning, reflects a real-life experiment in exploration and exploitation that he, in large part, designed and conducted when he was the new ‘boy Dean’ of the School of Social Sciences in the University of California at Irvine between 1964 and 1969. This chapter tells this story and then uses it to critique March's original model. It argues that March's model, which was probably the first simulation of an organisation learning, worked to constitute rather than model the phenomenon of organisational learning. The Irvine story is also important because it provides the context for what constitutes knowledge in organisation theory, and because it highlights the personal trauma and distress that can accompany the creative play of exploration.

This chapter is a Marxist Critical Realist inspired discussion of my interest in, and experiences of, being a working-class academic from Indian/African heritage. I begin my autoethnography by problematising the limits of defining social class from a gradational approach, which is the most common way to make sense of social class in academia and beyond. I argue that neoliberal capitalism organises people into workers and owners of production and without this acknowledgement, discussion of social class in the gradational approach is limited. I then go on to critique the de-centering of social class, for which I used Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a case study. My intention is to promote the explanatory power of approaching social class as as an organisational relationship, which assimilates racism, in the service of capitalism. Throughout the chapter, I provide examples of the way that I navigate this intellectual standpoint in the classroom, specifically through utilising the concepts of mystification and feasibility that I developed through my PhD that focussed on social class in Sweden. Without dismissing the value of the gradational approach of understanding social class in toto, and also the importance of personal identities (indeed I have focussed on my ethno-racial identity), my basic argument is that without the centralisation of social class, and crucially its articulation with neoliberal capitalism, social class becomes a descriptive category rather than explanatory, rendering the possibility of radical social change as severely diminished.

The purpose of the paper is two-fold. The first is to inform the readers of the racist origins of libraries in America. Readers will learn about historic instances of systemic racism in libraries and those that persist today. The second purpose is to give readers examples of antiracist actions they can take on an individual level, in concert with library administration, and on the institutional level.

This paper gives an overview of systemic racism in librarianship. Part I outlines the history of libraries and their institutional oppression origins in America. Part II reviews some of the current racial issues in Libraries and Information Science (LIS). Part III gives the author's viewpoint on how to incorporate antiracist action within libraries and how to decenter whiteness at the national level.

The authors found that libraries were established on institutional oppression and systemic racism, which continue to this day to center whiteness and disadvantage BIPOC. Having said that, now is the time to make changes, decenter whiteness and remove systemic barriers through antiracist actions. These actions will help increase the number of BIPOC working in libraries and improve the retention and promotion of those BIPOC too. If the American Library Association (ALA) heeds this call to action, Critical Race Theory (CRT) will become part of the Master's of Library and Information Science (MLIS), BIPOC will be better funded and supported, and the credentialing stigma will be removed.

This article highlights concrete action that should be taken beyond individual bias awareness and into systemic changes. It advocates for more critical awareness and daily antiracist action within the LIS field.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

This paper aims to provide a critical analysis of the European Commission's and the member states' attempts to introduce a European Qualifications Framework and national frameworks respectively.

The paper is based on a review of policies and substantive desk research in countries that have applied a qualification framework approach.

The analysis shows that qualifications frameworks (QFs) are resisted partly from inertia and conservatism and partly because important educational purposes are being defended. NQF experiences suggest that hopes associated with QFs are unrealistic (e.g. accreditation of prior learning).

The paper draws mainly on conceptual and secondary analysis. In future primary empirical analysis would be desirable.

The findings are extremely relevant to policy makers on the European and national levels. The lessons from NQFs suggest incrementalism, building blocks, supporting policies, consensus and staying as close as possible to practice are important.

This paper is one of the few attempts to evaluate current initiatives based on prior experiences.

Our study explores friction costs in terms of competition and market structure, considering factors such as market share, industry leverage levels, industry hedging levels, number of peers, and the geographic concentration that influences reinsurance purchase in the Property and Casualty insurance industry in China. Financial factors that influence the hedging level are also included. The data are hand collected from 2008 to 2015 from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook. Using panel data analysis techniques, the results are interesting. The capital structure shows a significant negative relationship with the hedging level. Group has a negative relationship with reinsurance purchases. Assets exhibit a negative relationship with hedging levels. The hedging level has a negative relation with the individual hedging level. Insurers have less incentive to hedge because it provides less resource than leverage. The study also robustly investigates the strategic risk management separately by the financial crises.

Considered going to IFLA 89 in Paris, but as noted in leading article in August, the fee of 2,200 francs would pay for a first class run around the Hexagon with SNCF for nine days with all sorts of extras and still leave enough for five good dinners. Expostulating thus to NLW's Favourite Overseas Librarian, Frances Salinié of the British Council in Paris, led her to make enquiry. Transpired, as they say, that belatedly and all unannounced one‐day registration at 300 francs was allowed. This possibility, the fact that I hadn't been to Paris this year, the near certainty that one day of IFLA would be an “elegant sufficiency” and a curiosity to see if “they order this matter… better in France” led me to the Gare du Nord clutching my 300 dirty oncers. Warning: lengthy chunk of political bias coming up. Don't bother to take reading matter on the London Dover/Folkestone railway. The swaying, clattering, noisome line makes reading, conversation or walkman listening virtually impossible. This chunk of Network Southeast is not a worthy descendant of the South‐Eastern and Chatham railway on which long dead father once drove beautiful locomotives. A pride in railways is one of the Victorian values not preached from the Downing Street pulpit. The new line promised for the Tunnel may sometime let you read in comfort, but that seems a rather drastic and expensive remedy.

This paper critically analyzes the International Olympic Committee's 2000 global marketing campaign titled “Celebrate Humanity”. Released prior to the 2000 Summer Games, this campaign capitalized on recent cultural trends by focusing on multicultural inclusivity and the idea that sport could contribute to world peace. Using this campaign as our case study, we demonstrate the possibilities for both local consumption and interpretation of a global campaign within the specific cultural context of the United States.