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This paper aims to explore the traditional and emerging roles of cataloguing professionals in a global network information environment. That exploration becomes even more critical in view of migration of information resources into digital, electronic and virtual domains.

An exploratory research design was adopted. The method was to first examine current issues in library and information practice with specific focus on digital technology, the electronic environment, automation, networking, the internet, cyberspace and virtual libraries. The next approach was to examine the challenges of operating in a globalized information environment.

Cataloguers have key roles in knowledge segmentation, identification, organization and authentication. They are vital as content and system managers, software specialists and information retrieval system designers. In all, more than 23 roles are articulated for forward‐looking cataloguing professionals.

The paper's originality lies in its argument that roles are correlates of competencies and that as the practice of knowledge organization migrates to a dominantly global information network environment, cataloguers must upgrade their competencies in order to effectively operate in the emerging environment.

This paper aims to build a theory model to examine the influencing mechanism of entrepreneurial environment on new firm performance based on network view and resource‐based view, and then carry out empirical research.

Data were obtained from 112 new firms, through the use of questionnaires, in Changchun city, China.

Evidence indicates that the entrepreneurial environment has an impact on new firm performance through entrepreneurial network and resource acquisition. The results show that eight out of ten hypotheses are supported.

In a hostile, dynamic and complex environment, the new firm should enhance its entrepreneurial network to ensure resource acquisition and then promote performance.

The paper shows definitely the significance of entrepreneurial network as a bridge between external environment and resource acquisition and new firm performance. Entrepreneurial network and resource acquisition are identified as important intermediary variables, and resource combination ability as a moderating variable. This paper examines the influence of external environment on new firm performance. The research has some theoretical and managerial implications for new firms' survival and obtaining growth in highly uncertain and turbulent environments.

Current networks are providing plenty of services that users can access and use. These services are more and more pervasive and deployed in different networks distributed across an environment. This raises the problem of managing such environments in order to grant access to services from anywhere and to adapt the environment’s networks to dynamic changes. Also, there is a need of an autonomous behavior to reduce human intervention and assure environment’s consistency. This autonomous and distributed behavior leads to the definition and integration of existing and new technologies to enable autonomous distributed management. This is fulfilled by providing paradigms that bring awareness about the surroundings and enabled tools to manage and adapt the environment’s resources. The main problem is to dynamically provide auto‐configuration of networks to deal with the frequent changes which results from users’ roaming, changing services constraints, and changing services themselves, and adding, upgrading or removing policies. The outcome of these issues is a dynamic system with complex management. Hence, this paper proposes the integration of different techniques to provide an autonomous, distributed, and secure management including auto‐configuration, adaptation, and auto‐protection of pervasive environments. Then, policies control the behavior of the environment, devices configuration and the enforcement of security mechanisms to protect sensitive data. Also, mobile agents are employed to distribute management tasks across the distributed environment. In order to provide auto‐protection capabilities, the autonomous behavior of the environment have to be secured. Actually, this security issue is addressed by defining an agent‐based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with X.509 certificates. The agent ensures then that the security functions are applied across all the distributed networks, where specific agents are responsible for conveying necessary information and certificates to local environments. Finally, the paper proposes a semantic‐based privacy management approach using ontologies to decide how privacy information is handled in the environment.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of network relationships and institutional environment on premium winegrowers’ internationalization process.

This study uses a case study approach to examine two premium wine producers engaged in internationalization. The data sources consist of semi-structured interviews, observations at three major events and secondary data sourced from industry reports and materials that are available online.

Findings illustrate that both personal and inter-firm networks help wineries to internationalize. Inter-firm networks play a significant role in gaining international legitimacy. Personal networks were found to be more important in establishing brand authenticity that facilitates wineries in their internationalization process. Gaining international legitimacy and establishing brand authenticity are crucial in the successful internationalization of premium wineries.

This study provides an explanation of how networks can be put into institutional context. Future studies could map out the formal and informal institutions within the wine industry and investigate the closer dynamics among the different actors in the whole network. A whole network is formally structured and governed, yet still built on the relationships among members, making it a very complex phenomenon. This would allow the evaluation of multilateral ties that link firms and actors within the network and how this affects the internationalization process.

This paper provides managers with insights on how they can capitalize on their inter-firm and personal networks to help them deal with domestic and international institutional environments when embarking on internationalization activities.

This paper adds to the existing literature on networks relationships and provides an important link between networks, institutions and internationalization.

Aims to develop a theoretical model for understanding and enhancing effective self‐learning in a networked human and information technology (IT) environment. Recent educational reforms in different parts of the world emphasize that independent self‐learning throughout the life span is a sine qua non of education. Parallel to this is the development that the Internet and information technology have changed the modes of teaching and learning fundamentally and created unlimited opportunities for learning. There is an urgent need to develop a theory or model that can be used to deepen the understanding of the nature and process of self‐learning and facilitate students becoming highly motivated and effective self‐learners with the support of a networked human and IT environment. The implications drawn from the theory can contribute to the paradigm shift of education in current worldwide education reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contingency effects that contextual factors of a networked service environment have on the phased Lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation frameworks.

This paper employs the critical realism (CR) case study research methodology to examine the contingent and causal relationships between contextual configurations of business networks, the DMAIC or PDCA phases in an LSS implementation agenda, and business management functions. The authors conducted a single case study on the basis of challenges they met in kicking off lean transportation in the Port of Houston.

The key finding from the study is a mid-range theory regarding the contingency effects of contextual factors of service business networks on the phased LSS implementation frameworks. The authors found that when there are complexity and dynamics of contextual factors at the field layer, management should focus more on tasks in early LSS phases to emphasize influencing. When there is no centralized authority in the network and the value-system is loosely coupled, management needs to execute more tasks as described in the define, measure and analyze phases with the purpose of both influencing and orchestrating. When individual actors have goals not aligned well with the goal of the business network and have unmatched operations capabilities, these factors should be considered as early as possible in these LSS phases. When a business network has complicated business processes with high unpredictability and uncertainty and individual actors’ value-creation systems are not well embedded in the entire value-creation system, PDCA will be the preferred core structure of an LSS implementation agenda.

This study contributes to the LSS research stream by introducing a causal/contingency model that prescribes the contingency effects of three contextual configurations on LSS implementation. It also contributes to the emerging discipline, business network management, regarding how to use LSS frameworks in strategic planning. It also contributes to the CR school of problem-driven case study by using a strategic initiative framework as a platform and each phase in the framework as a unit. This conceptualization of the entity of interest helps explore the interactions among three theoretical constructs: contextual configurations, phased LSS implementation agenda and management functions.

Managerial implications of this study are twofold. One is the procedure of analyzing the impacts of contextual factors on the causal relationships between LSS implementation phases and network management functions. The entire procedure represents the agenda-setting process of LSS implementation, the most daunting and challenging managerial task in LSS projects. Another one is the guideline on how to determine whether DMAIC or PDCA is appropriate for the LSS agenda when used in a networked environment.

This paper would serve as an excellent resource for both academicians and LSS practitioners in initiating, orchestrating and managing an LSS project in a networked service environment. This study represents the first effort to explore the impact of contextual factors of business networks on lean transformation.

Executives of network organizations seek to combine core competencies and talents of individual firms, along the various links of the value chain for a given project. These firms are brought together in alignment for the purpose of providing organizations a competitive advantage. Using multiple examples as well as results from an extensive research project, this chapter introduces a multidisciplinary model for leading network organizations. The model is informed by theoretical and empirical research and by executive practice. It includes consideration of an organization’s internal interactions as well as its interactions with the environment and with the external organizations within its network. The chapter provides leaders a set of four imperatives for achieving effective collaboration within networks.

This study aims to demonstrate the importance of organizational networks in organizational performance is relatively rich; less understood are processes in organizational networking that entrepreneurs and organizations use in making sense of rapidly changing contexts for organizational performance.

This study conducts an exploratory organizational-level narrative analysis into firms’ experiences in two major emerging markets (EMs), namely, Russia and India – to identify organizational networking processes in the midst of institutional upheavals. The study is based on in-depth case studies of firms in EMs sourced from interview data from senior management and consolidated with secondary data.

The authors find that initially firms rely on informal networks (including blat/svyazi and jaan-pehchaan/jan-pehchan) and later formal (in the form of bureaucratic followed by proprietary) networks to make sense of the changes and uncertainties in turbulent environments. The authors also demonstrate the cyclical nature of strategic sensemaking in the process of developing organizational networks for performance.

The study has a number of theoretical and practical contributions. First, it extends the well-established business networking construct to a more inclusive organizational networking construct. Second, it demonstrates that sensemaking is dependent on interorganizational networking from the outset and throughout the growth of an organization in turbulent markets – from informal to formal bureaucratic and proprietary networks. Finally, this study is unique in documenting the entire process of sensemaking from scanning to performance as well as successfully demonstrating the cyclical nature of sensemaking.

This paper describes an empirically derived typology of the verbal networks of 66 organizations from diverse industrial environments in Brazil and the United States and speculates about the possible origins and dynamics of network configurations across organizations. We identified three distinct configurations of verbal networks: high‐density, low‐factionalism, weak‐tie networks; low‐density, high‐factionalism, strong‐tie networks; and an intermediate category with high factionalism in frequent ties but a preponderance of weak ties and intermediate density. The different types were associated with different degrees of volatility and munificence in industrial environment and with different proportions of Brazilian and U.S. firms.

In this paper, the authors empirically investigate under which conditions production network management is effective to improve manufacturers' financial performance. For this, the authors explore contingencies between production networks and the three key dimensions of organizational environment.

A survey with senior managers was conducted for this research. The authors used a hierarchical regression analysis to test interaction effects and draw on follow-up interviews with chief operating officers (COOs) and senior managers to elaborate and explain the found associations.

Results indicate that manufacturers' financial performance is only associated with their network capability level if they operate in hostile competitive environments. In moderate competitive environments, improvements in the network capability level are not associated with greater financial performance. In particularly munificent environments, such production network upgrades are even associated with the opposite effect.

Results highlight in which organizational contexts upgrading production networks has positive performance implications and under which circumstances it is ineffective or even counterproductive.

The authors draw on unique survey data to add quantitative evidence to the predominantly conceptual and qualitative literature on global production networks. This is also one of the first studies to connect the topics of production networks and organizational environment.