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The European telecommunications landscape has been transformed over the past 25 years, but spectrum management has remained largely unchanged. The paper seeks to highlight the need for a more flexible approach to spectrum management and, in particular, the role of shared spectrum access.

The paper draws on a research study to examine the value of shared spectrum access, based on a review of the literature, a survey of European national regulatory authorities, and scenario analysis.

The paper highlights trends in wireless data growth and, in particular, the impact of 4G cellular mobile technology over the next five years. With pressure also growing on the licence‐exempt bands at 2.4 and 5 GHz, a more flexible approach to spectrum management will be required in future, including light licensing, de‐licensing and spectrum sharing.

The paper brings together a range of evidence to show how the current approach to spectrum management is no longer able to cope with the social and economic demands for the radio spectrum. It should be of value to policy makers, industry analysts and academics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the telecommunication reform process in Europe, its status, and upcoming policy issues. Furthermore, it also aims to provide an overview of the papers in this special issue.

The paper provides an introduction to the telecom reform process based on previous research and the papers in this issue of info.

The introduction argues that the European telecommunication reform process with the telecommunications green paper of 1987 as an important point of departure has been a success in many ways. It has, for example, facilitated the development of mobile, of the internet and its many applications, and considerably lowered prices. However, there are important areas where a single European market has not developed. Moreover, new challenges are rising in terms of upcoming reconfigurations of the whole information communications technology (ICT) area requiring new policy and regulatory answers.

The paper provides a brief introduction to the European telecommunication reform process, its achievements, present challenges, and the policy responses of the European Union. In addition, an overview of the papers of this issue of info is provided.

Continued research on the assessment and development of emotional and social intelligence competencies represents an opportunity to further both theoretical and applied applications of behavioral science to the management of human capital. While the field has continued to expand over the preceding decades, research has often trailed application, especially as it relates to cross‐cultural validity. The purpose of this introductory essay to this special issue of CCM serves to focus on cultural issues related to applied use of competencies in diverse cultures.

Emotional and social intelligence competencies are defined and an overview provided for the papers that will follow, with original research linking these constructs to performance in various occupations and cultures, as well as issues related to their development.

Emotional and social intelligence competencies are found to represent a practical and theoretically coherent, reliable and valid approach to assessing and developing individuals in diverse cultures.

As an introductory essay, the paper lays the foundation for the following articles in this special issue.

Although competencies are in widespread use around the world, issues related to cross‐cultural validation are seldom studied empirically. This introductory essay and subsequent articles will help clarify emotional and social competencies as a behavioral approach to applying emotional intelligence to the practical needs of organizations.

As the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) achieves full implementation in 2014–2015, public perceptions regarding improvement in access and quality of care due to the ACA provide a fertile area for sociological research. The aim of this chapter is to determine if race is independently associated with perceptions of quality of care and access to care after ACA implementation. And, secondarily, we examined if such a relationship remained stable after considering SES (education and income) alone and SES with other relevant individual characteristics.

Data come from a telephone survey of a representative sample of Georgia residents aged 18 years or older. For each domain of the dependent variables (quality of care and access to care), three models were fitted with a nested design. The first model included only race. The second model included only race and SES. Model 3 included race, SES, and the following individual characteristics: (1) self-rated health status; (2) sense of coherence (SOC; a construct used to explain why some people are more disposed than others to illness after stressful situations); (3) travel time to doctor’s office; (4) importance of short wait times as doctor’s office; (5) political affiliation; and (6) geographic location (rural/non-rural).

Race was significantly associated with both the quality of care and the access to care. Non-White respondents were more likely to perceive improvements to both as a result of the ACA. Likewise, respondents with either higher education or income were also more likely to perceive improvements in quality and access as a result of the ACA. However, these associations were partly explained by respondents’ self-reported political affiliations.

Results of this study show that public perceptions toward the ACA and its impact on quality and access to care seem to differ based on an individuals’ race, income level and political affiliation. This may be a reflection of the media blitzkrieg that surrounds the ACA rather than a direct consequence of the policy itself. A concerted effort to develop communication strategies and outreach efforts by race and SES that can better educate the general population on the ACA may alleviate some of the reservations that are inherent to any major policy implementation, especially in terms of healthcare quality and access.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process and interaction among group members using wikis to produce collaborative writing (CW) projects, and to compare their collaborative behavior among students at different levels of education.

The study investigated the participation and collaboration of Hong Kong primary school, secondary school, and university students in the process of developing their wiki-based CW projects. Both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained from analyzing the revision histories and the content of wiki pages.

Results indicated that the level of education significantly affected student CW actions, and their interaction and coordination behavior to co-construct the work. Also, the frequency of collaborative activities varied noticeably among the primary, secondary, and university students.

The study enriches our understanding of the complex and dynamic process of CW using wikis. It has practical implications on why and how the pedagogy and technology should be implemented differentially for the students at three different levels of education to facilitate collaborative knowledge construction.

Research to date is still lacking an in-depth knowledge about the processes and activities involved when students write collaboratively on wikis. Also, no study has yet compared the collaborative behavior among students at different levels of education. The results of this study contribute to the development of new and appropriate modes of group-based collaborative learning at all levels of the education system for the twenty-first century.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.