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Public libraries are incubators for collective action in the knowledge economy. As three case studies from the United States and Singapore demonstrate, public libraries can serve as influential champions that garner financial resources, communicate an urgent need for change, and respond to the unmet information and economic needs of marginalized individuals and communities. In the Raise Up Radio (RUR) case, public librarians engaged schools, museums, youth, and families in rural communities to develop and deliver STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content over local radio stations. In collaboration with organizational partners, RUR librarians created a model for library-community-radio projects for the rural United States. In the What Health Looks Like (WHLL) case, public librarians engaged senior citizens in discussions of health and the creation of health comics. In partnership with an interdisciplinary health research team, WHLL librarians developed a pilot for library-community-public health projects aimed at information dissemination and health narrative generation. In the Singapore shopping mall libraries case, the National Library Board (NLB) created public libraries in commercial spaces serving working families, senior citizens, and the Chinese community. The NLB developed an exportable model for locating information centers in convenient, popular, and useful business spaces. These case studies demonstrate how libraries are nodes in the knowledge economy, providing vital services such as preservation of cultural heritage, technology education, community outreach, information access, and services to working families, small- and medium-size businesses, and other patrons. In the years to come, public libraries will be called upon to respond to shifting social norms, inequitable opportunities, emergencies and disasters, and information asymmetries. As the cases of RUR, WHLL, and the shopping mall libraries show, public librarians have the vision and capacities to serve as influential champions for collective action to solve complex problems and foster sustainable development and equitable participation in the knowledge economy.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether aggregator packages might be appropriate to replace or supplement print collections in business and nursing, it aims to identify e‐book equivalents for print books acquired for an academic library's collections.

This paper provides a list of the library's acquisitions in two disciplines checked against e‐book aggregators' holdings. The comparison is analyzed and discussed.

The results confirm findings of a previous study showing that less than one‐third of print books acquired for this library's nursing and business collections have e‐book equivalents available from aggregators, so the aggregators' holdings do not strongly match the library's collecting profile.

The present study applies previous research to a different type of collection, and tests previous conclusions.

This paper contributes to assessment of the value of e‐book collections for academic libraries.

In this paper, I look at one of the most archetypal of children’s stories, that of Noah and the flood, to understand the classificatory schema it presents.

Drawing on an analysis of 47 children’s picture books based on the biblical story, including those held in the historical archive of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, I show that the single most consistent frame for the story is the trope of “two by two”, referencing both the animals and people in the story. The books in the sample, intended for children aged 4–10 years, were published between 1905 and 2006, and are between 14 and 60 pages long.

The repeated emphasis on mated pairs, one male and one female, serves to reproduce the twinned categories of gender and heterosexuality in an overtly “natural” fashion that ties the animal bodies to human social divisions. These constitutive categories of social division – gender and heterosexuality – then become central schemas for organizing people and experience. I draw on Martin (2000) arguing that children encounter picture books before they have had experience in actual social life. Therefore, the books help instill these primary categorization schemas in children, creating the social groupings and relations among them that order their worlds.

The argument makes a strongly causal role for culture and argues that the impact/importance of the content of children’s books may be subordinate to the role they play in helping establish classificatory schema that help construct children’s understandings of the social world.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanisms underlying hiring discrimination against transgender men.

The authors conduct a scenario experiment with final-year business students in which fictitious hiring decisions are made about transgender or cisgender male job candidates. More importantly, these candidates are scored on statements related to theoretical reasons for hiring discrimination given in the literature. The resulting data are analysed using a bivariate analysis. Additionally, a multiple mediation model is run.

Suggestive evidence is found for co-worker and customer taste-based discrimination, but not for employer taste-based discrimination. In addition, results show that transgender men are perceived as being in worse health, being more autonomous and assertive, and have a lower probability to go on parental leave, compared with cisgender men, revealing evidence for (positive and negative) statistical discrimination.

Targeted policy measures are needed given the substantial labour market discrimination against transgender individuals measured in former studies. However, to combat this discrimination effectively, one needs to understand its underlying mechanisms. This study provides the first comprehensive exploration of these mechanisms.

This study innovates in being one of the first to explore the relative empirical importance of dominant (theoretical) explanations for hiring discrimination against transgender men. Thereby, the authors take the logical next step in the literature on labour market discrimination against transgender individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore factors contributing to non-participation in a workplace physical activity (PA) intervention in a large UK call centre.

In total, 16 inactive individuals (nine male/seven female), aged 27±9 years, who had not taken part in the intervention were interviewed to explore their perceptions of PA, the intervention and factors which contributed to their non-participation. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.

Six superordinate themes were identified: self-efficacy for exercise; attitudes towards PA; lack of time and energy; facilities and the physical environment; response to the PA programme and PA culture. Barriers occurred at multiple levels of influence, and support the use of ecological or multilevel models to help guide future programme design/delivery.

The 16 participants were not selected to be representative of the workplace gender or structure. Future intentions relating to PA participation were not considered and participants may have withheld negative opinions about the workplace or intervention despite use of an external researcher.

In this group of employees education about the importance of PA for young adults and providing opportunities to gain social benefits from PA would increase perceived benefits and reduce perceived costs of PA. Workplace cultural norms with respect to PA must also be addressed to create a shift in PA participation.

Employees’ reasons for non-participation in workplace interventions remain poorly understood and infrequently studied. The study considers a relatively under-studied population of employed young adults, providing practical recommendations for future interventions.