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The California State University Library successfully improved its library’s hours, including introducing 24-hour access, thanks in part to an assessment process that helped the University Library to develop a partnership with the students. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In order to understand the need for expanded operational hours, students’ were surveyed on their satisfaction with current library hours, suggestions on how best to meet their actual hour needs, and interest in 24-hour access. Efforts to solicit student input included involving the student government in promoting the survey and reviewing its results, a decision that later had a major impact on the success of the project.

The survey identified days with problematic hours and which hours student suggested changes to that would best fit most students’ needs. In response to the findings, the library immediately implemented incremental changes that fit within current library resources. The survey’s most significant finding was that 94 percent of students wanted 24-hour study in the library.

An unexpected benefit of the library making immediate, incremental changes was that students could see the results of their input and feel a sense of ownership. The findings also led to the library making 24-hour access a top priority. When university funding was not available, the university’s student government approached the library with a unique proposal to include funding for 24-hour library access in their proposed student fee increase. The student body showed its willingness to invest in the library by passing the fee increase. California State University San Marco’s library began 24/5 hours in Fall 2017.

This study aims to represent the initial impact analysis of a human resource development (HRD) intervention – the Center for Human and Organizational Potential (cHOP) – for faculty and staff at an academic medical center in the Midwestern US. cHOP seeks to unleash faculty and staff potential and advance organizational outcomes by fulfilling employees’ basic psychological needs, posited by self-determination theory (SDT, Ryan and Deci, 2000): competence, autonomy and relatedness.

Using Cianciolo and Regehr’s (2019) layered analysis framework as a guide, the authors conducted a program evaluation to analyze, in-depth, the nature and impact of two representative cHOP programs: Accelerate and BOOST. Specifically, the authors examined whether the implementation of these programs was consistent with SDT, as reflected in participants’ reported program experiences (i.e. “Did the intervention, in fact, occur as intended?”). The authors also examined program outcomes and opportunities for improvement based on program participants’ voices (i.e. did the intervention, implemented as intended, work?). Because SDT is a theory of individual motivation, the authors identified a need to evaluate outcomes at the individual level and beyond, broadly exploring what would happened if program participants’ basic psychological needs had been addressed. The aim was to determine the potential downstream consequences of intrinsically motivated faculty and staff, while promoting divergent thinking on program impact and sustainability.

Participants reported experiences suggest that Accelerate and BOOST addressed all three psychological needs and strengthened their intrinsic motivation to advance their leadership and career development and improve the performance of their teams and departments. These outcomes suggest the potential for impact at the individual level and beyond, such as the institution and external, professional societies.

The study assessed two representative programs among cHOP’s many offerings. A comprehensive study of cHOP’s impact, directly linking psychological need fulfillment and organizational impact, is beyond the scope of a single study and requires further research.

The authors suggest expanding scholarly discussions in the HRD and health professions education (HPE) literature to characterize the promise of HRD-HPE partnerships and to account for their impact more fully.

The study contributes to both HRD and HPE scholarship by providing a layered account of academic medical center (AMC) faculty and staff development using an HRD approach; and examining the impact of a theory- and evidence-based novel HRD intervention (i.e. cHOP) at the individual level and beyond in an AMC context.

The authors provide three personal perspectives on personality disorder, based on their involvement in writing, directing and acting in a Resurgence Theatre Company production, Differentia, which provided a dramatic representation of personality disorder. The production was shown at the First National Personality Disorder Congress.

This chapter, together with those that follow, builds upon the ideas presented in the previous volume in this series (Maginn, Thompson, & Tonts, 2008). There we outlined our vision for a ‘pragmatic renaissance’ in contemporary qualitative research in urban studies. We argued that to survive as an effective and frequently used tool for policy development, a more systematic approach is needed in the way that qualitative-informed applied urban research is conceptualised and undertaken. In opening this volume we build on these initial ideas using housing as a meta-case study to progress the case for a systematic approach to qualitative research methods. We do this to both stimulate broad debate about the ways, in which qualitative research in urban/housing scholarship might be of greater use to policymakers and practitioners, as well as to suggest a way forward in realising the ‘pragmatic renaissance’.

The authors used Sue’s (2010) microaggression process model and Freeman et al.’s (2010) stakeholder theory as a theoretical basis for this case.

Information for the case was gathered from publicly available sources. No formal data collection efforts were undertaken.

Guess Who’s Coming to Deliver is a case that examines an event that occurred at Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse in late July and early August of 2015. A customer who had purchased some products from Lowe’s requested that only White delivery people were dispatched to her home because she did not allow African–American people in her house. The case is factual and was written from information that was publicly available in the media. The case is designed to help instructors facilitate a meaningful classroom discussion about microaggressions from the different stakeholder perspectives.

The case is relevant for undergraduate and graduate organizational behavior and human resource management courses.

The end of the twentieth century was filled with an ironic mix of panic and fatalism; together with optimism and hope. ‘Digital armageddon’ in the form of the Y2K bug was reportedly on the horizon (Vulliamy, 2000), but as we know, never transpired. If, however, Y2K had materialised and affected technology as predicted, the consequences would have had profound macro and micro impacts – economically, politically, socially and spatially. Cities – with their super-concentration of technological infrastructure, hardware and software – would arguably have endured the brunt of this catastrophe. Had this disaster occurred, its reach would have been well beyond the city, spiralling out from the CBD to the suburbs, rural settlements, jumping national boundaries, and ultimately bringing economic, transport and communication systems to a near halt, rendering day-to-day living experiences unbearable, if not virtually impossible.

In Western liberal democracies over the last decade or so, community development, housing policy and neighbourhood renewal have been increasingly underscored by a philosophy of participatory decision-making (see Imre & Raco, 2003; Lo Piccolo & Thomas, 2003; Maginn, 2004). At one level, it appears that central and local governments have experienced a policy and democratic epiphany. This is reflected in a ‘new’ acknowledgment that ‘when citizens themselves are the key to the quality of neighbourhoods, a new avenue of policy intervention is opened up’ (Lelieveldt, 2004, p. 534; see also Crenson, 1983). In this context, participatory models of decision-making are seen as having the potential to ‘empower’ local residents who were previously the subject of ‘top-down’ or command and control forms of planning (Healey, 1999; Meredyth, Ewing, & Thomas, 2004; Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1996; Rose, 1996; Dean, 2002). On another level, however, there is caution, suspicion even, about this paradigm shift. A perception exists that governments are essentially displacing, redistributing and/or retreating from their historical welfare responsibilities (Chaskin, 2003, 2001; Fraser, Lepofsky, Lick, & Williams, 2003; Pierre, 1999).