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This paper aims to discuss the guiding principles for how to find solutions to a complex problem facing HR professionals: What to do with those who could or should retire and move on to the next stage of their lives?

The author offers five guiding principles that may help you find a solution suited to your organization. These principles should help you assess where to focus your efforts and how to build a plan for moving forward. He then provides several potential solutions for HR professionals and their aging workforce to consider.

The challenge to the human resource professional and the organization’s executives is to understand these guiding principles and develop solutions that work for the organization, business conditions and people.

With these guiding questions and considerations in mind, HR professionals can better help their aging workforce stay, go or find a solution in between.

You must attach clear, specific meanings to words, i.e. be able to identify their referents in reality…. All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase – or any abstract statement – as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: “Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!” and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean. Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it – for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud…. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own (Rand, 1982, p. 16).We begin this chapter by taking Ayn Rand’s advice. We project – by means of a fictional story – what it would be like for a businessman to accept and live by the philosophy of postmodernism.

This chapter studies the tourism cluster of Majorca and its connection with collective entrepreneurship. To this end, the authors review the history of four world leading Spanish hotel companies, from their beginnings, in Majorca, in the 1950s, to their internationalization, in the 1980s and 1990s: Barceló, Meliá, Riu, and Iberostar. This allows us to identify common patterns of behaviour among them over time, which in turn illustrate the dynamics of the tourism cluster and the role played by its context. This qualitative and historical research allows us to make the following contributions: first, in line with other studies in the economic history of Spanish tourism, the four cases support the identification of Majorca as a tourism cluster. Second, the authors highlight several important characteristics of the island which reinforced and strengthened the cluster and boosted collective entrepreneurship, through an intense flow of information between the companies. Third, the authors illustrate coopetition as the key nature of the relationship between the clustered companies in a simultaneous process of competition and cooperation. Finally, the authors show how the strength of the tourism cluster, in Majorca, drove the companies to replicate the same dynamics and structures abroad.

This paper provides a historical case study, through the analysis of Luisa Spagnoli’s entrepreneurial life. Luisa Spagnoli was one of the most famous Italian businesswomen of the twentieth century, founder of “Perugina” chocolate factory and creator of “Luisa Spagnoli” fashion firm. The study aims particularly to examine the role of Luisa in the development of her businesses within the wider context of Italy of the 1900s, and to verify if and how gender has influenced the meaning and the shape of her entrepreneurial initiatives over time.

This study offers a historical analysis of entrepreneurial life of Luisa Spagnoli, developed through an archival study in a synchronic view. An interpretive historical method is adopted to deepen and better understand the links among personal, cultural, social and institutional domains.

This study contributes to the scholarship on businesswomen’s role in history and underlines the role of personal perceptions of female entrepreneurs to overcome external barriers.

The limitations of this study concern the nature of the analysis itself, which is a single-case study.

This analysis highlights the centrality of personal self-perceptions to face up to the difficulties of an unfavourable context, contributing to create the pre-conditions necessary to become an entrepreneur.

Significant advances have been made in using applied methodological approaches. These approaches facilitate critical and creative ways to generate new knowledge, encouraging researchers to explore novel research questions which could not be sufficiently addressed using traditional “branded” methodologies. It is important that, in addition to design, researchers consider the most appropriate methods to collect data. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the draw and tell method in the context of an interpretive descriptive study.

Given the challenges associated with eliciting responses from adolescent populations, in addition to the use of a semi-structured interview guide, the authors encouraged adolescent participants to produce drawings as part of an interpretive descriptive study.

Despite the fact that drawings are seldom used with adolescents during research interviews, the authors found this method promoted conversation and facilitated deep exploration into adolescents' perspectives.

The authors argue that this creative approach to data collection should be embraced by researchers engaging in applied methodological research, particularly with participants who may be challenging to engage. Drawings, although seldom used with adolescent research participants, can stimulate engagement and facilitate conversations.

The purpose of this paper is to review Wilson's (1981) seminal article, “On user studies and information needs” (Journal of Documentation, 1981, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 3‐15) as part of a series celebrating the Journal's 60th anniversary.

This paper adopts a literature‐based conceptual analysis, taking Wilson's paper as the starting point, and evaluating the significance of, and later developments in, the issues dealt with in that article.

Wilson's article has had a significant effect on the development of information science. It dealt with several fundamental issues, including the nature of information itself and of information need, models of information seeking and information behaviour, particularly those based on phenomenological or “whole life” concepts, appropriate research methods for these areas, and the nature of information science as an academic discipline.

The paper provides a perspective on the development of information science over 30 years, with particular emphasis on the study of human information behaviour.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb024348. When citing the article, please cite: Tom Wilson, (1990), “askSam”, Online Review, Vol. 14 Iss 4 pp. 267 - 272.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb044961. When citing the article, please cite: Tom Wilson, (1990), “Steering a course with Magellan”, The Electronic Library, Vol. 8 Iss: 2, pp. 124 - 125.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/13666282200800007. When citing the article, please cite: Anne McCrudden, Tom Wilson, Robin Johnson, (2008), “Supporting strengths: the work of Julian Housing”, A Life in the Day, Vol. 12 Iss: 1, pp. 24 - 28.

The papers in this issue and the next issue of Vine (110 and 111) are concerned with the impact of electronic journals, and fall into two main groups: those from libraries, and those from publishers. There is no paper from a purely commercial publisher, and one of the “library” papers is in fact from the managing agents of the NESLI programme, who negotiate on behalf of libraries. Despite these caveats, the groupings do make clear the difference in position that exists between those who look at electronic information services from the viewpoint of the librarian (as surrogate for the end user), and those who look at them from the viewpoint of the supplier. The hybrid case is perhaps Tom Wilson, a supplier in this case, but very much on the side of the academic rather than the publisher, and putting the case for the free electronic journal.