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Higher education organizations around the world have always faced environmental changes. However, in the past decade altered societal expectations, new public policies, and technological innovations have created an unprecedented set of challenges for universities. Although the borders of universities have opened in new ways for their

The purpose of this paper is to make visible different approaches to university librarians' professional expertise such as they are mediated through user information seeking education. The empirical basis of the study consists of an analysis of 31 web-based tutorials in information literacy accessible via Scandinavian university libraries' web-sites. The results make apparent four, sometimes conflicting, approaches to user information seeking education expressed in the tutorials: a source approach, a behavior approach, a process approach and a communication approach. These approaches disclose different ways of defining central concepts such as information, information seeking and the user. A study of attitudes to user education is important as attitudes entail practical consequences for the operation of user education.

The recent spate of work on the practice of business lawyering has begun belatedly to make up for the surprising neglect of the topic by sociologists of law, or social theorists generally. An important reason for the neglect of the consideration of lawyering as a process has been the predominance of structuralist perspectives in the sociological study of the legal profession. Furthermore, both theoretical perspectives and practical factors have led those sociologists who have attempted to analyse lawyer-client relations to concentrate on encounters with individual clients rather than the work of lawyers for business. The image of the lawyer as dealing essentially with the private problems of individual clients has become harder to maintain with the increased prominence, first in the US and then in many other countries, of the large, bureaucratized law firm specialising in commercial and business law (Galanter 1983; Galanter and Palay 1991), and the sharpening of the division between lawyers who serve corporate clients and those with a practice predominantly of individuals (Heinz and Laumann

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the most promising information system technologies for the health care industry today and in the future. Many experts and researchers consider that RFID should improve the tracking of patients, medical personnel, drugs, and equipment, decrease medical errors, provide positive identification of patients and medications, secure the access of sensitive places in hospitals, provide patients with safer medications and last but not least, it can facilitate better information management. In this paper, we question these promises by challenging seven myths associated with this technology: five are related to a misunderstanding of what RFID can really do and the other two are related to wrong or incomplete definitions of what RFID solutions are.

Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad.

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Existing perspectives on the social and institutional underpinnings of regional economic performance lack an account of how regions in post-socialist or developing countries lacking embedded, cohesive, trust-based networks could organize to transform themselves. This paper shows how provisional, contingent post-socialist projects – in opposition to more stable firm, market, or network forms of organization – temporarily drawing together sets of actors from diverse organizational environs can enable regions to overcome social impediments to development. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the Łódź old industrial district in central Poland, the first part of this paper demonstrates the projectification of regional restructuring efforts and links it to regional trajectory shift embodied in a variety of far-reaching industrial, institutional, and social transformations. The second part of the paper explores the question of how trajectory shift could have occurred in Łódź, despite the lack of incremental interactive learning across project stages. The region is shown to possess a distinctive transitional capacity producing learning by switching in which contingent collective projects are continually and

Recent studies have observed the spread of open science in the private sector and identified some benefits of the strategy. However, the social conditions that have motivated the adoption and diffusion of open science among for-profit firms remain under-explored. This paper analyzes cultural and structural forces that have influenced biotechnology firms ’ adoption of the strategy. I model the probability that a firm adopts open science as contingent upon (i) the normative predispositions of academically trained founders, (ii) the structural characteristics of a firm’s technological niches and (iii) the influence of structurally equivalent competitors. Probit analysis is performed on the probability that a firm would publish research findings in scientific journals within five years of its founding, using a sample of U.S. biotechnology firms that filed IPO prospectuses with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission between 1972 and 2002. The results show that founders ’ professional training and competitive influence both have a positive impact on adoption, while dense (crowded) technological niches reduce the likelihood that a firm would pursue the open science strategy. 1 I.

Phills, John Roberts, and the editors of this volume for helpful comments on earlier drafts