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This fifth edition of Looking for Information is redesigned to reflect the breadth of research across information behaviour studies, with a new streamlined, six-chapter structure, presenting a refreshed look at people’s information needs and seeking practices, while also embracing contemporary concepts such as information use, creation, and embodiment.This edition retains its core purpose by highlighting essential aspects of research on people’s information behaviours, including detailed examples from more than 1200 research publications. The authors present historic works (including those focused on people’s occupations) alongside contemporary research addressing the situations and contexts that shape people’s experiences. Studies using innovative methodological or theoretical approaches, and those reflecting ongoing shifts towards interdisciplinarity are also featured.The authors carefully balance quick access to summaries and highlights, alongside long-form narratives, while retaining the content and focus that readers of Looking for Information have come to expect. Each chapter serves as a stand-alone piece of writing, with its own reference list and Must-Read recommendations, facilitating e-reading and inclusion on course syllabi. All these features will enhance readers’ experiences of this new edition.

This book is a comprehensive overview of the theoretical discussion of one of most important conceptions in sociology at the end of 20th century - the theory of social systems.  The spotlight of this book falls on the work of Niklas Luhmann and his holistic approach. Current modern society is, for Luhmann, a functionally differentiated society, which means that a number of specialized societal sub-systems (politics, economics, religion, law, science, art etc) have formed. Each system is based on its own type of communication led by its own generalized communicative media. Luhmann controversially depicts modern society as a plurality of many societal subsystems operating without a top and without a coordinating and managing centre. This book weighs the strong and weak features of the systemic approach in sociology and discusses ways to rethink it.

Railways are frequently promoted as one of the most sustainable modes of transport. However, their impact will in practice be significantly affected by the ways in which they are designed, constructed, and used. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the issues involved in planning, engineering and operating sustainable railway systems. It introduces and examines a wide range of aspects of railway systems and their interrelationships with other human and natural systems. For each of these aspects it considers the key factors that affect the sustainability of the railway.Students, academic researchers and those in rail industry or related fields who are interested in railways or in transport sustainability more generally will find this to be an invaluable guide. It will be particularly helpful to those who are either relatively new to the railway context, or who have a detailed knowledge of one aspect of railways but are seeking to acquire a more holistic understanding of railway systems.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the range of themes which make up the field of Historical Sociology. Jiří Šubrt systematically discusses the main problems of societal development, long term process and changes in the key areas of social life. These include not only temporalized sociology, evolutionary theory, civilizational analysis, societal systems, structures and functions, but also modernization and revolution, risk, crisis, catastrophe and collapse, wars, conflicts and violence, nations, nationalism and collective memory. This study does not ignore the fundamental dichotomy underlying the discipline, which is between individualism and holism. At the heart of this book lies the human individual as related to social and historical development. The key question is who or what is responsible for the process of human history: society or the individual? The author concludes by offering an approach which may help in resolving this dilemma.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.Complex coordination across time, space, and cultures involves a great deal of uncertainty. This uncertainty may be accepted and handled with judgment and pragmatism, but more often in contemporary modern society, it is treated as a technical problem to be ‘solved’. This is a book about the paradoxical implications of the quest for certainty in interorganizational relations in the complex field of development aid.Authors Alexius and Vähämäki scrutinize questions related to the concept Obsessive Measurement Disorder, i.e. what causes an increase in control mechanisms, and how and when can this prove counterproductive? They further investigate the question on why performance management - and measurement requirements seem in some instances to hinder, and in others to support the implementation of aid projects and programs.Drawing on 80 original interviews with aid bureaucrats working at different levels and in different organizations, including public agencies, companies, non-government organisations, and universities all involved in development aid projects financed fully, or in part, by the Swedish taxpayer, they identify coping mechanisms and responses that may help to prevent the extremes of obsessive measurement disorder, and foster instead pragmatic, constructive organizing and learning that benefits not only aid organizations and their employees, but also - and more fundamentally - the societies in need.

Individualismand holism, the concepts embedded in the title of this book, represent two keytheoretical perspectives that have for many decades steered and shapedsociological thought. For over a century these two interpretative perspectiveshave also divided sociological theory into two camps, accompanied by a band ofscholars trying to bridge this dualism.According toAmerican sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, individualist theories derive theirappeal and strength from their underlying assumption that humans make decisionsas individual, free, autonomous, and rationally and morally consistent beings. A related belief is that they are able to express thesequalities in their actions regardless of the situation in society or whateconomic or moral conditions prevail.Holistic, or collectivist, theories, unlikeindividualism, assign primacy to social entities. This perspective is important because itcreates the basic precondition through which entities can become the subject ofdeliberate sociological analysis. However, there is a price for fulfilling thisprecondition. The emphasis it places on the collective, and on larger entities,logically means that the individual will and free human decision-making tendsto be lost from the field of view.This book argues that these twoperspectives, individualist and holistic, form the central dilemma ofsociological thought. It provides anextensive review and critique of contemporary sociological approaches to thisantinomy and examines attempts that have been made to overcome it and unite them. Moreover, the book proposes a new approach tosolving this dilemma via the concept of 'critical reconfigurationism', arguingthat the resolution of this dilemma is vital not just for sociological theorybut also for empirical social research.

Since his death in 1994, the understanding of Jacques Ellul's significance appears to have deepened considerably. A colloquium devoted to his work in Technique, held six months before his death, drew scholars from all over the world to Bordeaux, France. Four years later, in September 1997, the Penn State University conference on Education and Technology attracted over two hundred participants, most of whom gave evidence of interaction with Ellul's thought. His contribution to the study of the sociology and theology of technology has now been universally acknowledged and built upon. Few scholars seem to appreciate, however, the full scope of his work, especially in areas outside their expertise. One of the goals of this volume is to present the totality of his work, as thoroughly as it can now be established, so that interested persons can explore what he wrote in detail.

Examining a range of under-explored work-life interface issues as they affect different stages of a worker’s life, the authors share new insights into complex issues that affect us all.Topics explored include the wellbeing of students who work, solo-living staff, those on complex fertility journeys, perinatal mental health, chronic illness, menopause, and retirement.Work-Life Inclusion: Broadening perspectives across the life-course will be primarily useful for two main audiences: 1) Academics and students in the fields of work and employment, gender studies, and those interested in health and wellbeing 2) People management practitioners and employers.

This book explores the empirical manifestations of the paradoxical features of reproductive technologies and provides in-depth understandings of solo motherhood through assisted reproduction and by recognising the complex experiences and the lived realities of forming donor-conceived families.The author offers insights into how single women 'do' family, identity and kinship and how the choice to create life as a solo mother is continuously rationalised. She uncovers how established, societal cultural narratives are adopted, negotiated and transformed in the processes of decision-making and fertility treatment. The book draws on science and technology studies, feminist theory, kinship- and family studies and identity theory, and reveals how aspects of bio-genetic and social connections (nature-culture) take on varying meanings when kinship and familial relations - are created through assisted reproduction.Through the lens of solo mother families, the book covers broader sociological questions including; how donor conception challenges existing and endemic kinship ideas and practices and what kinds of individual, social and legal responses have been prompted by advances within medically assisted reproduction.

Since the 1970s, alarming discourses about declining fertility and the difficulties of balancing work and family have flourished in Western countries. Captured by the notion of the 'biological clock', they put women's reproductive age and the fertility decline to the centre of public and medical attention. Reproductive biomedicine constitutes a specific domain invested with hopes for technological and medical answers and a new market for fertility extension technologies, such as egg donation and social egg freezing.Addressing long-standing questions about the articulation of the biological and the social in the making of bodies and identities, this book questions the nature of reproductive ageing, a taken for granted 'fact of life' at the core of reproductive biomedicine. What is the biology of the 'biological clock' made of and how can we account for its embodied reality from a feminist perspective? Opening the black box of the biological, the book makes a way between essentialism and constructivism with the aim of accounting for its materiality, while also illuminating its political implications. By following the ontological choreographies of age-related infertility in the science and medicine of reproduction, this study explores how age materializes and documents what happens when reproduction meets ageing. Deeply transdisciplinary, it questions what is fixed about the biology of the fertility decline in a way which adds complexity to debates about the biomedicalization of reproductive ageing.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.The higher education and research system faces a constant dilemma. On the one hand, research and higher education are run by autonomous, interrelated academic communities, often described as collegial governance. On the other hand, they are an instrument for the fulfillment of goals that are often external to the academic community. What, then, is the role of academics and academic knowledge in governance of higher education and research, and how does this reflect on and impact their aims and overall place in society?Fostered through joint workshops and an open dialogue, this double volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations develops a deeper understanding of collegiality, examining through a unique comparative perspective how it is translated and practiced in different settings across the world. Concentrating on challenges to collegiality and the erosion of faculty governance, this first installment analyzes global waves of reforms, ways in which various kinds of managerial modes of organization and control come to reshape universities, and how this intersects with the evolving missions of universities as institutions.Revealing the globalization, homogenization and variation that have come to characterize the collegiate system, University Collegiality and the Erosion of Faculty Authority critically considers the state of and future of the higher education system, and how we can consciously shape it moving forward.

Volume 31 of Research in Organizational Change and Development addresses emerging issues, challenges and opportunities while advancing new insights to practice and theoretical development.Contributions are devoted to a few timely concerns and emerging organizational challenges. The role that Organizational Development (OD) can play in helping organizations integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Technology – while focusing on issues of design, planned change roadmaps, and collaboration and change methodologies – are explored. Two of the chapters magnify the role that action research methodology plays in the infusion of AI literacy in a business school and in enhancing inter-organizational collaboration in the public health sector. Several chapters address the role that OD can play in the development of new capabilities such as ambidexterity, the moral purpose of the OD profession, and a scholar-practitioner system-based integrated organization development consulting model. One chapter focuses on group dynamics and advancing a sociological perspective that is embedded in a habitus change orientation.The volume concludes with a contribution that builds on the legacy of Ed Schein, where the authors identify trajectories of broad areas for future exploration and development of the field.

What is our role in creating healthy organizations and a healthy world? Creative Social Change fosters a unique dialogue on the interconnections between leadership, sustainability, the long-term viability of the planet, and organizational development. Brought together, these arenas of research and action can influence events globally and contribute to creating a healthy society. The book builds on interviews with five eminent social scientists, thought leaders for many decades on the nature of organizational and societal development: Robert Quinn, Otto Scharmer, Edgar Schein, Peter Senge, and Margaret Wheatley. It includes contributions on what is needed for change from longstanding creative scholar-practitioners such as Riane Eisler and Karl-Henrik Robert, as well as new voices, and concludes with a variety of concrete case studies from around the world about efforts in this direction. Embracing all levels of thinking, from the conceptual to the concrete, the book generates a foundation for scholarly research and proposes practical questions that can be used for dialogue and action among leaders, policy makers, and organizational consultants.

In this volume, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education offers the first in a series of state-of-the-art analyses of research, theory, and practice in the various domains of teaching. The knowledge base for teaching and teacher education takes a variety of forms and is drawn from many disciplines and other sources. This volume specifically covers generic knowledge, that is, knowledge considered by the profession as credible and generally applicable in most content areas and throughout elementary and secondary levels of teaching. More than 20 chapters are devoted to the following elements of knowledge essential for beginning teachers to practise: content of teaching, relationships between content and pedagogy, organization and management, understanding individual students, curriculum planning, context/environment for learning and teaching, and professional functions and responsibilities.

This book develops a comprehensive approach, known as the Ranking Technique, for the assessment of decision options. It aims to provide a way of presenting a decision maker with a consistent method of making a thorough assessment of all the factors associated with complex decisions. The Ranking Technique is based on a detailed analysis of all the issues involved and presents the results in a simple manner which should be understandable by the lay public not versed in the complexities of the issues involved. Ranking Technique is illustrated by application to four major decisions that have caused controversy and one fuel resource evaluation, although it is stressed that the Technique is applicable to all decision-making situations. The study describes how technical, economic and socio-political factors can be evaluated and their significance integrated to give a comprehensive assessment of the decision options.

This volume provides a collection of papers at the cutting edge of competitive strategy, analyzing and assessing the role and value of strategic moves and groups in industry. Theoretical models are supplemented by empirical studies on the dynamics of competitive moves and the link between strategic groups and performance. Linking commentaries and extensive reviews of research issues make this a comprehensive survey of the subject. The book will be of value to corporate strategists, consultants, senior managers, as well as academics concerned with research into competitive strategy.

"Learning to Think: Thinking to Learn" has grown out of a conference organized by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in July 1989. Its purpose is to discuss and advance the state of knowledge about how young people think and reason. Thinking is a normal activity for every normal human being, ordinary life depends on our ability to think. Thus the prime objectives of formal education in all disciplines have always been the refining and shaping of the powers of thought. This book explores three broad ways of thinking in the context of education, looking firstly at the 'skills' approach, secondly at the 'infusion model' and thirdly at the belief that the traditional disciplines and pedagogy of education already provide for the development of thinking.

The tenth volume in the "Best of Long Range Planning Series" focuses on the role of shareholder value as a key tool to evaluating strategic options. Within limits, the concept has an essential part to play in strategic management. However, the authors argue that it should not be the only approach used, as customer focus and employee development are also crucial. By learning the lessons propounded in this volume, companies can avoid inappropriate predation, generate attractive returns for shareholders and provide a sound platform from which to launch and sustain successful customer-driven strategies and lasting competitive advantage.

This book presents a collection of papers from an international symposium on Science and Education in the 21st Century held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as part of a celebration of their 250th anniversary. The papers, written by leading scientists and educators, review the competence achieved by science teaching in secondary schools as well as the issues facing science education. The book also gives the first overview of what we know about sex differences in science achievement and attitudes, and analyses the factors behind these differences. Ecological aspects in science teaching are also discussed as are recommendations about science teaching for the future.

For the first time, prominent scholars of the major disciplines in organization studies come together to search for common ground. Economists, sociologists and psychologists put aside their disciplinary, their language and paradigm barriers, in seeking to address common problems and find universal solutions. Recent advances in population ecology, transaction cost economics, control theory, leadership studies and decision-making are among the topics covered as well as new syntheses on old confrontations between issues of power and efficiency and of rationality and norms. These papers, stemming from the International Symposium on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Organization Studies (Wassenaar, Netherlands, May 1990) reflect the interdisciplinary rapprochement that has gathered momentum over the last ten years, and will surely point to important new directions in organization studies for the future. Organizational researchers, PhD students and students of advanced courses in organizational studies, as well as researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology and economics will find this an important reference and study volume.

This fourth volume of the Handbook of Special Education: Research and Practice deals with the nature and nurture of gifted and talented youth, issues affecting students with severe disabilities and children and youth at risk. Section one focuses on gifted and talented youth, their identification, practices to accelerate and enrich their learning, their socio-emotional adjustment, and special categories of gifted students. New federal legislation in the US, changing views about intelligence, and growing concern over quality of education, make this section timely and important. Section two concerns students with severe disabilities with topics ranging from how they can be served in regular school and community settings to the transition to work and living in the community. In section three the theme is children and youth at risk from poverty, limited linguistic competence, limited cognitive mastery, and family problems. The chapters highlight what action can be taken to solve the educational problems associated with these risks. Special attention is paid to the problems of education in the inner-city.

Throughout the last decade there has been an unprecedented amount of activity in curriculum policy, and recent years have seen the acceleration of that activity following the Education Reform Act of 1988. This reader is a selection of work which addresses some of the more complex ideas and debates surrounding curriculum policy. The book is divided into three parts, the first section describes the background to recent curriculum policy, the second section looks at a variety of ways of constructing the curriculum, all of which have an impact on policy, while the third section offers a series of critiques on current policy, in particular the immediate impact of the ERA and of vocationalism, of market forces and strong central control.

Throughout the last decade there has been an unprecedented amount of activity in curriculum policy, and recent years have seen the acceleration of that activity following the Education Reform Act of 1988. This reader is a selection of work which addresses some of the more complex ideas and debates surrounding curriculum policy. The book is divided into three parts, the first section describes the background to recent curriculum policy, the second section looks at a variety of ways of constructing the curriculum, all of which have an impact on policy, while the third section offers a series of critiques on current policy, in particular the immediate impact of the ERA and of vocationalism, of market forces and strong central control.

"Science Education and Curricula in Twenty-Three Countries" is the first in a series of three volumes presenting the results of the second IEA Science Study. Comparisons are made between countries in terms of the conditions under which science is taught, the organization of science teaching, the emphasis on different science content areas and on the process of science, the focus of decision-making with respect to the science curriculum, and the penetration of new ideas in science teaching. Consideration is also given to the fair and valid assessment of science education across countries. Reports on the provision of science education in each country studied are included.

The problem of the Terror lies at the heart of any reflection upon the French Revolution and its implications for modern political culture. Contemporaries sought to grasp its meaning immediately after the fact as they struggled to explain an experience which seemed to defy the Revolution's fundamental assumption: that rational human intentions could erase the arbitrariness of history and institute a transparent social order. Since then, historians and philosophers have not ceased to ponder what Benjamin Constant called "that inexplicable delirium known as the reign of the Terror. "For some, the Terror deviated from the rights of man only to preserve them: it was a system of revolutionary government dictated by circumstances that threatened the very existence of the infant French Republic. For others, it revealed a dynamic inherent in the Revolution from the start: a dynamic unleashed by the very effort to refashion society in the light of human reason. For still others, it was a symptom of the fact that the promised transformation of society was still incomplete - and a model for any future revolution that would complete it. This volume has been designed to bring together contributions by representatives of a wide range of historiographical approaches to the French Revolution. It seeks, in the wake of the heated historical debates of recent years, to reopen old questions and to formulate new ones, to suggest how the problem of understanding the Terror is being approached, or might be approached, two hundred years after the event. In a century more than ever aware of the fragility of the boundaries between citizenship and victimization, the topic retains its challenge for historical comprehension - and its profound relevance to the enduring question of the nature and conditions of democracy. Now volume 4 is published. Drawing clear inspiration from the earlier highly acclaimed volumes, Professor Baker has now edited a supplementary volume. It has as its aim to advance, by focusing more precisely on the period of the Terror, the explanation of the nature and implications of the political culture of the French Revolution the early volumes initiated.

Europe is undergoing rapid and profound social and political change, and time-honoured methods and practices are being challenged as a result. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing and relevant than in education, which is charged with the task of preparing future generations for the "New Europe". Everyone accepts that education should be for all, that it needs to be extended, and that "education for life" is a phrase with real significance, but how is education best provided? In February 1990 the Academia Europaea council decided to sponsor a study group on education in modern European society funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The report, in the form of this book, deals with many problem areas in European education; for example school quality, examinations, the teaching of foreign languages, and science education. It also analyses the role of the school as an institution in an increasingly complex technological and meritocratic society, and spells out the role of basic education in forming a European identity and consciousness.

This book is a bridge between the technical literature of administrative theory and philosophical discourse. It is needed because an adequate axiology (value theory) of administration is ignored by the former and lacking in the latter. That value theory is necessary to leadership and administration follows directly from decision making and policy formulation, and indirectly from post-modern conditions and context. Moreover, leadership requires self knowledge and motivational insight. The knowledge of good and evil as a critical component of administrative thought ought not to be denied by any technocratic asepsis. Central themes include organization and administrative theory, decisions and policy making, hierarchy, leadership, power, values, and interests. Particular attention is paid to pathologies, ideologies, and the problems of praxis. A robust value theory is presented together with its implications both for the common interest and for personal value auditing. A unique feature of the book is its concurrent presentation in aphoristic form of a general propositional logic of administration. The work is the consolidation of a quarter century of research, teaching, and publication in the subject field. Drawing upon this body of knowledge, the author reconstructs a definitive text along with the extensive new material, notably in the areas of polemic management, ideology, value auditing, and leadership critique.

How can educational research make a greater impact on educational practice? "Problem-Based Methodology: Research for the Improvement of Practice" explains why educational research has contributed so little to the understanding and resolution of educational problems, and how, with a different methodology, its contribution could be significantly greater. The book offers an alternative problem-based methodology (PBM) which is better matched than either empiricist, critical or interpretive approaches to the generic features of educational problems, to the way practitioners seek to resolve those problems, and to the normative requirements of any practical activity. In addition, PBM incorporates a politics of inquiry which shows how researchers and practitioners can reach warranted agreements about the nature of problems and solutions, through dialogue that is simultaneously critical and collaborative. Two original school-based studies illustrate this new approach to educational and social research.

There is a widespread consensus that adult education and continuing vocational training are central elements in a strategy aimed at achieving economic growth. However, the stakes are not only economic. Adult education has also become a structural determinant of employment opportunities, earnings and quality of life. Adults who lack the motivation, opportunity or information needed to participate in a lifelong learning society will become increasingly disadvantaged. Educational systems must prepare people for a life of active learning. This volume argues that the principles of lifelong learning must be at the heart of a new approach to skills development. Lifelong learning is advocated not as a theoretical and utopian idea, but as the inevitable reality in affluent, technologically advanced, politically and culturally pluralistic societies. Each chapter addresses one of several questions important for the future of lifelong education. In particular they concern theory and research on the five themes: lifespan development and education; intelligence; transfer and capacity to learn; informal learning in the work place; learning to learn; and the implications for policy.