The legal and institutional framework for, and challenges to the payment of reprographic fees in academic libraries in Ghana

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Larteley Adu ◽  
Thomas B. van der Walt

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate the legal and institutional frameworks for, and the challenges to the payment of the reprographic fees in Ghana.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research approach was employed to address the objectives of the study. This involved focus group discussion sessions with twelve purposively sampled postgraduate students (six each from the private and public institutions) and the five Technical Committee members of CopyGhana; and qualitative interview sessions with the head librarians of four academic universities (two private and two public).FindingsThis study shows that CopyGhana derives its existence from Copyright Act 2005, (Act 690) section 49, and Copyright Regulations (L.I. 1962) 2010, sub-regulation 18. Copyright Regulations (L.I. 1962), 2010, sub-regulation 18 mandates CopyGhana to identify all the outfits that engage in photocopying for immediate licensing, and to protect the economic rights of foreign rightsholders within the jurisdiction of Ghana. Though students and library staff generally agree to the payment of the reprographic fees (the students however want to see it legally insulated against possible future arbitrary increases), the position of university authorities possesses a big challenge to its implementation.Originality/valueThe paper evaluated the legal and institutional frameworks for the payment of the reprographic fees, and the challenges in its implementation, and proposes that CopyGhana may have to activate its legal right to sue in order to overcome the challenges posed by university authorities, as is being done in other jurisdictions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-228
Author(s):  
Martijn van Ooijen ◽  
Antonie van Nistelrooij ◽  
Marcel Veenswijk

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to expand the theory on multistory cultural change by showing how a dominant narrative on construction safety dynamically interrelates and is contested on multiple intertextual levels in an organizational field of organizations contributing to the recovery of houses in an earthquake region.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnoventionist research approach was adopted in which interpretation of data to find narratives and designing interventions went hand-in-hand.FindingsWe found four distinctive composite narratives besides the dominant narrative to which five actors refer in their accounts, thereby contributing to three types of story patterns. These narratives disclose the taken-for-granted ideas and beliefs that characterize the challenge of changing organizational culture. One intervention, which intended multiple stories to touch the surface, was highlighted as a multistory intervention.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research could extend the knowledge on other change interventions that contribute to multistory cultural change processes.Originality/valueAdopting an ethnoventionist approach to provide deep insights on an unfolding cultural change process for both scholars and practitioners.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Yli-Kauhaluoma ◽  
Mika Pantzar

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how back-office service staff cope with the intricacies of administrative work. Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies the research approach of “at-home ethnography” in a university back-office. The primary method of data collection was participant listening in the field, either in formal interviews or casual conversations. Photography helped the authors to zoom the conversation in to specific artefacts in administrative offices. Findings – The study identifies both forward- and backward-looking recipes as essential administrative tools that back-office staff develop and use to handle intricacies that emerge in their daily work. Forward-looking recipes are based on anticipatory cognitive representations, whereas backward-looking recipes are based on experiential wisdom. The study elaborates on the different kinds of modelling practices that back-office service staff engage in while building and applying these two different kinds of recipes. Practical implications – The recipes support administrators in knowledge replication and thus help avoid interruptions, reduce uncertainty, and produce consistency in administrative processes. Originality/value – In contrast to existing studies of formal bureaucracies, the study provides a unique empirical account to show how back-office service staff cope with the multiple intricacies existing in current office environments. The study shows how recipes as models contribute to stabilizing or even routinizing work processes in complex administrative situations.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Chang ◽  
Sylvain Max ◽  
Jérémy Celse

Purpose Employee’s lying behavior has become ubiquitous at work, and managers are keen to know what can be done to curb such behavior. Managers often apply anti-lying strategies in their management and, in particular, the role of self-awareness on lying intervention has drawn academic attention recently. Drawing on multi-disciplinary literature, this study aims to investigate the efficacy of self-awareness in reducing lying behavior. Design/methodology/approach Following the perspectives of positivism and deductive reasoning, a quasi-experimental research approach was adopted. Employees from Dijon, France were recruited as research participants. Based on the literature, different conditions (scenario manipulation) were designed and implemented in the laboratory, in which participants were exposed to pre-set lying opportunities and their responses were analyzed accordingly. Findings Unlike prior studies which praised the merits of self-awareness, the authors found that self-awareness did not decrease lying behavior, not encouraging the confession of lying either. Employees actually lied more when they believed other employees were lying. Practical implications This study suggests managers not to rely on employee’s self-awareness; rather, the concept of self-awareness should be incorporated into the work ethics, and managers should schedule regular workshops to keep employees informed of the importance of ethics. When employees are regularly reminded of the ethics and appreciate its importance, their intention of lying is more likely to decrease. Originality/value To the best of the atuhors’ knowledge, the current research is the first in its kind to investigate lying intervention of employees in the laboratory setting. Research findings have brought new insights into the lying intervention literature, which has important implication on the implementation of anti-lying strategies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel E. Collier ◽  
Daniel L. Sherrell ◽  
Emin Babakus ◽  
Alisha Blakeney Horky

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential differences between types of self-service technology. Specifically, the paper explores how the dynamics of public and private self-service technology influence customers' decision to use the technology. Design/methodology/approach – Existing customers of private and public self-service technology were surveyed from the same industry. Using structural equation modeling, the authors examine how relevant self-service constructs influence evaluations and attitudes of customers across both settings. Findings – The analysis reveals that customers' control and convenience perceptions differ across public and private self-service technology. Additionally, customers placed a heavier emphasis on the hedonic or utilitarian evaluation of a service experience based on the type of self-service technology. Practical implications – For managers of self-service applications, understanding the unique differences of public and private self-service technology can aid in the implementation and adoption of the technology. By properly understanding the differences of the self-service types, managers can provide a beneficial experience to the customer. Originality/value – By identifying and describing two distinct categories of SSTs, this study allows managers and researchers to better understand how and why individuals choose to utilize individual self-service technologies. Through understanding the unique dynamics of a public and a private SST experience, retailers can determine the appropriate strategy for customer adoption based on the utilitarian or hedonic functions of the technology.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Verica Milutinovic ◽  
Jelena Musanovic ◽  
Dejan Beric

Purpose This study made an advance over previous work by providing a modified model for measuring the competitiveness of tourism destinations based on competitive performance from a stakeholder perspective. Furthermore, this paper aims to evaluate the sources of relative strengths and weaknesses perceived of a destination. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a quantitative approach to seek opinions of 135 tourism stakeholders. Univariate and bivariate statistical analyses were used to describe the profile of the respondents, quantify the main findings and test the proposed hypotheses. Findings The results highlight the importance of safety in determining the attractiveness of a destination and its significance for the competitiveness of a destination. The strongest indicator of competitiveness is “Core resources and attractions,” while the weakest indicator is “Destination management.” Also, employees in public institutions and in the tourism industry in general have different opinions about competitive tourism destinations for most dimensions. Research limitations/implications Despite the fact that the findings do not consider the demand side, which has a major impact on the destination, they minimize the research gap and contribute to the existing literature review. Practical implications The results are of particular value to stakeholders and destination management responsible for strengthening the competitiveness of tourism destinations. Originality/value The research progressed over previous studies by developing and empirically testing a modified conceptual model for measuring destination competitiveness from a supply-side perspective and recommending improvements for the emerging tourism destinations.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Varaprasad Mallisetti ◽  
Tharun Dolla ◽  
Boeing Laishram

Purpose The most recent advent of the unsolicited proposal in the public private partnership mode of infrastructure procurement has changed the duties and roles of private and public sector agencies. Also, they have increased the practitioners' difficulties to work out strategic mechanisms and methods to manage these unsolicited proposals (USP) effectively. So, this study aims to understand how well equipped are the Indian USP guidelines for managing procurement. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis with coding procedures was carried to understand the regulations of USP frameworks of India over the four stages of USP procurement. Findings The findings show that there are severe flaws in various states' frameworks. The states have flaws in their policies in implementation features across the stages of USP such as defined objectives, the absence of fees and review timeframes in the submission, time frame and guidance on benchmarking and market testing in evaluation and development, time frame for bidding and access to information in procurement stages. Originality/value The USP implementation framework developed as part of this study can direct the policymakers and practitioners to improve public procurement regulations and the necessary changes for the successful implementation of USPs. In doing this, the private sector is enabled to develop more competitive and innovative proposals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
Chihli Hung ◽  
You-Xin Cao

Purpose This paper aims to propose a novel approach which integrates collocations and domain concepts for Chinese cosmetic word of mouth (WOM) sentiment classification. Most sentiment analysis works by collecting sentiment scores from each unigram or bigram. However, not every unigram or bigram in a WOM document contains sentiments. Chinese collocations consist of the main sentiments of WOM. This paper reduces the complexity of the document dimensionality and makes an improvement for sentiment classification. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds two contextual lexicons for feature words and sentiment words, respectively. Based on these contextual lexicons, this paper uses the techniques of associated rules and mutual information to build possible Chinese collocation sets. This paper applies preference vector modelling as the vector representation approach to catch the relationship between Chinese collocations and their associated concepts. Findings This paper compares the proposed preference vector models with benchmarks, using three classification techniques (i.e. support vector machine, J48 decision tree and multilayer perceptron). According to the experimental results, the proposed models outperform all benchmarks evaluated by the criterion of accuracy. Originality/value This paper focuses on Chinese collocations and proposes a novel research approach for sentiment classification. The Chinese collocations used in this paper are adaptable to the content and domains. Finally, this paper integrates collocations with the preference vector modelling approach, which not only achieves a better sentiment classification performance for Chinese WOM documents but also avoids the curse of dimensionality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Daniela Chimirri

Purpose While tourism scholars have increasingly recognized the significance of collaboration as an essential element in tourism development, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical research centering on (trans)local collaboration as a central means for future tourism development in Greenland. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conceptual and analytic potentials and challenges of collaboration in an explorative case study. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies a case study approach to scrutinize collaboration in the setting of a tourism workshop in South Greenland. This research approach is exploratory in nature and focuses on collaborative activities among participants from different research institutions and countries, from Campus Kujalleq in Qaqortoq, from small-scale enterprises and businesses, managers of destination marketing organizations and local fishermen. Findings Four “collaborative configurations” emerged during the workshop. These inspire and challenge ways of (re)conceptualizing collaborative tourism development in South Greenland and call for the reconsideration of the present approach toward tourism development for shaping new possible future(s) of tourism in the Greenlandic context. Originality/value The relevance of this paper emerges from the crucial significance that tourism actors in Greenland credit collaboration. Moreover, by approaching development issues from within and mutually developing possible practice solutions through collaboration with local tourism actors, the paper aims to give voice to the local community, which currently is lacking in the debate on tourism development in Greenland.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (6/7) ◽  
pp. 831-854
Author(s):  
Dina Elikan ◽  
Yves Pigneur

Purpose Being able to communicate a clear identity to different stakeholders is crucial for SMEs and startups in today’s world, which is characterised by accelerated innovation, growing competition and increasingly connected consumers. However, this can be a complex task for small organisations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a visual tool that supports entrepreneurs in SMEs and startups to collaboratively develop their identity communication strategy. Design/methodology/approach The paper follows a design science research approach. The authors propose the design of a tool as well as some preliminary qualitative evaluations. The authors conducted three iterations between design and evaluation, where the results of the evaluations are implemented in the design. Findings The authors demonstrate how to design strategic tools for allowing teams to co-design their identity communication strategy and present the tool. The authors also evaluate its use and find out through the preliminary evaluations that it could be easy to use and useful for practitioners. Originality/value The originality of this paper lays in the novelty of the tool and its development. Such a tool addressing identity communication strategy has not been developed with a scientific approach until now.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 764-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Evans ◽  
David Lines

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an insight into the complexities of the identity work performed by independent coaches, based on an investigation into their “lived experiences”. The emerging coaching industry has created opportunities for individuals wishing to pursue a career as independent executive/career coaches. Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory investigation was conducted using the principles of grounded theory, drawing on insights from “knowledgeable informants” (18 in total) gained through interviews and focus group discussion. Findings – Despite the attractiveness of pursuing an independent career, the findings surfaced a number of tensions in the way that independent coaches transform and perform their identity. One tension involves balancing notions of self-identity and “ideal work” with presenting a credible self to different client groups, the purchasers of their services. Research limitations/implications – As the research focused on a specific category of independent practitioners, more research is required to assess the generalizability of the findings to other categories of practitioners. Practical implications – A framework illuminating the processual nature of identity work among independent coaches is presented. This could be used to inform developmental conversations with aspiring independent coaches, or to support the content on formal coaching programmes. Originality/value – In drawing attention to the complexities of identity work performed by independent coaches, given the contingencies affecting their work, this research offers a different contribution to the coaching literature.


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