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This study aims to raise awareness of the key challenges, opportunities and priorities for evidence-based strategies’ application to inform building and urban design decisions.

This study uses deductive qualitative content and manifest analysis, using semi-structured interviews undertaken with building and urban design professionals who represent a UK-based organisation.

The challenges associated with the practical implementation of frameworks, potential application areas and perceived areas of concern have been identified. These not only include the need to practically test their use, but also to identify the most appropriate forums for their use. Participant responses indicate the need to further develop engagement strategies for their practical implementation, clearly communicating the benefits and efficiencies to all stakeholders.

Implications/ limitations of this study come with the fact that some of the respondents may possess inadequate professional experience in properly evaluating all the questions. Additionally, the information gathered is restricted to the UK geographical context, as well as coming from one organisation, because of data accessibility.

The findings of the study can be adopted by designers in the strategic definition level to overcome the key challenges associated with the use of evidence-based strategies, enhancing their decision-making processes.

As a theoretical contribution to knowledge, this study enhances the body of knowledge by identifying the challenges associated with the practical implementation of evidence-based strategies to inform building and urban design decisions. In practice, the findings aid urban planners, designers and academics in embedding and adopting strategies that enhance decision-making processes.

As institutional theory increasingly looks to the micro-level for explanations of macro-level institutional processes, institutional scholars need to pay closer attention to the role of emotions in invigorating institutional processes. I argue that attending to emotions is most likely to enrich institutional analysis, if scholars take inspiration from theories that conceptualize emotions as relational and inter-subjective, rather than intra-personal, because the former would be more compatible with institutional theory’s relational roots. I review such promising theories that include symbolic interactionism, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, moral psychology, and social movements. I conclude by outlining several possible research questions that might be inspired by attending to the role of emotions in institutional processes. I argue that such research can enrich the understanding of embedded agency, power, and the use of theorization by institutional change agents, as well as introduce a hereto neglected affective facet into the study of institutional logics.

This study frames the international disability movement – NGOs, foreign donors, and transnational networks focused on promoting the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – as an organizational environment. As the movement expands into the Global South, it actively pressures local grassroots associations to adopt a new organizational model in order to become membership-based advocacy organizations. Many groups, however, are embedded in local civic environments that expect them to act as self-help and social support organizations. As such, grassroots associations are caught between two organizational environments, each promoting different models and practices.

This analysis draws upon 18 months of participant observation and 69 interviews gathered from a local coalition of seven grassroots disability associations in Nicaragua. This ethnographic approach is combined with sociological institutionalism, an analysis that emphasizes the way organizations conform to organizational models that spread across a field.

The local associations responded in a variety of ways to the advocacy model promoted by the international movement. Organizations either conformed, resisted, or developed hybrid organizational models on the basis of internal characteristics that determined how they straddled the two organizational environments.

This paper highlights the way international models may be ineffective in local environments that have civic traditions and lower levels of governmental capacity than found in the West. Some disability associations, however, will creatively combine local and international models to create new initiatives that make a positive impact in the lives of persons with disabilities at the grassroots.

What proof have the public, independent of the assertions of the makers, that all the firms whose products are sold indifferently by the shopkeepers use only the best materials; or, indeed, that a large number of the articles sold are not mixtures more or less objectionable or fraudulent ? This, in effect, is the question put by a writer in a West of England newspaper, and it might be used as a text upon which to write a lengthy homily on the adulteration question and on the astonishing gullibility of the public. As a matter of fact the only evidence of the character and quality of food and other products, in regard to which there is no independent guarantee, is that which is afforded by the standing of the makers, and to some extent of the firms which offer them for sale. And this evidence cannot, under any circumstances, be looked upon as constituting proof. The startling allegations so commonly put forward by advertisers with respect to their wares, while they may be ineffective in so far as thinking people are concerned, must nevertheless be found pecuniarily advantageous since the expense involved in placing them under the eyes of the public would otherwise hardly be incurred. Many of these advertised allegations are, of course, entirely unjustifiable, or are incapable of proof. It may be hoped that the lavish manner in which they are set out, and their very extravagance, may, in time, result in producing a general effect not contemplated by the advertisers. In the meantime it cannot be too often pointed out that proof, such as that which is required for the satisfaction of the retailer and for the protection of the public, can only be obtained by the exercise of an independent control, and, in certain cases, by the maintenance of efficient independent inspection in addition, so that a guarantee of a character entirely different to that which may be offered, even by a firm of the highest eminence, may be supplied.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.

The author distinguishes between state, process, and object perspectives on institutions and institutionalization. While all-purpose process approaches dominate the literature, the author argues that these are analytically insufficient without theorizing the nature of “institutional objects.” Building on recently developed analytic disaggregations of the culture concept in cultural sociology, the author argues that doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts exhaust the broad classes of potential objects subject to institutionalization processes. The proposed approach provides a coherent ontology for future empirical work, features robust microfoundations, places institutional routines and practices in a material context, and acknowledges the importance of semiotic codes and vocabularies in organizational fields.