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The purpose of this paper is to investigate enterprise social media systems and quantified gender and status influences on emotional content presented in these systems.

Internal social media messages were collected from a global software company running an enterprise social media system. An indirect observatory test using Berlo’s “source–message–channel–receiver” model served as a framework to evaluate sender, message, channel and receiver for each text. These texts were categorized by gender and status using text analytics with SAP SA to produce sentiment indications.

Results reveal women use positive language 2.1 times more than men. Senior managers express positive language 1.7 times more than non-managers, and feeling rules affect all genders and statuses, but not necessarily as predicted by theory. Other findings show that public messages contained less emotional content, and women expressed more positivity to lower status colleagues. Men expressed more positivity to those in higher positions. Many gender and status stereotypes found in face-to-face studies are also present in digital enterprise social networks.

Limitations include generalizability: all data were collected from a single enterprise social media system.

Managers establishing codes of conduct for social media use will find this research useful, particularly when promoting awareness of emotional expressiveness in online venues with subordinate colleagues.

This study offers a behavioral measurement approach free from validity issues found in self-reported surveys, direct observations and interviews. The collected data offered new perspectives on existing social theories within a new environment of computerized, enterprise social media.

Customer waiting is regarded as one of the most critical aspects of service quality. Research has suggested various approaches to reduce the negative impact of waiting. This article investigates the waiting time performance of alternative service process designs that consist of two operations, order taking and order preparation. The research premise is that no single service process design is the best in all operating conditions. Managers should build flexibility into service process design by using alternative designs in combination. Several break‐even models are developed to examine the contingent nature of the performance of alternative designs. The results point to the need for building flexibility into service process designs by demonstrating that waiting time performance can only be optimized if design strategies are altered in response to ongoing changes in service system input parameters.

The article seeks to provide an overview of 55 recent books (2009‐2011) on higher education, with special emphasis on the authoritative overview edited Altbach et al., American Higher Education in the Twenty‐First Century (Johns Hopkins, 3rd Edition, June 2011, 511 pp.).

Books are grouped in nine categories: Global trends, Losing autonomy, Faculty, Students, Finance, Digitization, Curriculum, Diversity, and Moving forward. A concluding Coda discusses an important new paradigm of four types of scholarship, proposed in the seminal 1990 report on Scholarship Reconsidered, and the two types of scholarship that continue to be badly lacking in the academy, to the detriment of the world, the nation, and higher education itself.

American higher education is undergoing many changes and stresses, and all of the books considered here point to a “bleak horizon” in various ways, in part caused by the outdated structure of higher education. Altbach issues a timely call for a new “sense of academic mission,” which is discussed in the Coda.

This uniquely broad and up‐to‐date “frontier frame” overview, enabled by the GlobalForesightBooks.org web site on current affairs books, emphases the many perspectives on higher education, provides a broad frame to appreciate current thinking, and encourages more synthesis that seriously addresses the “Knowledge for What?” question.