Book Reviews 347
more sophisticated theoretical understanding of the role of the welfare state in
capitalist democracies might have allowed her to see that the national mood she
observed, and the ideological unity of the policy community, might perhaps be
an expression and an outcome of the same political phenomenon. The apparent
diversity of interests in the policy community may be merely the manifestation
of infighting among different factions, including the state, of a historical bloc
that currently exercises a political hegemony over Canadian information poli-
tics and perhaps over Canadian politics generally. Despite the structural diver-
sity built around particular interests, however, most of the players in the policy
community represent the values of a dominant capitalist ideology. In the end,
this ideology provided the information policy community with the unity it
needed, and that Buchwald observes, to secure a government information pol-
icy based on competition and market solutions that tends to exclude public in-
terest challenges to its core values. Despite this problem, Buchwald’s disserta-
tion usefully contributes to the literature of information policy-making and
politics, and I certainly hope that she pursues its publication.
Editor’s note: This dissertation was one of two receiving the 2000 Eugene
Garfield-ALISE Doctoral Dissertation Award, granted by the Association for
Library and Information Science Education.
REFERENCES
Canada. Government of Canada. (1996).
Building the information society: Mov-
ing Canada into the 21st century.
Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services.
Electronic Journals as Innovations: A Study of Author and Editor Early
Adopters
, by Karla Lynn Hahn. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University
of Maryland, 1999. (UMI order number AAG9926786).
Reviewed by
Katherine W. McCain
, Professor, College of Information
Science & Technology, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Phila-
delphia, PA 19104
Ͻ
Kate.McCain@cis.drexel.edu
Ͼ
.
E-journals are a truly significant innovation in the scholarly communication
process, whose diffusion and adoption can be studied within individual dis-
course communities (and eventually compared across different communities
whose needs and communication practices vary). Karla Lynn Hahn provides
such a case study in her 1999 dissertation,
Electronic Journals as Innovations: A
Study of Author and Editor Early Adopters.
In this well-researched and well-
written study, Hahn uses qualitative research methods to explore the percep-
tions of authors, editors, and publishers of two newly-established electronic