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Of all the natural disasters, drought is the most gradual and the most hard to predict. However, this insidious disaster continually affects the lives and livelihoods of farmers living in drought-affected areas. The northwestern part of Bangladesh is recognized as being more severely affected by drought than the rest of the country, as drought is a recurring event in this area. It has substantial impacts on agriculture and causes great suffering for farmers – in particular, poor and small farmers, who are more vulnerable to drought. Therefore, this study tries to illustrate farmers’ existing coping practices with regard to drought. It also addresses their prioritized adaptation practices, which are based on local context and available resources. This study not only focuses on the implementation of these adaptation practices from the national to the local level, but it also mentions various roles of stakeholders and a definite timeframe for each adaptation practice.

The predominant view of positioning in both the literature and practice – a remarkably uni- or two-dimensional view – asks these questions: (1) What dimension should the product or service be positioned on, for example, unique styling, design, performance, and quality? (2) What category does the product or service compete in or belong to? So marketers therefore ask: Should the computer brand be positioned as reliable (Dell), or faster (Toshiba)? Research on economic value is well established in the pricing literature, especially in business-to-business pricing. Most of this literature focuses on differentiation value, that is, how to calculate the worth of the differential benefits a customer receives from using the firm's product versus the competitive substitute. But a much less studied area of this research deals with the price of the competitive reference product, or competitive frame of reference. Rarely do marketers extend positioning strategy to the level of economic value, asking: How is the product framed, and how valuable is the frame? The purpose of this chapter is to explore competitive frames of reference in business-to-business positioning. Specifically, what are alternative types of frames of reference? What is the role of the reference price in frames of reference? What are the implications of choosing one type of frame of reference versus another?

This chapter presents the author’s experiences over a 47-year career as a feminist applied sociologist at Educational Testing Service (ETS), a private non-profit research and testing company. The author presents early experiences that influenced her to become a feminist and a sociologist; her reactions to graduate school, the culture of academia, and her choice to leave before finishing her PhD to become an applied sociologist; the author’s early work in the ETS research department which included graduate school and gender-related publications; and the substantial part of author’s career as an applied sociologist and administrator in ETS’s corporate side. ETS’s founding with the mission to expand educational opportunities with fair, well-designed tests, and to further social science knowledge laid the groundwork for a corporate culture characterized by values of fairness, respect for individuals and diversity, and integrity. The ETS Standards for Quality and Fairness, along with annual reviews of testing programs for following these measurement standards, supported cultural norms, attitudes, and behaviors related to fairness. The multifaceted concept of fairness has been key not only to the author’s experience within the corporate culture but to the wide variety of responsibilities that the author had during her career.

This article argues that the financial crisis has brought to the surface a series of dilemmas that have their origins in the declining affluence of the U.S. economy in the late 1960s and 1970s. When growth faltered beginning in the late 1960s, policymakers confronted difficult political choices about how to allocate scarce resources between competing social priorities. Inflation offered a means of avoiding these trade-offs for a time, disguising distributional conflicts and financing an expansive state. But the “solutions” that inflation offered to the end of growth became increasingly dysfunctional over the course of the 1970s, setting the stage for the turn to finance in the U.S. economy. Paradoxically, the turn to finance operated as the functional equivalent of inflation, similarly allowing policymakers to avoid difficult political choices as limits on the nation's prosperity became more constraining. But the turn to finance no more resolved these underlying issues than did inflation, and as a result the recent financial crisis likely augurs the return of distributional politics to center stage in American political and social life.