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The purpose of this theoretical chapter is to rework a promising but limited theory of the foundations of reciprocity. Reciprocity is often attributed to an “internalized norm of reciprocity” – a deeply felt moral obligation to help those who have helped us in the past. Leifer's theory of local action develops a radically different and compelling foundation for reciprocity – one in which the impetus for reciprocity is a thinly veiled battle for status. We rework the theory to offer a new one that addresses its limitations. The key idea is that the impetus for reciprocity is the desire to signal that one intends to create joint value rather than to capture it from the counterparty.

Our analytical approach rests on close examination of a puzzling and underrecognized feature of social exchange: people who initiate social exchange routinely deny giving anything of value (“it was nothing”) while the receiver inflates their indebtedness to the giver (“this is too much!”). We refer to this negotiation strategy as reverse bargaining and use it as a window into the logic of social exchange.

We develop a more general theory of how people manage the threat of opportunism in social exchange that subsumes local action theory. The key insight is that people who initiate social exchange and seek reciprocity must balance two competing objectives: to ensure that the person receiving a benefit recognizes a debt she must repay; and to mitigate the receiver's suspicion that the giver's ulterior motive is to capture value from the receiver.

Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

There has been a move towards the implementation of digital/e-health interventions for some time. Digital/e-health interventions have demonstrable efficacy in increasing individual empowerment, providing timely access to psychological interventions for those experiencing mental ill-health and improving outcomes for those using them. This study aims to determine the efficacy of digital/e-health interventions for individuals detained in prison who experience mental ill-health.

A systematic search of five academic databases – CINAHL, ASSIA, PsycINFO, Embase and Medline – was completed in December 2020 and updated in February 2022. The review was guided by the Whittemore and Knafl (2005) framework for integrative reviews. A total of 6,255 studies were returned and screened by title and abstract. A full-text screening of nine (n = 9) studies was conducted.

No study met the inclusion criteria for the clinical efficacy of digital/e-health interventions in a prison setting. Subsequently, a review of the literature that made it to the full-text review stage was conducted, and gaps in the literature were identified to inform policy, practice and future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first integrative review conducted on the efficacy of digital/e-health interventions for mental ill-health in prison settings.