Search results

Action from activists is at the origin of many initiatives that end up injecting moral concerns into the way companies operate. In such instances, activists function as moral entrepreneurs that lastingly change the definition of what constitutes morally acceptable corporate behavior. Yet, in order to have such a lasting effect on companies, activist efforts need to pass through multiple stages that deal with both the effective mobilization of their own constituents and the triggering of corporate responses that can induce broader change in the economy. In the present chapter, the authors study how local shareholder activists initiated and helped sustain the process that led to the establishment of active ownership in Switzerland between 1997 and 2011. Active ownership refers to the active engagement of shareholders with firms to push them toward considering environmental, social, and corporate governance criteria in their decision-making. The case illustrates the processual nature of moralizing dynamics initiated by activists and emphasizes the long-term and cumulative nature of many moralization projects.

More pluralistic approaches have recently emerged in entrepreneurship, yet the discipline remains disinterested in the ideological influences underpinning its research and teaching practices. Following Louis Althusser’s work on interpellation, the process by which ideology enrols and consummates its subjects, the chapter examines the interpellation of entrepreneurship-as-practice researchers and draws attention to the powerful nature of ideology. Critical reflexivity is put forward as an exercise to explore the researchers’ beliefs and identity and to tease out their relationship with the discipline. Finally, using three autoethnographic accounts, the chapter argues that the boundaries of the entrepreneurship discipline can only be shifted if and when researchers learn to recognise themselves as ‘the person in the mirror’. The reflexive spotlight also allows researchers to spot ideological breaks and engage in acts of ‘ideological resistance’.

This study puts focus on teaching and learning attitudes in two schools, one in England and other in Sweden. The purpose is to highlight and problematize teaching and learning in a changing society and find out what happens when two school cultures learn from each other. In Sweden, the attitude is “entrepreneurial learning” and in England “personal learning and thinking skills,” different names, but the same underpinning approach to teaching and learning. This chapter is based on an “open” questionnaire, classroom observations and group interviews with teachers. In our way of analyzing the material, we have chosen the concepts dualistic and integrative perspective on knowledge and school development. Following themes was visualized: authority – authoritarian, interest – meaninglessness, and control – trust. Results show both similarities and differences between the two countries. However, the most unexpected result was what the teachers focused on in the classroom. The Swedish teachers paid more attention to the relationship to the students, while the English teachers focused more on the relationship to learning.

This chapter provides more in-depth focus on the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship and the associated capacities for creating diverse forms of change. More specifically, the theoretical underpinning of entrepreneurship is carefully introduced in order to illuminate and extenuate its role as the mechanism that makes novel products and processes available to society where impact of various types can be realized.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

Research universities are recognized as primary sources of the knowledge essential to the development of innovative solutions to a wide range of economic, social, and ecological problems that affect humankind. This utilitarian function of American higher education dates back to the creation of land grant institutions with the passing of the Morrill Act of 1862 (Lucas, 1994; Veysey, 1965). The prominent higher education historian John R. Thelin (2004) described the importance of this land grant legislation by stating, “Its institutional legacy was the accessible state college and university, characterized by a curriculum that was broad and utilitarian” (p. 76). Shifts in the research paradigm that followed the World War II placed further emphasis on applied research that was to be “directed toward some individual or group or societal need or use” (Stokes, 1997, p. 8). Most recently, the utilitarian function of higher education has become closely linked to the commercialization of knowledge and discovery. Specifically, the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed colleges and universities to take ownership of intellectual properties created in part or in full through federal funding, allowed the transfer of knowledge from higher education to society through market channels to become standard practice.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.