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I am honored to present Volume 22 of Political Power and Social Theory (PPST). This volume is a landmark, in that it is among the first volumes of PPST to be dedicated to a single topic. With the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election in sight, this special volume on the meaning of Barack Obama's presidency from a critical social science perspective is especially timely. For the first part of the volume, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Louise Seamster have put together a diverse collection of essays on the politics of race in the age of Obama. For the second part (the Scholarly Controversy section familiar to PPST readers), Philip S. Gorski offers provocative reflections on Obama and civil religion in the United States, with critical commentary from Joseph Gerteis, Andrew R. Murphy, and Michael Young and Christopher Pieper.

Philip S. Gorski's “Barack Obama and Civil Religion” offers a number of important contributions to the study of American culture generally, and American Civil Religion (ACR) more specifically. Gorski's appreciation of the deep diversity in contemporary American society is a welcome development in ACR analysis. I ask whether the term “civil religion” remains most adequate for describing the sort of cultural phenomenon that Gorski, following Bellah, attempts to capture, and offer some methodological and interpretive comments on the promise and challenge of studying ACR in the twenty-first century United States. I close with some more particular remarks on Barack Obama and the contours of ACR as sketched by Gorski.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Ranked preference data arise when a set of judges rank, in order of their preference, a set of objects. Such data arise in preferential voting systems and market research surveys. Covariate data associated with the judges are also often recorded. Such covariate data should be used in conjunction with preference data when drawing inferences about judges.

To cluster a population of judges, the population is modeled as a collection of homogeneous groups. The Plackett-Luce model for ranked data is employed to model a judge's ranked preferences within a group. A mixture of Plackett- Luce models is employed to model the population of judges, where each component in the mixture represents a group of judges.

Mixture of experts models provide a framework in which covariates are included in mixture models. Covariates are included through the mixing proportions and the component density parameters. A mixture of experts model for ranked preference data is developed by combining a mixture of experts model and a mixture of Plackett-Luce models. Particular attention is given to the manner in which covariates enter the model. The mixing proportions and group specific parameters are potentially dependent on covariates. Model selection procedures are employed to choose optimal models.

Model parameters are estimated via the ‘EMM algorithm’, a hybrid of the expectation–maximization and the minorization–maximization algorithms. Examples are provided through a menu survey and through Irish election data. Results indicate mixture modeling using covariates is insightful when examining a population of judges who express preferences.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The paper adopts an organizational perspective to explore the conditions of possibility of the recent re-emergence of overt class-based discourse on one hand, epitomized by the ‘We are the 99%’ movement, and the rise on the other hand of a populist, nativist and sometimes overtly fascist right. It is argued that these phenomena, reflecting the increasingly crisis-prone character of global capitalism, the growing gap between rich and poor and a generalized sense of insecurity, are rooted in the dismantling of socially embedded organizations through processes often described as ‘financialization’, driven by the taken-for-granted dominance of neoliberal ideology. The paper explores the rise to dominance of the neoliberal ‘thought style’ and its inherent logic in underpinning the dismantling and restructuring of capitalist organization. Its focus is upon transnational value chain capitalism which has rebalanced power relations in favour of a small elite that is able to operate and realize wealth in ways that defy and often succeed in escaping the regulation of nation states.

This chapter documents an innovative pedagogical application of a service-learning oriented approach, pioneered by academics at a University in the North of England (UNEUK). Referred to as directed experiential learning, the core ethos of this approach connected forms of close-to-practice research, critical reflection, and community engagement and as such brought about a radical reworking of the final year of study for an existing undergraduate program – a BA (Hons) Education Studies. Responding to a broadening professional context within UK schools, this program prepared nascent professional educators and through their studies, invited them to engage in university–community partnerships where their learning and contributions to practice were inextricably conjoined.