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This chapter considers the mobilities of families subject to child protection involvement at the threshold of the birth of a new baby. The author presents data arising from an ethnographic study of child protection social work with unborn babies. This study aimed to draw near to social work practice within the Scottish context through mobile research methods and included non-participant observations of a range of child protection meetings with expectant families. Research interviews were sought with expectant mothers and fathers, social workers and the chair persons of Pre-birth Child Protection Case Conferences. Case conferences are formal administrative meetings designed to consider the risks to children, including unborn children. This chapter focusses on the experiences of expectant parents of navigating the child protection involvement with their as yet unborn infant. The strategies that parents adopted to steer a course through the multiple possibilities in relation to the future care of their infant are explored here. Three major strategies: resistance, defeatism and holding on are considered. These emerged as means by which expectant parents responded to social work involvement and which enabled their continued forwards motion towards an uncertain future.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

Within tertiary education, service-learning can offer deeply engaging and transformational experiences for students, broadening their consideration of a host of social justice issues of our time, including diversity and inclusion. This chapter describes how service-learning interfaces with two areas in particular, both of which have wide-ranging public health implications and are generally misrepresented in public media: poverty and mental health. Representative studies are highlighted and case examples are presented in each domain, concluding with recommendations for future research. The authors argue that service-learning courses addressing social justice issues such as poverty and mental health can lead to deep learning in students if they are sequenced to include both direct service-learning that concretizes the issue and community-based research that highlights the public policy challenges and implications of addressing that issue systemically.

In this chapter, I attempt to explain the diverse nature of social enterprise education in higher education and review the content, placement, and pedagogy of various programs of study with distinctly different approaches. I see the approaches to social enterprise education falling into three different categories that I call accommodating, integrating, and immersion. The differences are explained by the problem of the familiar: the attempt to define the field in terms of the existing economic and entrepreneurial theories alone. Building on work of others I offer a new framework for understanding social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in the form of propositions that may be empirically tested and potentially could be helpful in developing consistent models for social enterprise education. These propositions are concerned with social benefits or outcomes, agency and firm, scale, and sustainable funding.

Purpose –– The People's Republic of China has introduced policies to encourage Chinese who have worked or studied abroad to return and bring back the knowledge and skills they have gained. This chapter reports on the experiences of these returners as agents of organisational learning.

Methodology –– The exploratory qualitative study is based on a written questionnaire and telephone interviews with 24 returners in diverse organisations and industries in China.

Findings –– The study identifies a type of returner not yet addressed in the literature, ‘experienced self-internationalisers’, which we expect will grow significantly. We find that despite expecting returners to contribute to organisational learning, management does not organise the process. It depends on the individuals themselves, who develop various strategies for sharing their knowledge with local colleagues. Organisational learning is a cross-cultural process and requires bridging a gap between the kinds of knowledge the local employees are interested in gaining and what the returners feel the organisation needs. We note that organisational learning is more likely when the returners recognise their own need to learn rather than just to teach.

Research limitations –– The sample is relatively small; we describe how to take the research forward to more organisations and additional kinds of respondents.

Practical implications –– We formulate recommendations for policymakers, returners and human resource managers seeking to stimulate organisational learning more effectively.

Value –– The chapter generates new insights into organisational learning in China, and it shows how to addresses a phenomenon at the crossroads between the fields of organisational learning, intercultural communication and international human resource management.

A broad range of policy evaluations below is begun in Chapter 2 by Kate Johnston, Colette Henry and Simon Gillespie in their evaluation entitled ‘Encouraging Research and Development in Ireland's Biotechnology Enterprises’. This investigation critically evaluates Irish government policy towards biotechnology development over a preceding 10-year period. In Chapter 3, Anthony Ward, Sarah Cooper, Frank Cave and William Lucas examine ‘The Effect of Industrial Experience on Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-Efficacy in UK Engineering Undergraduates’ in a large-scale study that generally produces satisfactory results in terms of raising the profile of entrepreneurship among undergraduates. Deirdre Hunt, in Chapter 4, again focuses on the evolution of strategy in Ireland, this time towards the more general topic of new firm formation with a personal contribution entitled ‘Now You See Them — Now You Don’t: Paradoxes in Enterprise Development Strategy: The Case of the Disappearing Academic Start-Ups’.