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The aim of the study is to capture consumers' conceptualization of ethnic food and ethnic restaurants, focusing on what it takes for ethnic restaurants to be perceived authentic.

Qualitative research, based on semi-structured in-depth interviews which were transcribed and subjected to inductive thematic analysis.

The findings conceptualize what ethnic food and ethnic-authentic restaurant are, leading to formulating the criteria that authentic ethnic restaurant should meet.

Findings have practical implications for restaurateurs interested in establishing themselves as ethnically authentic and for businesses focusing on ethnic food. This study was based on Israeli-Jewish participants; studies with other populations will contribute to the findings' trustability.

This study provides novel and critical insights into ethnic restaurant managements and to the customer conceptualization of the concept of ethnic authentic, demonstrating it being a multifaceted concept.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of parental involvement among 317 teachers in the Arab education system in Israel.

A questionnaire measured teachers’ attitudes regarding parents’ involvement in the school relating to pedagogy, resources, and control.

The findings show that Arab teachers perceive parents’ involvement as related to pedagogy and resources rather than control. In addition, the research results revealed that young teachers in terms of age, and seniority of teaching, and teachers who are not members of the management team demonstrated a stronger perception of the pedagogy and control components than did older and senior teachers and teachers who are members of the management team. However, older and senior teachers and teachers who are members of the management team had a stronger perception that parental involvement related to resources than did young teachers and teachers who are not members of the management team.

Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The paper contributes to our understandings of the different components that affect parental involvement in developing and minority societies.

Large-scale assessment has been used in many education systems as an instrument to evaluate educational performance nationally. This practice is based on the concept of epistemic governance which encourages school accountability. This study aims to explore teachers' perspectives regarding the value and uses of national large-scale assessment (NLSA), highlighting its relevance across contexts.

Using qualitative data, this paper presents the case of the Israeli NLSA tests – the Meitzav, while examining the perceptions and actions in which teachers engage to follow-up on the test results, and the extent to which they implement pedagogical change in light of the test results.

The findings showed that teachers tend to use the NLSA test results as a pedagogical tool to improve learning processes to a limited extent. They concede that most activity involving the tests at the school and class levels is dedicated to preparation and not to pedagogical change. Some explanations are suggested.

This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the NLSA testing regime for the school, curriculum and pedagogy.

Similar to community colleges in the United States, the Israeli tertiary system includes two-year technological colleges, which provide students with a labor-market relevant qualification. Nonetheless, unlike the community colleges, the technological colleges are not considered to be part of the higher education system and their transfer function is irregular and confined. In order to understand these differences, the chapter has two complementary objectives: (a) to describe the emergence and development of technological colleges and (b) to evaluate the implications for social inequality in access to higher education in Israel. We use a mixed-methods research design, including analyzing primary and secondary sources describing the official policy and public discourse around these colleges (qualitative/historical research) and comparing students attending academic institutions to students attending technological colleges and students across different fields of study offered by these colleges (quantitative research). Drawing on Phillip's (2004) model for policy attraction in education, we find that technological colleges in Israel were based on the Dutch HTS model, while the founding of these colleges was initiated by local impulse. The implementation of the technological colleges in the Israeli context was shaped by a cultural logic for higher education that emphasizes research and knowledge production, creating a binary tertiary system. Drawing on sociological literature on diversification and stratification in tertiary education, we find that technological colleges attract more students from disadvantaged groups and more students with relatively low academic ability than academic institutions. In addition, within technological colleges, students from advantaged background and higher academic ability are more likely to study in more prestigious fields of study. These findings suggest that if policy makers in Israel aspire to increase access to higher education, they should rethink policy instruments and cultivate the transfer function of technological colleges. This is among the first studies to examine technological colleges in Israel and we conclude with different directions for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between teachers’ professional role, their sense of empowerment, and their attitudes toward managerial promotion (career development) following the implementation of educational forms.

The study was conducted in Israel in 2015 and included 663 teachers, 250 elementary school teachers and 413 middle or high school teachers. A questionnaire and statistical analyses (ANOVA, multivariate analysis, and correlations) examined the attitudes of teachers in one of four professional roles toward managerial promotion (their desire for future promotion and sense of organizational fairness). This was compared with their sense of empowerment (comprising feeling respected, professional growth, influence, autonomy, self-efficacy, and decision making), while controlling for their demographic and professional backgrounds.

Four-fifths of teachers were interested in pursuing managerial promotion and they perceived the promotion process as moderately fair. The greater teachers’ sense of empowerment, the greater their desire for future promotion and their belief in the fairness of the promotional process. Teachers currently holding a leadership position expressed the strongest sense of empowerment.

The study presents a multivariate model to predict teachers’ attitudes to managerial promotion on the basis of their professional role and sense of empowerment. The findings have implications for educational policy-making, particularly where there is a national focus on increasing school autonomy.

The findings will contribute to local and international research on teacher empowerment and career development.

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to reveal complex events structures in events’ occurrences by analyzing event databases, targeting to systematizing events’ analysis and surpassing the need for idiographic approaches.

A process-oriented point of view is enabled by purposeful data transformations, and higher-order dependencies are discovered and exploited to capture the flows among the events.

Political events do not follow a linear movement that is implied by a sequence, but they occur in varying patterns that cannot be reflected accurately when assuming only first-order dependencies.

The methodology suggests a novel way to look and to analyze raw event data and it offers an accessible, practicable and supplementary tool as it does not disturb any of the established relevant research designs, and it does not require any additional data to be applied.