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Many African Americans cheered the election of President Obama in 2008 with the hope he would cause an easing of the pain of economic and political barriers to collective black progress in America. This chapter assesses the role of President Obama in addressing these issues.

The Presidential Bully Pulpit is presented as a framework for addressing racial inequities. Properly used it can bring keen attention to issues a president deems important for consideration by the American public. Socio-historical texts and secondary data are used.

Data are presented to show how racial discrimination continues to affect African Americans during the age of Obama. These include housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and racial profiling. This chapter shows Mr. Obama has not used the office of the presidency as a bully pulpit for addressing these racial inequities. Rather he has tended to use the bully pulpit to chastise blacks, especially black males.

Also discussed are some promising developments challenging racism that have emerged from his administration, primarily from the Department of Justice, and how President Obama could use the bully pulpit more productively.

This chapter presents a contradiction in the actions of President Obama. While he seldom uses the bully pulpit to push his own legislative agendas or to push toward solutions to relieve racial inequities in society, he does use the bully pulpit to criticize black males.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether characteristics of French organizations can be found in the Airbus Group, ancient European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) Group, and how these characteristics have evolved over time in comparison to German ones.

This article presents an in-depth case study by using a contextual approach, considering influential factors which are likely to influence the evolution of organizations.

The analysis shows that the Airbus Group reflects characteristics of French organizations: the importance of strategy, the principle of honour, centralization of decision and power, the role of the state in the capital and its influence via professional networks of its elite coming from the Grandes Ecoles. These findings confirm a relative continuity of national peculiarities over time. The recent evolution of the company also highlights the German influence, notably in terms of shares and management positions.

The case study demonstrates that the Airbus Group has become a multinational company where contextual elements and organizational structures regulate intercultural relationships of interests, influence and power.

Five contextual factors are proposed, which allow to understand and structure the peculiarities of French organizations, in comparison to German ones as well as power distribution within the Airbus Group.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an earnings management dimension to compute pre-manipulated accounting performance (free of discretionary accruals) to determine whether family-controlled firms perform better than non-family-controlled firms.

The authors used Jones’ model (1991) to obtain a pre-manipulated performance measure for a sample of Chilean firms. The authors then regressed the pre-manipulated measures of accounting performance as dependent variables against the family nature of the largest shareholder using the Blundell and Bond generalized method of moments estimator.

The authors found that the pre-manipulated performance of family-controlled firms is superior to that of non-family-controlled firms. The authors also show that the presence of institutional investors in the firm’s ownership structure has a positive influence on the performance of family companies. The results suggest that earnings management behavior is not sufficient to explain the better performance of family-controlled firms that has been reported in the literature.

The authors provide new evidence regarding the real superior performance of family business. These results provide some degree of confidence to investors since family firms provide good quality earnings measures of financial performance.

este estudio pretende determinar si las diferencias en performance entre empresas familiares y no familiares puede ser explicada por la existencia de manipulación contable de los retornos.

usamos el método de Jones (1991) para obtener una medida de retorno contable no manipulado para una muestra de empresas chilenas, y luego estimamos una regresión de tipo panel donde la medida de retorno sin manipular es la variable dependiente, la naturaleza familiar o no de la empresa es la variable independiente y una serie de variables de control. Debido a la posible endogeneidad entre retorno y tipo de empresa, usamos la técnica de Blundell y Bond (Método Generalizado de los Momentos).

encontramos que aun usando retornos libre de manipulación contable, las empresas familiares muestran un mejor desempeño que aquellas no familiares. Además, se observa que la presencia de inversionistas institucionales (AFPs) en la estructura de control de la firma, tiene un efecto positivo sobre el desempeño de las empresas familiares.

se presenta nueva evidencia que ratifica el mejor desempeño financiero de las empresas familiares. Además, mostramos, a diferencia de estudio previos, que la presencia de inversionistas institucionales explica parte del mejor desempeño financiero de dichas empresas. Lo anterior permite a inversionistas estar seguros que el mejor retorno de empresas familiares no se debe a la manipulación contable de las utilidades.

This study explores the factors that explain the adoption of innovative teaching practices within schools and how this is determined by the different perceptions of principals and teachers.

The authors use the self-other agreement to measure the difference between the principal and teachers' rating based on the responses of 255 principals and 10,415 teachers, applying polynomial regression with surface analysis to examine the in-agreement/disagreement of self- and other-ratings.

Results indicate that schools where principals and teachers agree on the level of collaborative culture, learning climate, professional development and instructional leadership are associated with higher innovative teaching practices, creating opportunities for stimulating learning environments. In addition, the adoption of innovative professional practices is more likely to result when there is disagreement with teacher over-rating the factors.

It has practical implications for developing strategies aimed at encouraging the implementation of innovative teaching practices among teachers and it extends the research on teachers' professional practices by using self-other agreement data collection method and surface analysis.

The vast collection of data provide a unique investigation opportunity of the effects of collaborative culture, learning climate, professional development and instructional leadership on innovative teaching in Italy.

This is a selective annotated bibliography of the literature on Christopher Columbus from 1970 to 1989. The subject is particularly relevant considering the approach of the Quincentenary of the “discovery” of America in 1992. For that same reason, there has been an outpouring of literature on the subject since 1990, a significant subset of which contributes to are interpretation of Columbus the man, his voyages, and their impact on the new world. It is hoped that this more recent literature will be part of a subsequent annotated bibliography.