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In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

In this chapter, we explore the role of disability-based employee resource groups (ERG) in implementing large organizations' disability inclusion strategies and how pandemic responses shaped the workplace treatment and inclusion of disabled employees.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with disability-based ERG members and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals in large corporate settings. Then, we analyzed how pandemic-induced changes in the workplace impacted disability inclusion efforts and experiences of disabled employees.

Results from our study revealed that workplace disability inclusion responsibilities shifted to disability-based ERGs during the onset of the pandemic. Participants detailed how organizational disability inclusion practices and policies expanded through increased awareness among some employee bases and were de-prioritized to the point of erasure in other situations. Within the context of the pandemic, members of disability-based ERGs played an integral part in both enhancing visibility of disability and responding to instances of ableism in their respective organizations.

Findings provide context as to how shifting organizational contexts, such as pandemic related workplace policies, becomes disabling, and in turn illustrate the fluid nature of disability. By framing disability as an evolving (fluid) identity category and prioritizing the awareness of disabled perspectives, organizations can better support disabled employees in their future, overarching DEI strategies and approaches to workplace inclusion post-pandemic.

This paper is about equity crowdfunding syndicates as a form of entrepreneurial finance and looks specifically at the lead investors' human capital and their ability to raise funds.

The authors develop regressions on a unique hand-collected dataset of 178 lead investors taken from the US-based platform AngelList.

Results indicate that lead investors' specialized human capital has a positive effect on their syndicate fundraising performance. However, it does not find a significant effect of general human capital. It also finds that specialized human capital is mediated by the reputation of the lead investor on the platform.

This study extends human capital theory in the crowdfunding context by providing a more comprehensive portrait of human capital and in doing so, shifts the focus from an entrepreneur to an investor perspective, an approach much neglected in the crowdfunding literature.

This study advances the current knowledge on crowdfunding as it is one of the first to understand syndicate investment as an innovative and alternative platform-based financial channel. It also contributes to the current debate on the role of human capital in crowdfunding and more generally to entrepreneurial finance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how employee need relates to rewards and employee perceptions of fairness within an organization in the USA using a pay-for-performance system.

To evaluate the presence of a relationship between employee need and reward allocation in a pay-for-performance system, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of 292 employees from two departments at an academic medical center.

The findings highlight the positive relationship between employee need and reward allocation that remains when controlling for employee performance evaluation ratings. Findings further show that employee communication with the manager about need explains this relationship.

The findings make two important contributions to research on reward allocation and performance management. First, the results show employee need is related to the allocation of rewards in organizational settings outside of collectivistic cultures or developing countries. Second, by demonstrating the role of employee communication with managers about need within the relationship between employee need and reward allocation, the paper provides a more detailed understanding of additional factors related to compensation decisions in a pay-for-performance system.

Little research has explored the relationship between employee need and reward decisions at an individual level in organizational settings within individualistic cultures. The findings from this study address this gap by establishing the presence of this relationship in a pay-for-performance reward-based organization with service-based values. This finding is timely due to the current economic downturn experienced by organizations, and thereby the level of employee need observed in Western individualistic cultures.

This study aims to investigate how the language used in US Title II equity crowdfunding campaign descriptions relates to campaign success.

Data on >3,200 equity offerings from 12 Title II platforms was obtained from 2013 to 2016. The aspects of the campaign descriptions that are focused on are tone and two measures of readability: information quantity – the amount of information available to the investor and information quality – the ease of understanding of the passage of text. Tobit regressions with sector-clustered standard errors are used for estimation while controlling for company-specific variables, market sentiment and platform, regional, sector and time effects. Results are robust to alternative estimation approaches.

Inverse U-shaped relationships exist between information quantity, information quality and tone and Title II equity crowdfunding campaign success. Overall, less is more as it appears that an intermediate level of information – quantity, quality and tone – is optimal in terms of being a factor that contributes to equity crowdfunding campaign success.

Extends the use of textual analysis to the equity crowdfunding environment in the USA where such analysis is lacking and provides empirical evidence that the language used (e.g. sentiment) in US Title II equity-based crowdfunding campaign descriptions does influence campaign success. It provides empirical evidence of and extends the concept of information overload to the entrepreneurial finance sub-field and indicates tone may be an additional information attribute to consider in this context as contributing to overload.

The purpose of this paper is to present various knowledge‐acquisition methods and to show how existing empirical research can be used for mapping between marketing problem domains and knowledge acquisition techniques. The key to doing this is to create a taxonomy of marketing problem domains.

This paper combines a thorough literature review with prima facie conceptualization to map a generic problem domain, and thereby provide guidance in the choice of knowledge‐acquisition technique for developers of expert systems in the field of marketing.

Recent empirical research in the field of expert systems shows that certain knowledge‐acquisition techniques are significantly more efficient than others for the extraction of certain types of knowledge within specific problem domains. It is found that protocol analysis, while fairly commonly used, is relatively inefficient for analytic problems. In the synthetic problem domain, interviewing proves to perform better for simple problems and worse for more difficult‐to‐model synthetic domains.

The findings suggest that it may be worth exploring some of the non‐traditional knowledge‐acquisition techniques when working on some types of applications. Further research could offer guidance in choosing the appropriate technique, with the aim of improving the quality, efficiency and development of the resulting system.

Designers of expert systems for marketing should consider interviewing and card sorting as the main means of knowledge acquisition for analytic problem domains, rather than protocol analysis as the main knowledge‐acquisition technique for analytic problem domains.

This paper is the first to suggest mapping between knowledge‐acquisition research and marketing problem domains.

Discusses the long existing and confusing problems of establishing the relationship of who is, and who if not, a dependent worker. Reflects developments which have occurred in British law as it affects the employment field, plus an evaluation and analysis of some of the different types of employment relationships which have evolved by examining, where possible, the status of each of these relationships. Concludes that the typical worker nowadays finds himself in a vulnerable position both economically and psychologically owing to the insecurity which exists.

The status of employee which draws the distinction between a contract of service and a contract for services, and the practical aspects of the two relationships have been discussed. The transfer of the employee by the permanent to the temporary employer has also been considered. It is now proposed to treat a variety of employment relationships which will include short term and casual labour, temporary workers supplied by an agency, labour only sub contracting, outworkers, apprentices, students and cadets, part time labour, crown employment, office holders; probationary employees and finally merchant seamen. The criterias discussed and analysed in relation to the status of employee apply to some, but not to all, of these employment relationships.

Today, there is attention being focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR), a function which transcends, but includes making profits, creation of jobs, and the production of goods and services. It is how well corporations perform this function that determines their influence in social cohesion. This article will therefore discuss some of the social cohesion issues involving corporations, the concerns over how corporations make profits, create jobs, hire, promote and fire, treat shareholders, run their boards, and give back to the communities in which they function. Most of these functions depend on the quality of corporate governance, which in turn has implications for social cohesion. The article begins with a discussion of the concept of CSR. Then it will identify and discuss some corporate behaviors that promote CSR in the following areas: governance; employment practices; involvement in communities; environmental protection; and ethical investment. The paper concludes that successful business strategy that contributes to social cohesion is that which foster integrity in internal governance while promoting positive engagement in communities in which they operate.