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This narrative inquiry centers on teachers' longitudinal experiences of policy-related reforms systematically introduced to T. P. Yaeger Middle School, a campus located in the fourth largest, second most diverse city in America. The embedded research study, with roots tracing back to 1997, uses five interpretive tools to capture six mandated changes in the form of a story serial. Special research attention is afforded pay-for-performance, the sixth reform in the series. The deeply lived consequence of receiving bonuses for his teaching performance prompted Daryl Wilson, Yaeger's long-term literacy department chair, to proclaim “data is [G]od.” Wilson's emergent, inventive metaphor aptly portrays the perplexing conditions under which his career ended, and how my long-term research project likewise concluded.

Emailing does not preclude emotional exchange and many times it causes us to engage in spiralling exchanges of increasingly angry emailing. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to explore how factors of temporality are related to anger when emailing, to model circumstances that protect against, but also ignite, anger escalation, and to raise a discussion for practitioners of how to avoid damaging email communication. By intersecting literature on communication, information systems, psychology and organisational studies, factors leading to an ‘emotional verge’ are identified and summarised in a model showing factors likely to prime, but also protect against, anger escalation.

This chapter focusses on entrepreneurship and policies of public services in England, specifically leisure centre provision in the UK during the late twentieth century. The central role played by local authorities in sport provision was complimented by an increasing cadre of leisure sector professionals and with increasing architectural interest in the provision of leisure. The institutional context was framed by the Sports Development Council (SDC) after 1965 together with the broader action of local authorities who aimed to provide their ratepayers with access to improved sport and leisure services. The resulting leisure centres were perhaps a way to signal the prestige of local authorities but were expensive investments. The capability of local authorities was boosted by the local government reforms of the 1970s, which merged districts, pooling their resources. The possibility of support from private capital and after 1973 from the European Economic Community (EEC) also provided new opportunities for the organizational form. Eventually, there was a shift in emphasis from the provision of organized sport to that of more individualized and commercialized “leisure” as a product. Whether or not this achieved the long-term aims of central government, to improve access to sport and to tackle urban challenges, remains questionable. However, the story of leisure provision in the UK remains one of remarkable public sector entrepreneurship within an institutional context.

Beginning in narrative re-evaluated daily from classrooms inside prison walls, this article further explores cultural, ethical, and social values of teaching college courses inside the wall. Interrogating public discourse over what Eric Schlosser terms the “prison–industrial complex” arrogates subsequent considerations. Prison-building became a growth industry, even as prevailing political response to prisoners themselves became increasingly censorious and unforgiving. Traditional American culture preaches redemption but relishes abasement, promises forgiveness but refuses forgetting. Carefully examining further questions about humanistic discourse as a possible locus for radicalization, we finally confront how the prisoners’ situation reflects rather than deflects traditional expectations.

In the wake of growing pressures to make scholarly knowledge commercially relevant via translation into intellectual property, various techno-scientific communities have mobilized to create open access/open source experiments. These efforts are based on the ideas and success of free and open source software, and generally try to exploit two salient features: increased openness and circulation, and distributed collective innovation. Transferring these ideas from software to science often involves unforeseen challenges, one of which is that these movements can be deemed, often incorrectly, as heretical by university administrators and technology transfer officers who valorize metrics such as number of patents filed and granted, spin-off companies created, and revenue generated. In this paper, we discuss nascent efforts to foster an open source movement in nanotechnology and provide an illustrative case of an arsenic removal invention. We discuss challenges facing the open source nano movement that include making a technology widely accessible and the associated politics of metrics.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

Family business firms (FBFs) constantly struggle with the challenge of successfully reaching and surviving beyond the third generation. Narrative or storytelling is frequently used in business to transmit knowledge, achieve goals, create and maintain a connection with stakeholders, and achieve sustained growth. Most FBFs consciously or unconsciously use narrative and possess their own discourse, which is unique to every family and family business and which may aid FBFs in achieving continuity. FBFs must have an adequate atmosphere of collaboration and cooperation so that group members can transform acquired tacit knowledge through storytelling into explicit action. FBFs should be prepared to help collaborators and other stakeholders build competencies since tacit knowledge transfer, through narrative, can aid in the solving of problems, enhance innovativeness, and improve strategic decision-making. Therefore, narrative may well aid FBFs in fulfilling their ultimate goal of continuity. The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the potential influence of narrative on FBFs’ continuity and prevention of their precipitous expiration. This chapter contributes to previous literature that sheds light on the narrative implications of FBFs, and depicts FBFs’ narratives and the dynamics of their business objectives, as well as touches on the heterogeneous nature of each family business’ storyline. There are various advantages to FBFs’ storytelling; perhaps the most noteworthy is the achievement of sustained business growth and continuity.