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Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, women did nearly three-quarters of the world’s unpaid work. As institutional supports, including in-person school and community-based care for children, the elderly, and the disabled vanished early in the pandemic, many women’s caregiving responsibilities increased. In some cases, opportunities for paid employment disappeared due to layoffs and furloughs, while in others, paid work was no longer possible without access to the missing institutional supports. Either way, access to needed supports – financial, practical, and social – was diminished. The lapse of needed supports also had severe impacts on subgroups of women, including pregnant and post-partum women. A range of considerations – vaccine safety, social interaction and infection risk, disease severity – have posed serious challenges for pregnant and post-partum women. Across the board, women’s need for continuous access to better social, financial, and practical supports at home, in the community, and in the workplace was made even more evident by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study was to survey parents who have Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and examine issues surrounding their parenting.

Qualitative surveys were used to collect data.

Findings from the study include three themes: (a) They needed to know; (b) Involving children with treatment; and (c) I can’t do this alone. Discussion of findings and conclusions and recommendations for parents, physicians, and future studies are presented.

Data for the study was collected through self-reports and limited demographic data was collected.

Continued research on MS is needed, especially in the area involving children in at-home treatments and children as caregivers. Children can be a challenging population to investigate, yet as evidenced in this study, children are being involved in MS treatments of their parents. A greater, more in-depth look at the role of a child as caregiver is warranted.

Much of the discussion surrounding the antivaccine movement focuses on the decision of parents to not vaccinate their children and the resulting danger posed to others. However, the primary risk is borne by the child left unvaccinated. Although living in a developed country with high vaccination rates provides a certain amount of protection through population immunity, the unvaccinated child is still exposed to a considerably greater risk of preventable diseases than one who is vaccinated. I explore the tension between parental choice and the child’s right to be free of preventable diseases. The chapter’s goal is twofold: to advocate for moving from a dyadic framework – considering the interests of the parents against those of the state – to a triadic one, in which the interests of the child are given as much weight as those of the parent and the state; and to discuss which protections are available, and how they can be improved. Specific legal tools available to protect that child are examined, including tort liability of the parents to the child, whether and to what degree criminal law has a role, under what circumstances parental choice should be overridden, and the role of school immunization requirements in protecting the individual child.

To demonstrate how the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), a formal project management framework commonly used in corporate settings, can be used to manage library projects, even in situations where the librarian does not have authority over project resources, like personnel, scope, and budget.

This chapter uses a conceptual review of the library, project management, and library project management literature to construct recommendations and best practices.

Many of the PMBOK tools are effective for project managers working without formal authority. These tools include the Stakeholder Register, which allows a project manager to track stakeholders based upon their interest and influence; the Responsibility Assignment Matrix, which allows a project manager and team members to quickly and easily see work and personnel relationships; and Integrated Change Control, which provides project managers with a process for understanding and documenting the impact of project changes. These tools, as well as the PMBOK’s strategies on managing project communication and monitoring and controlling project work, which help orient stakeholders to the work and expectations of the project, while also making sure there are no surprises, provide effective project management tools for librarians working without formal authority.

While the PMBOK is occasionally discussed in the library literature, this chapter extensively uses the framework to connect the framework to library project management. This chapter also shows how the PMBOK, which relies on formal authority, can also be used in situations where the project manager lacks it.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to help us position and understand the increasing importance of project-based innovation for industrial organization in the 21st century. It builds on and extends Joan Woodward's (1958 and 1965) pioneering research, which classifies industrial organizations according to the complexity of production technology and volume of output. We suggest that a radical revision of Woodward's framework is required to account for the extensive use of project-based organizations to gain competitive advantage through accelerated innovation and growth in new technologies and markets.

In this chapter we put projects at the centre stage of firms' activities – i.e. product and process innovation, strategy formulation and implementation, capability building and learning, organizational structure and design, and systems integration (the capability to combine diverse knowledge bases and physical components into functioning systems). Based on the findings of a 10-year research programme into firms producing high-value capital goods – known as complex products and systems (CoPS) – we draw out conceptual insights about project organizing that can inform and contribute to the development and reformulation of more universally applicable formal theories of strategic management and organization.

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.

Although built to explain an inherently dynamic process, current theories of internationalization are criticized for having limited dynamic qualities. To come to this conclusion, we adopt international market withdrawal as an empirical extreme. We expect dynamic theories of internationalization to be able to accommodate and explain international market withdrawal within the scope of the internationalization process of the firm. An integrated global strategy framework is presented as a promising point of departure toward this aim. To assess this framework's dynamic qualities, we compare it with the ‘stages’ models of internationalization and the transaction-cost based international business theory. Although this integrated global strategy framework — and especially the resource-based part of it — seems to outperform these two established theories, the framework is not capable of fully explaining the dynamics in the internationalization process of the firm. Moreover, the integrated global strategy framework struggles with the paradigmatic incompatibilities among its fundamental explananda. Adopting the resource-based perspective as a pivotal point, we propose an (emergent) resource-based evolutionary theory of the firm as a dynamic framework that is capable of explaining international market withdrawal and the internationalization process of the firm.