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Teams focus on a common and valued goal, and effective teams are able to alter their behaviors in pursuit of this goal. When teams are viewed in the context of a dynamic environment, they must adapt to challenges in the environment in order to maintain team effectiveness. In this light, we describe various sources of team variation and how they combine with individual-level, team-level, and dynamical mechanisms for maintaining team effectiveness in a dynamic environment. The combination of these elements produces a systems view of team effectiveness. Our goals are to begin to define, both in words and in operational terms, team effectiveness from this perspective and to evaluate this definition in the context of team training using intelligent tutoring systems (team ITS). In addressing these goals, we present an example of real-time analysis of team effectiveness and some challenges for team ITS training based on a dynamical systems view of team effectiveness.

In his important text Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil Katz (1988) provides a powerful phenomenological description of the experience of crime, which is ontologically situated within the social world from which it emerges. As such, the experience of crime is viewed as neither the exclusive psychological artifact of a self-enclosed and finished rational actor or as the epiphenomenal conclusion of a process of a structurally imposed determinism (Katz, 1988). From this perspective, the experience of crime emerges from its specific co-constituted encounter with the social world that both constructs and is constructed by this intertwining of self and the world.

In this chapter, we consider how neuroscience methods can enhance the study of team processes, as well as facilitate the development of teams. We overview exciting new neuroscience technology that can be applied to the assessment of teams in real time. While research that has already used this technology to study team engagement and workload is summarized, we also consider other team-based concepts to which it might be applied, such as groupthink and shared mental models. We further suggest that emotional contagion and neurological mirroring concepts can come together to help us form a better understanding of emotions and their effects in teams. We conclude the chapter with a consideration of how neurological methods can potentially help develop team processes and provide insights for both members and team leaders.

Purpose – In an attempt to enhance patient safety, health care facilities are increasingly turning to crew resource management (CRM) and other teamwork training interventions. However, there is still quite a bit about such training interventions that remain unclear. Accordingly, our primary intent herein is to provide some clarity by providing a review of the literature, in hopes of highlighting the current state of the literature as well as identifying the areas that should be addressed by researchers in this field going forward.

Design/methodology/approach – We searched various electronic databases and utilized numerous relevant search terms to maximize the likelihood of identifying all empirical research related to the use of CRM training within health care. Additionally, we conducted a manual search of the most relevant journals and also conducted a legacy search to identify even more articles. Furthermore, given that as a research team we have experience with CRM initiatives, we also integrate the lessons learned through this experience.

Findings – Based on our review of the literature, CRM and teamwork training programs generally appear beneficial to individual employees, the groups and teams within such settings, and overall health care organizations.

Originality/value – In addition to reviewing the literature that addressed CRM and teamwork training, we also highlight some of the more critical aspects of CRM training programs in order for such initiatives to be as successful as possible. Additionally, we detail various factors that appear essential to sustaining any benefits of CRM over the long haul.

There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the country account for death sentences and even fewer for executions. Drawing on theoretical work that seeks to account for why these locales continue to use capital punishment, we provide in this chapter a thick description of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary United States. In doing so, we demonstrate how capital punishment operates in a field of violently defended racial boundaries. Our chapter shows the roles of various local actors across time in fortifying such racial boundaries through historical white terrorism and more recent reinforcement of zones of racial exclusion that are embodied especially in communicated fears of “illegal immigrant gangs.” We contend that the case of Maricopa County points to the importance of attending to racist localisms as a catalyst for the continued implementation of the death penalty in the United States.

Cohesion is a key contributor to team effectiveness, leading to great interest in understanding how to diagnose, monitor, and enhance it in practice. However, there is great inconsistency in how cohesion is conceptualized and measured, making it difficult to compare findings across studies, and therefore limiting the ability to advance science and practice. To begin addressing these issues, we draw from qualitative and quantitative analyses and extract themes indicating what matters most for effective cohesion measurement. Such themes are presented around six major questions – who, what, when, where, why, and how – as they pertain to each major component of the cohesion measurement process. Emerging approaches to cohesion measurement and corresponding avenues for future research are also discussed.

This chapter explores queer theory as a “thought of a method” in educational ethnography by sharing stories of two third grade boys and situating them in a discussion of Britzman’s ideas about reading and Butler’s notion of fantasy. The stories are presented as a possible queer educational ethnography, in which the ethnographer writes the fantastic narrative of the boys as they read creatively to reveal and unsettle gender and reading as sites of constraint to which other constraints adhere. The boys’ reading itself is a queer reading of these constraints and as such makes alterity visible and possible. The study and the methodological framework suggest that educational ethnographers and other adults who work in schools should become attuned to the markers of constraint and alterity, so as to recognize, shelter, and maintain the alterity that children make possible. The chapter asserts children must be allowed to read for alterity, and shows how fantastic narratives that emerge from such readings are limited by the hushing of individuals who disallow alterity in classrooms. Ultimately, this chapter is relevant to ethnographers of education in that it suggests that queer theory not only is necessary to narrate and thus shelter the ways that gender can and should be unsettled in classrooms, but also allows us to narrate and shelter other queer urgencies related to fear, violence, and vulnerability that children experience or share in classrooms. Implications for the current climate of school reform based on standardization of curriculum are also discussed.