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The contemporary business world has been facing mounting criticism for quite a long time. The accusations relate to the short-sightedness of business decisions, strategies oriented solely to profit-making, hostile takeovers, a focus on cost reduction, employee redundancies, etc. This has led to a decline in trust towards business executives, as shown, for example, by the 2016 GfK Trust Index based on research conducted in 27 countries, including 13 European ones. According to the survey, managers and entrepreneurs are ranked 22nd out of 32 professions analysed (Trust in Professions, 2016). This relatively low level of trust in business managers, coupled with the new challenges created by a changing business environment which managers must cope with in order to stay in the market, means that contemporary companies have to change. Corporations are increasingly being challenged as to their function in society. Entrepreneurs must face the challenges connected not only with increasing competition or the development of new technologies, but also growing social expectations. This means that companies today must be managed not only effectively, but also responsibly. This chapter will present the findings of research on the place of sustainability marketing activities in the system of goals for contemporary organizations. To begin with, market trends will be discussed, which in today’s world to the greatest extent influence the marketing strategies of small and medium-sized enterprises in the food and drink sector, as well as the challenges such companies face nowadays. Next, a change in the significance of the strategic goals that these companies set for themselves will be discussed. The final part of the chapter will focus on sustainability aspects in the strategies adopted by SMEs.

If there are truly impermeable walls between objective research purity, applied science research and development, and advocacy for social justice, then the current system of education, tenure, rewards and recognition should be serving society well now and into the future. However, the world has dramatically changed due to three shaping forces in society: (1) technological flattening of the landscape of opportunity, (2) the rise of the inseparable role of technology in creating knowledge and culture, and (3) the development of complex systems science. These three game changers imply a dramatic rethinking of the foundations of knowledge and practice in all fields because they exert new constraints and open up new opportunities for education concerning the knowledge and skills needed to prepare the next generation of leaders for the global competition of ideas, creativity, and human potential. The 21st century educator capable of transforming learning environments is a person who is a master of these three core concepts. This chapter articulates a vision that is aimed to generate thinking and debate, and like an attractor, pull mental models toward the future as scholarly communities in education grapple with their own next steps and the challenging conversations needed for advancement and innovation in response to the globally changing landscape.

The purpose of this theoretical chapter is to rework a promising but limited theory of the foundations of reciprocity. Reciprocity is often attributed to an “internalized norm of reciprocity” – a deeply felt moral obligation to help those who have helped us in the past. Leifer's theory of local action develops a radically different and compelling foundation for reciprocity – one in which the impetus for reciprocity is a thinly veiled battle for status. We rework the theory to offer a new one that addresses its limitations. The key idea is that the impetus for reciprocity is the desire to signal that one intends to create joint value rather than to capture it from the counterparty.

Our analytical approach rests on close examination of a puzzling and underrecognized feature of social exchange: people who initiate social exchange routinely deny giving anything of value (“it was nothing”) while the receiver inflates their indebtedness to the giver (“this is too much!”). We refer to this negotiation strategy as reverse bargaining and use it as a window into the logic of social exchange.

We develop a more general theory of how people manage the threat of opportunism in social exchange that subsumes local action theory. The key insight is that people who initiate social exchange and seek reciprocity must balance two competing objectives: to ensure that the person receiving a benefit recognizes a debt she must repay; and to mitigate the receiver's suspicion that the giver's ulterior motive is to capture value from the receiver.

Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights provided a path-breaking theoretical analysis of what he called the “myth of rights.” Scheingold's key insight was that even though rights were a myth, rights ideologies nevertheless left a significant imprint on American politics. The book charted a research agenda that has now been followed by a wide range of sociolegal scholars. Looking across that diverse body scholarship, I find convergence on two points. First, scholars claim that law and legal ideology contribute to processes of legitimation and to political acquiescence. Second, and seemingly in tension with the first, most people do not appear to believe in idealized legal myths and express only qualified commitments to legal ideals. Most scholars have responded to this tension by downplaying evidence that people have doubts about legal ideals, often treating expressions of doubts as evidence of confusion. As a result, scholars still conclude that residual commitments to legal myths help to explain legitimation and acquiescence. Such moves produce accounts of legal myths that are insufficiently attentive to politics and power. Scholars would do better to return to Scheingold's more ambivalent perspective on the politics of rights in order to understand the political consequences of commitments to rights’ ideologies.

President John F. Kennedy navigated through the Cuban missile crisis with the help of his advisers in the so-called ExComm. While ExComm attendance was very stable and its goal, the removal of the missiles, clear, true to the garbage can model the options available were socially constructed and were ambiguously related to the objective they purportedly served. An analysis of the recorded discussions reveals that Kennedy's choice of a blockade required the ExComm to suppress talk about the perils it entailed; his decision not to intercept a Soviet tanker was based less on caution than unsustainable indecision; and when Kennedy squared off against his advisers regarding the best way to respond to Khrushchev's conflicting offers on October 26 and 27, the latter worked to exclude him from the very decision he was about to make. The analysis points to a natural affinity between the garbage can model and ethnomethodological attention to the fine-grained details of deliberative talk.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate students’ qualitatively different ways of understanding the learning object in three undergraduate courses in the discipline of accounting. The theoretical framework of variation theory, a general learning theory, is applied. The lecturers chose a learning object which is investigated under two different teaching conditions – the conventional lecture model and the variational method. Two student groups were identified as a comparison group and a target group, comparable in various relevant parameters. All students took three required accounting courses. In the comparison group, the lecturers used the conventional lecture model and in the target group the variational model. The results indicated significant differences between the two groups’ examination results in the three courses, with students in the target group performing much better. The educational implications and limitations of the study, and areas for further research, are discussed.

In the first section of the book, Maureen D. Neumann, Laura C. Jones, P. Taylor Webb, and Olga M. Welch examine the ways in which “new” notions of leadership have influenced leadership development programs. Neumann, Jones, and Webb in the chapter, “Developing Teachers Leaders to Transform Classrooms, Schools and Communities,” advocate for, and offer ways that teachers can become cognizant of their leadership and its effects, so that they can develop deliberate commitments towards social justice in schools which are sites of social, political, and economic influence. They propose a model for leadership that is an alternative to traditional allocations of power through positional hierarchies. According to Neumann, Jones, and Webb, “while school leaders may recognize their actions within a single frame of the model, the practice of leadership is the ability to move in and out of three different conceptualizations of leadership, managerial (transactional), professional development (transformational), and social responsibility (critical).” They propose that effective teacher leaders utilize all three aspects of the leadership domains as a way to adapt to, oftentimes, challenging and rapidly shifting political and economic climates within education. Neumann, Jones, and Webb conclude their chapter with a discussion of pedagogy of possibility and argue that pedagogical content knowledge is a marker of professional teaching competence, and teachers must engage students in the moral and ethical issues surrounding the use of knowledge in our democracy for any subject matter.