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This chapter explores the origins of the theme of competitive advantage in 19th and early 20th century economics. This theme, which forms the core of modern Strategic Management, was a battleground for debates about the value of abstract theory versus observations about real-life events. Intellectual genealogies, citations, and other sources show the central roles played by the University of Vienna and Harvard University. These two institutions strongly influenced the theory of monopolistic competition as well as all three modern views of competitive advantage – the industrial as expressed by Porter, the resource-based as expressed by Penrose, and the evolutionary as expressed by Schumpeter.

In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to the cool bureaucratic response from government officials that they were used to. To close the chapter, we discuss some risks of the proactive enabling approach, we compare our findings to problems that citizens’ initiatives often face during their interactions with local institutional actors in the Netherlands found in other literature, and we briefly discuss possible implications of practicing a modest enabling approach for developments in governance.

This chapter briefly discusses an often overlooked impact of the loss of the Aral Sea, the social costs to the population in the surrounding areas. While much focus has been on the shrinkage of the Aral in the past half century, the story is much older and includes a diversity of people, ecosystems, and productive ways of living in a harsh climate. This chapter is an overview of how ecological parameters have influenced life for the local population in Karakalpakstan. The research is based on a short site visit and tests ideas for a longer project that will look at who is migrating for employment, based on what criteria, and the dynamics of that choice. Seminal writings about human activity around the Aral when it was full, along with recent reports on livelihoods, health, and migration patterns are reviewed. The chapter supports the idea that migration can be an adaptation to climate. Migration is overall a negative social sustainability indicator for Karakalpakstan.

There has been a great deal of quantitative, survey research produced in the last thirty years which states that there is underachievement amongst ethnic minority children in English schools. This quantitative research reveals an increasingly complex picture of ethnic minority achievement and underachievement. Early work tended to simply demonstrate that ethnic minority children were underachieving in school (Little, 1972; Mabey, 1981; Mabey, 1986), this then shifted (as research became more sophisticated, gender and class were introduced as variables and pupils ceased to be simply categorised as black or white) to the identified achievement of some groups and the underachievement of others (e.g. Brent, 1994; Craft & Craft, 1983; DfES, 2003a, b; Drew & Gray, 1990; ILEA, 1990; Kysel, 1988; Sammons, 1995).

At the November 2002 National Communication Association Convention, The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Affiliate sponsored a spotlight panel honoring the contributions of Laurel Richardson to symbolic interaction and communication. These sessions feature distinguished symbolic interactionists who have contributed to the study of communication and promoted interdisciplinary discussion between communication and symbolic interaction scholars. Under the leadership of Shing-Ling (Sarina) Chen, these annual sessions have become highlights of NCA meetings for ethnographers, symbolic interactionists, performance and cultural studies scholars. Following such esteemed honorees as David Maines (1999), Norman Denzin (2000), and Peter Hall (2001), the spotlight on Laurel Richardson produced another exciting program.