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This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

This paper sets out to analyse both the dominant constructions of childhood and the prevailing sexual scripts embedded in international reports on the sexualisation of childhood debate.

Four international reports from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis whereby the sexual subjecthoods made available to children and images of childhood itself can be interrogated.

This paper finds that a broad-brush approach to sexualisation renders consumption and embodiment as ‘sexualised’ and problematic. Gender remains unproblematised and sexuality as an issue is palpable by its absence. The reports show a lack of attention to the voices of children and a denial of their moral agency. Innocence is constructed as a fundamental yet unstable feature of childhood which requires protection from the insidious external forces of 21st century sexual cultures. Childhood thus functions as a motif for the state of society as a whole.

Identifying the dominant constructions of childhood, sexualisation, gender and sexuality, by analysing how these concepts are defined, understood and talked about within international responses to the issue of the sexualisation of childhood, light can be shed upon the sanctioned ways made available to ‘do’ sex, gender and sexuality and to ‘be’ a child, a boy, a girl, a ‘sexual’ or a ‘sexualised’ being. In addition, this enables evaluation of the ways in which images of the child are mobilised for policy and political agendas and how childhood functions as both a barometer for, and symbol of, the well-being of a society.

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, was now but a faint memory. Yet had a historian of some earlier period of European history thought to pen a line as presumptuous as Marx's, it might have read: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggle with plague or pestilence.” Epidemics and pandemics have haunted human societies from their beginnings. The congregation of large masses of humans in urban settings, in fact, made the evolution of human infectious disease microorganisms biologically possible (McNeill, 1976; Porter, 1997, pp. 22–25). Epidemics have been as determinative of the course of economic, social, military and political history as any other single factor – emptying cities, decimating armies, wiping out generations and destroying civilizations.

Pauline Boss is Professor, Department of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota; and a family therapist in private practice. Her research interests are in the area of family stress, specifically when there is ambiguous loss or boundary ambiguity in families. Her research has included various types of ambiguous loss ranging from loved ones physically missing after war or terrorism, to those psychologically missing due to Alzheimer’s disease or other chronic mental illnesses.Bertram J. Cohler is Professor, the Committee on Human Development, the College, and the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. His research interests include study of continuity and change across the course of adult lives, the family, narrative and writing the life story, social change and sexual identity, and the study of nostalgia in personal and popular memory.Frank Fincham is a Distinguished Professor and Director of Clinical Training at University at Buffalo. His interests include forgiveness, cognition in relationships, and the impact of interparental conflict on children.Karen Fingerman is Associate Professor and Berner Hanley University Scholar at Purdue University. Her research focuses on positive and negative emotions in relationships. Her work has examined mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, friends, acquaintances, and peripheral social ties.Elizabeth Hay is a Doctoral Student in Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in intergenerational relationships and how they contribute to health and well-being throughout adulthood.Lori Kaplan is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago, Illinois. Her research focuses on family systems and relationships across the life cycle. She has published articles on child custody arrangements after divorce, chronic illness and its effects on family relationships, and family caregiving to an elder with Alzheimer’s disease.David M. Klein is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His current research interests include intergenerational relations, romantic relationship formation, and the sociology of science with an emphasis on the development of theoretical and methodological perspectives in the family sciences.Frieder R. Lang is Professor of Human Development at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His research interests are processes and mechanisms of the development of social and family ties over the life course, motivational psychology of human development and successful aging.Frank Lettke is Assistant Professor in the department of History and Sociology at the Universität Konstanz (Germany), Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie and directs the Research Center “Family and Society.” He is interested in intergenerational relations and the diversity of family forms. His current research focuses on family relationships in the context of inheritance.Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research interests include institutional and practical arrangements of intergenerational relations, and gender equality in the enlargement process of the European Union.Kurt Lüscher, Ph.D., held a chair in Sociology at the Universität Konstanz (Germany), Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie until 2000, where he was also director of the research center on “Society and Family” (he is now professor emeritus). He has longstanding research interests in the family, the life course, and intergenerational relations. He has also worked extensively in the areas of socialization, child and family policy, and the relationship between family and the legal system.Greg Maio is a Reader in Psychology at Cardiff University. His research interests include attitudinal ambivalence, attitude change, relationships, and social values.Francesca Giorgia Paleari is Lecturer at Catholic University of Milano, Italy. Her research interests include family relationships, forgiving, and research methodology.Karl Pillemer is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, where he also directs the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute. His research interests include the impact of life course transitions on family relationships, the causes and consequences of parent-child relationship quality, and the interaction between families and community institutions.Andrejs Plakans is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; and editor of The History of the Family: An International Quarterly (Elsevier). His research interests focus on post-1800 eastern Europe, and include historical demography, rural family structures, and kinship.Camillo Regalia is Professor of Social Psychology at Catholic University of Milano, Italy. His research interests include family relationships, self-efficacy beliefs and forgiving.Harry Segal is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Psychology and Human Development at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. His research interests include the clinical assessment of narrative, the implicit processes involved in the imagination, computational modeling of early experience, and the cognitive-affective aspects of transition from early to mid-childhood.

New Zealand is widely recognised as extreme in its New Public Financial Management reforms. Scrutiny of the reformed financial management system reveals its consistency with a controversial political agenda: trade liberalisation of even core social services such as social welfare, health and education. Further, the detailed requirements are systematically biased towards withdrawing from government services (by running them down) and/or privatising them (by artificially inflating reported costs, thus projecting an appearance of inefficiency). The legislation underpinning the New Zealand model was shepherded through parliament by a Minister of Finance who publicly opposed exposing social services to market forces. Drawing on archival records, this article provides a historical account of how this legislation came into being. The legislation handed key levers of power to extend the reforms to the Treasury. Particular attention is paid to the friction within the government of the time over extending the reforms to social policy, and the role of the Treasury. Possibly, some ministers who drove the reforms through did not appreciate their nature. Alternatively, the handover of the levers of power could be perceived as an attempt to avoid blame.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the use of creative methods with children and young people is less important than creativity in the data analysis process; and second to introduce a framework for analysis which takes into account structure and agency and reveals the multi-layered context of the research encounter. The argument presented here has implications for those working within the “new” social study of childhood in the ongoing endeavor to understand children’s experiences and childhood in a social context. The model presented here is of potential value as a tool in data analysis and more widely in helping us to conceptualize childhood agency and the relationship between structure and agency. This chapter problematizes the call for creative methods with children and young people and instead focuses on creative data interpretation. An original model is presented which researchers can apply to the analysis and interpretation of data gathered in research with children and young people. The creative ways in which children and young people use the research encounter are a multi-layered response to context, which additionally demonstrates the creation of “other” spaces in and through their shared talk.

How do institutions affect entrepreneurship? Conversely, how do entrepreneurs impact institutions? Institutional theory has long struggled to explain the action and agency inherent in entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1988; Barley & Tolbert, 1997). Contemporary institutionalist research in organization studies began with the question of how the institutional environment shapes the structures and behaviors of existing organizations. This research largely focused on how normative, regulative, and cognitive dimensions of the environment (Scott, 2008) constrain large, mature organizations and the circumstances that increase the adoption of new structures by such organizations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983). A subsequent wave of research in the institutional tradition focused on institutional change within mature organizational fields (see Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002). Some recent research has studied the actors – “institutional entrepreneurs” – that create new or transform existing institutions (e.g., Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004). Much less attention, however, has been paid within the institutional-theory literature to entrepreneurship: the processes of founding and managing new organizations.