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Purpose – This chapter evaluates the shift in black voter support from Mayor Adrian Fenty to Mayor Vincent Gray in the 2010 DC mayoral election. The complexities of new black leadership are used as a theoretical framework for understanding the salience of gentrification, crossover racial appeal, campaign tactics, and policy implementation in the mayoral transition from one black candidate to another.Design/methodology/approach – This study used polling data from The Washington Post one month prior to the 2010 DC Democratic primary (The Washington Post, 2010). Using a sample of 630 respondents, multinomial logistic regression was used to measure the extent to which substantive policy positions, racial crossover appeal, and/or personal traits factor into voter preferences.Findings – The results reveal that a combination of personal, racial, and substantive factors contributed to Adrian Fenty’s defeat in 2010. The implications suggest a reexamination of the significance of symbolic representation in voter candidate preferences and the shifting complexity of black leadership in the procurement of black substantive representation.Originality/value – This chapter captures the transitional nature of black leadership in order to distinguish viable strategies for blacks to secure both elected office and black empowerment, while offering a more nuanced approach to analyzing the changing nature of the black voting calculus in the United States.

In this chapter, we identify three distinct transformational performance improvement (TPI) approaches commonly used to redesign work processes in health care organizations. We describe the unique components or tools that each approach uses to improve the delivery of health services. We also summarize what is empirically known about the effectiveness of each TPI approach according to systematic reviews and recent studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. Based on examination of this research, we discuss what knowledge is still needed to strengthen the evidence for whole system transformation. This involves the use of conceptual frameworks to assess and guide implementation efforts, and facilitators and barriers to change as revealed in a recent evaluation of one major initiative, the Lean Enterprise Transformation (LET) at the Veterans Health Administration. The analysis suggests ways in which TPI facilitators can be developed and barriers reduced to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of quality initiatives. Finally, we discuss appropriate study designs to evaluate TPI interventions that may strengthen the evidence for their effectiveness in real world practice settings.

This study evaluates participation in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, a service-learning activity, to determine if participating students develop confidence in the skills needed for success in the accounting profession. An analysis of data from students at eight U.S. universities shows that VITA students were significantly more confident in their practical skills, citizenship skills, and personal responsibility skills after their VITA experience than a control group of students who did not participate in VITA, measured over a similar period of time. The VITA participants also reported a stronger sense of school pride and moderately more confidence in their interpersonal skills. However, the VITA students reported less confidence in their problem-solving skills, perhaps due to being faced with complex decision-making situations. While this finding was initially unexpected, it actually demonstrates the value of experiential learning for students.

This study investigates university students’ perceptions of (i) an introductory accounting course and (ii) the profession of accountancy. The study examines the extent to which these perceptions change during the students’ first semester of accountancy studies, and whether these perceptions relate to the students’ interest in the field of accounting. To investigate these issues, we survey 231 undergraduate students in their first semester of accounting studies at a large Greek university. In general, the results show that the students’ initial perceptions of the accounting profession are rather traditional and stereotypical, but that these perceptions generally become more “positive” at the end of their first semester after completing an introductory accounting course. Moreover, at the end of the semester, the students perceive the introductory course as being more rewarding and enjoyable than they had originally expected. The study also finds that students who are interested in accounting hold more positive views of the course and the profession (both at the beginning of the semester and at the end) than those who are not interested in accounting. The findings underline the important role of educators in influencing the perceptions and intentions of their students with regard to accounting study and profession.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

By taking conventionalist view of the evolution of biotechnology, we suggest that the process by which entrepreneurs determined what made biotechnology valuable and figured out how to organize around such an economic logic was contested. The shape that biotechnology has ultimately taken emerged from the resolution of these contests. Convention theory – as elaborated in Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) On Justification ¹ – argues that our economy is shaped by participants affecting the rules of economic action. Whereas most economists would argue that the assignment of value underpins any system of exchange, conventionalists suggest that this value is not only given by the principles of optimization but instead can be derived from many possible spheres such as civic duty, attainment of fame, proof of technologic performance, and demonstration of creativity. More specifically, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, p. 43) claim that the establishment of a particular logic “comes about as a part of a coordinated process that relies on two supports: a common identification of market goods, whose exchange defines the course of action, and a common evaluation of these objects in terms of prices that make it possible to adjust various actions.” Simply put, economic logics embody principles of economic coordination or conventions that guide interpretation of the technology and its value.

The fairy tale is a genre popularly associated with characters that inhabit opposite extremes in the axis of good and evil, such as the brave prince, the beautiful princess and the wicked witch. From the tension between the two extremes emerges the familiar narrative: as Dallas Baker has remarked, the death of the monstrous villain often precedes ‘heterosexual fulfilment’ (2010, p. 8), and thus the classical script is laid out.

This chapter will investigate how lesbian and bisexual retellings deconstruct that script and collapse the insurmountable distance between good and evil, hero and villain, queering fairy tale paradigms and upending genre expectations. Sam Miller declared in 2011 that ‘there are no more queer monsters’ (p. 222) in horror films, making the fact that they still lurk in fairy tale retellings all the more remarkable, although they often do so disguised as, or otherwise fused with, well-known childhood heroines. In this way, Lauren Beukes’s The Hidden Kingdom (2013) aligns a bisexual Rapunzel with Sadako, the vengeful spirit from Japanese horror film Ringu (1998); The Sleeper and the Spindle (Gaiman, 2014) features a Snow White who must save the Sleeping Beauty, here an evil witch guarded by zombie-like sleepers; and ABC's Once Upon a Time (2011–2018) features a bisexual Little Red Riding Hood who transforms into a dangerous werewolf. This chapter thus explores the significance of resilient, queer monstrosity in contemporary fairy tales, these authors' interpretation of the conservative archetype of the queer villain, and the potential of these retellings to enact subversive fantasies of empowerment for queer readers.

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized and coordinated by text-mediated and text-regulated social organization. Actor-network Theory (ANT) is a theory/method that is concerned with how realities get enacted. ANT focuses on a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors (e.g., computers, documents, and laboratory equipment) and how the relations between them are constituted and how they are made to hang together to create certain realities. In this chapter, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT. We begin with an overview of IE and ANT and focus on their ontological and epistemological “shifts.” We then discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT, particularly from an IE stance. In doing so, we put these approaches into dialog and allude to some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of combining these approaches.