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Trans students at New College of Florida provide overwhelmingly positive assessments of their campus culture as related to issues of gender identity, a stark contrast to existing literature on gender-nonconforming collegians. This chapter examines the interactional processes that create a context supportive of all genders – the ways students are expected to act toward one another and how they hold each other accountable to these norms. I draw on interviews with 24 students with diverse identities to argue: (1) there is a trans-inclusive understanding of gender that is dominant on campus, (2) the students have norms that reflect the inclusive understanding and provide direction for when and how gender should enter interactions, and (3) swift responses to breaches of interactional norms serve to support gender-nonconforming students and affirm the identity of the community as unwilling to tolerate transphobia. This analysis demonstrates an alternative cultural context, one in which community members are held not to conventional expectations associated with assumed sex category, but to an understanding of gender that does not take identity for granted. In so doing, it highlights how shifts in shared understanding can create more inclusive interactional practices. Additionally, the focus on the meaning underlying social processes suggests that shifts in how people think about gender could similarly lead to alteration of organizational structures that would help trans students thrive.

In 1930s Britain, tennis champion Fred Perry was a household name. However, the name Fred Perry is more commonly associated with striped-collar polo shirts featuring a laurel wreath logo. In the late 1960s, Fred Perry polo shirts were standard mod and Skinhead dress. When worn by working-class youth the shirt became subversive commentary on English elitism because it had originally been designed for the tennis courts. Many punks also aligned with the brand in dual demonstration of association with working-class ethics as well as an alternative to t-shirts. In the 1980s and onward, this sartorial style was appropriated by right-wing white nationalists, which stripped it of its subcultural spirit. Patriot groups, such as neo-Nazis and the alt-right have continued to co-opt the subcultural style, simultaneously turning the Fred Perry polo into a symbol of racism and bigotry. The multi-use of the Fred Perry brand creates a challenge in how to interpret visual cues when one garment has competing perceptions that at times can be completely opposing. This study examines the history of the Fred Perry brand through the lens of symbolic interactionism, specifically how the shirt evolved from a rather innocuous, yet subversive, form of merchandize repurposed from the tennis world to youth subcultures where the polo communicated group identity. As the brand has moved through fashion cycles, the association of the Fred Perry polo with deviant groups has reduced the brand to representations of hate and separation, which has impacted sales and brand image with its intended consumers.

We explore how scholarly understandings of and the practice of organizational transformation have evolved since Bartunek and Louis’s (1988) Research in Organizational Change and Development chapter. While Bartunek and Louis hoped to see strategy scholarship and OD approaches to transformation inform each other, strategy literature has drifted away from transformation toward more continuous change. OD practice has focused on the implementation of its own versions of transformation through Large Group Interventions, Appreciative Inquiry, the new dialogic OD, and Theory U. Based on a discussion of Theory U, we call attention to the importance of individuals as an important source of new ideas in understanding and practicing large-scale change.