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This qualitative study examined urban school personnel’s opinions, perceptions, and strategies in implementing the following: (a) locally mandated Zero Tolerance Discipline Policies, (b) nationally mandated standardized high-stakes testing laws, and (c) how the two combined can be counterproductive to one another. Three themes emerged from the research. The first and predominate theme that emerged and discussed was “perspectives that described the potential impact standardized high-stakes assessments have on African American male students that violate the Zero Tolerance Discipline Policy.” The research and its recommendations are valuable to policymakers, education advocates, stakeholders, superintendents, boards of education, administrators, teachers, and parents.

Based on literature providing evidence that Afrocentric hairstyles (e.g. afros, braids, dreadlocks) of Black women working in professional settings are often associated with negative stereotypes and biases regarding competency and professionalism, this chapter examines the extent to which these biases may be influencing the hairstyle choices of Black women employed in higher education. While academic workplaces tend to be more flexible and informal than non-academic settings, we found many Black women in higher education are, nonetheless, choosing to wear Eurocentric hairstyles. However, choice of hairstyle was influenced by academic discipline, type of institution and level in the university hierarchy.

This paper focuses on the role of myth in group identity maintenance. It begins by looking at the occupational group, but broadens to show how subsociety and the larger society affected the group's identity and actions. Mississippi Delta blues performers’ use of myth serves as the historical example, and this analysis shows how the group reacted to living in a segregated and racist society. Analysis of songs demonstrates how myth can play a role in tying together this subordinated group in society and perpetuate myth. How the blues subculture still employs these myths today is also addressed.

Black people have been historically, legally, and systematically blocked from accessing U.S. educational opportunities at all levels. Institutions, policies, and affirmative action efforts have all influenced the racial desegregation of public education, which had legal and social implications for higher education. While legislation provided a way for black students to enroll into predominantly white institutions, students were met with racial tension and discrimination. The integration efforts of the 1960s focused primarily on black students, and later on, other students of color; this led to the creation of many race-centric resources and support services for students.

Today, however, as conversations on race have transitioned toward diversity, racial justice efforts are often diluted in the creation of broadly reaching diversity and inclusion efforts. Black cultural centers have since transitioned to minority and multicultural offices to now diversity and inclusion centers. The authors understand that the progression of student issues, needs, and concerns presents a need to broaden diversity efforts. Yet, race-related incidents, specifically, continue to serve as a foundation for the creation of diversity offices that are oftentimes designated as “catch all” efforts. In this chapter, the authors will provide historical racial context for current diversity efforts within higher education and discuss the contemporary role of race and racial justice within diversity work in higher education.

Purpose – The Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings have presented new challenges in how the media covers school shootings. These events have transformed Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho not only from disgruntled youth to school killers, but also into actors, writers, and directors of their own narrative.

Methodology/approach – This article focuses on the role of the masculine identity and underlying messages in the communicative process of the shooters. Further examination looks at what particular messages the shooters are communicating through the media. This includes an analysis into their journals, internet postings, and videos that were left behind as archives of the performative scripts. Finally, reflection is presented in terms of which parts of the shooters’ messages are or are not communicated and why.

Findings – This article considers the differences in the Columbine and Virginia Tech cases in terms of who is controlling the information that gets released to the public. In the case of Columbine, information was or was not released by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, whereas in the case of Virginia Tech, nearly all decisions regarding material release was made by the media (particularly NBC News).

Originality/value of paper – This article applies Muschert and Ragnedda's (2010) examination of cultural scripts to two benchmark cases, examining the mediatization of the shooters’ own words.

Hospital nurse managers are in the middle. Their supervisors expect that they will monitor and discipline nurses who commit errors, while also asking them to create a culture that fosters reporting of errors. Their staff nurses expect the managers to support them after errors occur. Drawing on interviews with 20 nurse managers from three tertiary care hospitals, the study identifies key exemplars that illustrate how managers monitor nursing errors. The exemplars examine how nurse managers: (1) sent mixed messages to staff nurses about incident reporting, (2) kept two sets of books for recording errors, and (3) developed routines for classifying potentially harmful errors into non-reportable categories. These exemplars highlight two tensions: the application of bureaucratic rule-based standards to professional tasks, and maintaining accountability for errors while also learning from them. We discuss how these fundamental tensions influence organizational learning and suggest theoretical and practical research questions and a conceptual framework.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the rationale for and approach to enhancing community participation in traffic safety initiatives. It describes a process that practitioners can use to engage members of the public in the development of community-based solutions to traffic safety problems. The approach used draws on contemporary social theory, historical antecedents, and demonstrated best practices for effective engagement efforts.

The implications of the ideas developed in this chapter include the need for traffic safety and related agencies to develop and deploy new or expanded capacities as they implement community-level traffic safety initiatives. One such capacity is the development of greater interdisciplinary understanding of sociopolitical dynamics that support and/or inhibit the effectiveness of behavior change efforts. Another is the ability to employ practical participatory processes that engage community members so as to draw out the tacit but critical knowledge about barriers to and avenues for supporting behavior change strategies. These increase the likelihood of developing traffic safety strategies that are effective within the specific and unique culture of each community.

There has been much discussion regarding the necessity of moving away from precise (rules-based) standards toward less precise (principles-based) standards. This study examines the impact of the proposed shift by using a controlled experiment to evaluate the influence of rule precision and information ambiguity on reporting decisions in the presence of monetary incentives to report aggressively. Using motivated reasoning theory as a framework, we predict that the malleability inherent in both rule precision and information ambiguity amplify biased reasoning in a manner that is consistent with individuals’ pecuniary incentives. In contrast, consistent with research exploring ambiguity aversion we predict that high levels of ambiguity will actually attenuate aggressive reporting. Our results support these predictions. Specifically, we find an interactive effect between rule precision and information ambiguity on self-interested reporting decisions at moderate levels of ambiguity. However, consistent with ambiguity aversion, we find decreased self-interested reporting decisions at high levels of ambiguity relative to moderate ambiguity. This study should be of interest to preparers, auditors, and regulators who are interested in identifying situations which amplify and diminish aggressive reporting.

Critical race theory (CRT) seems to face a never-ending baptism by fire. When the Trump administration sought to ban CRT from American federal training courses in 2020, this may have come as a shock to few (Lang, 2020). Perhaps of greater surprise was that mutual sentiments resonated with the UK Minister for Equalities Kemi Badenoch, a black female, who appears to oppose the teaching of CRT in principle (Thrilling, 2020). The resurgence of such denunciations is problematic in a Western world which is primed for social activism, particularly for scholars in higher education institutions, where CRT has been gaining traction as a guiding framework for research into antiracism, fairness and affirmative action. This chapter suggests that the condemnation of CRT is neither unexpected nor is it altogether absurd. Nevertheless, it aims to provide a balanced metatheoretical ‘criticism’ of CRT and offer a view on the suitability of, and prospects for, its activist research agenda in higher education. Quite often, criticisms of CRT reflect issues with its origin as a troubled bricolage of conveniently assembled ‘tenets’, which do not lend themselves easily to the burden of evidentiary production required in higher education research and practice. In this review, I analyse CRT, through its bricolage-style characteristics, as primarily an explanatory theory, with respect to its application against racialised issues in higher education policy. It is hoped this chapter offers academic and activist researchers a way past the shadow of CRT's bricolage, by defusing some of the misgivings towards its inherent limitations.

The disproportionate identification of learning disabilities among certain sociodemographic subgroups, typically groups who are already disadvantaged, is perceived as a persistent problem within the education system. The academic and social experiences of students who are misidentified with a learning disability may be severely restricted, while students with a learning disability who are never identified are less likely to receive the accommodations and modifications necessary to learn at their maximum potential. In addition to inconsistent definitions of and criteria for diagnosing students with learning disabilities that may result in misdiagnoses, it is feared that discrimination also plays a role. We use the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002 to describe national patterns in learning disability identification by individual- and school-level characteristics. Our results indicate that sociodemographic characteristics are predictive of being identified with a learning disability. Whereas some conventional areas of disproportionality are confirmed (males and language minorities are more likely to be identified), differences in social class entirely account for black and Hispanic disproportionality. Discrepancy between the results of bivariate and multivariate analyses reaffirms the importance of employing sophisticated methodology in explorations of disproportionality.