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As guest editor, I was asked to view Surface Mount Technology (SMT) in the U.S. through the eyes of a member of the Surface Mount Council. As such, my observations are interwoven with the work of the Surface Mount Council.

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

Eco-entrepreneurship has emerged as an intensively debated topic over the last few years with a recent upsurge of writing in the field. At the same time, the debate on this topic has moved increasingly from journals focused on environmental management (Schaltegger, 2002) to mainstream business journals (Cohen & Winn, 2007; Dean & McMullen, 2007). The topic of eco-entrepreneurship lies at the nexus of innovation, concern for the environment, and entrepreneurship. Yet, most contributions to date remain conceptual or focus on reporting case studies (Schaltegger, 2002; Schaltegger & Petersen, 2001). Rarely found are results and analyses of larger-scale empirical surveys on the topic, and it is this gap in the literature that this chapter addresses.

Members of Congress become involved in scandals on a regular basis. These range from personal imbroglios, like sexual affairs or substance abuse, to professional scandals like embezzlement of campaign funds, abuse of office, or insider trading. As a common feature of congressional life, scholars have shown that scandals frequently disrupt the electoral and legislative trajectories of representatives' careers.

However, it must be remembered that congressional offices are comprised of more than just an individual member. Congressional offices are legislative enterprises, and a representative's staff are integral to his or her political and lawmaking activities. Accordingly, studying how scandals relate to the careers of congressional staff is an important but overlooked topic.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the relationship between members' malfeasances and the careers of the staff around them. The authors combine a list of congressional scandals with a dataset that captures the turnover of staff in congressional offices. The chapter proceeds in four parts. First, the authors describe the structure of a congressional office and the relationship between members and their staff. Next, the authors provide an overview of scandals in Congress and what previous literature has uncovered about their effects. Third, the authors examine staffing patterns and turnover in offices hit by scandal, uncovering evidence that scandals are associated with staff departures. The authors end by considering how Congress as an institution could help to protect and support employees who are caught up in a member's poor choices.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

Organizational and cultural misfits have been among the most vital factors associated with Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) failure. Admittedly, in a foreign environment, such problems can be further amplified due to the liability of foreignness, increased information asymmetries and additional transaction costs, further hampering the success of the deal. Considering that, in 2019 alone, the value of cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) exceeded $1.2 trillion (out of $3.9 trillion of the total global M&A value), deciphering the “black box” of CBA success comes at the forefront of the academic and managerial interest. In this chapter, the authors examine a missing link on the post-acquisition performance for cross-border deals, the role of organizational slack. The authors particularly theorize that slack may benefit foreign acquirers, by sheltering them against liability of foreignness and acculturation costs; yet this benefit will be conditional upon the type of slack and the acquirer’s prior CBA experience.

The chapter critically analyzes the concepts and the practices of surveillance in modern and postmodern societies along with their consequences. We show the changes in the systems, which are used to monitor individuals, and emphasize the transition toward soft surveillance systems, probably stimulated by digital technologies. This switch from top-down control to “lateral” monitoring systems encloses surveillance practices with suggestive names like interveillance, synopticon, and dataveillance. The dark side of digital health has a bright start. According to Topol’s (2016) vision of the future, we will soon be the “consumers,” the real protagonists, of the management of our health – thanks largely to the practically endless data about our bodies, behaviors, and lifestyles we will be able to collect and analyze. We will share our health information in real time with the doctors whom we will choose based on their score in clinical rankings (here, too, quantification rears its head). Yet, this simplified version of health makes it seem that there are always some solutions, which the algorithm can supply as long as it has enough information. Moreover, in the United States, some health-insurance companies have started to offer a discount on premiums to the members who agree to collect and share self-tracking data with them. Clearly, the discount is given only to the workers who have healthy habits. At first sight, this can seem as a win-win trade-off; however, what today is presented as an individual option can easily become a requirement tomorrow.