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This study examines the director labor market to better understand which director attributes are important for board service.

Director level data, which includes proxies for both human and social capital, is analyzed to determine which characteristics increase the likelihood of gaining additional board appointments.

We find that general skills and director connections are valued in the marketplace. Among specific director characteristics, financial expertise, holding an MBA degree, and S&P 500 experience are positively associated with gaining new board appointments. Moreover, regardless of the director’s level of expertise, highly connected individuals are more likely to obtain new appointments. Finally, from a range of characteristics, only director connections mitigate the negative consequences of serving on the boards of firms that restate their financials.

While most research has analyzed the effectiveness of boards of directors as a whole, this study examines the value of individual director characteristics within the context of the labor market.

This chapter will provide an overview of the types of concerns that are evident in the research literature regarding how well teachers are prepared to teach in inclusive classrooms citing both preservice education and in-service professional development/learning. It will present an overview of the measurements that have been used to measure teachers’ perceptions of preparedness for inclusive environments and the use of surveys to assess attitudes, beliefs, and values. The chapter will conclude with a discussion regarding measuring teachers’ perceptions to inform/improve teacher preparation efforts/policies/practices and what needs to be done to improve teacher preparation for inclusive education.

Status, which is based on differences in esteem and honor, is an ancient and universal form of inequality which nevertheless interpenetrates modern institutions and organizations. Given its ubiquity and significance, we need to better understand the basic nature of status as a form of inequality. I argue that status hierarches are a cultural invention to organize and manage social relations in a fundamental human condition: cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals with nested competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes in the effort. I consider this claim in relation to both evolutionary arguments and empirical evidence. Evidence suggests that the cultural schema of status is two-fold, consisting of a deeply learned basic norm of status allocation and a set of more explicit, variable, and changing common knowledge status beliefs that people draw on to coordinate judgments about who or what is more deserving of higher status. The cultural nature of status allows people to spread it widely to social phenomena (e.g., firms in a business field) well beyond its origins in interpersonal hierarchies. In particular, I argue, the association of status with social difference groups (e.g., race, gender, class-as-culture) gives inequalities based on those difference groups an autonomous, independent capacity to reproduce themselves through interpersonal status processes.