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An ongoing public relations (PR) crisis resulted from the behavior of Mylan, a pharmaceutical company, regarding its well-known antianaphylaxis product, the EpiPen. Mylan’s mishandling of the EpiPen controversy widened its legitimacy gap among external stakeholder groups – as well as among its employees. Its actions conflicted with the values expressed by its corporate social responsibility (CSR) rhetoric and jeopardized stakeholders’ commitment, loyalty, and productivity. In this chapter, I argue that #EpiGate renders Mylan unable to activate the type of collective identity orientation needed among employees during a legitimacy controversy. Employing identification and storytelling as critical lenses, rhetorical analysis of Mylan’s CSR documents suggests how its contradictory messages compounded its legitimacy gap among employees. Mylan’s inability to address rising CSR expectations among employees involves both human resources (HR) and PR practitioners. Suggestions for how these functions should work together to better shore up expression of CSR values with employee expectations are provided.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

This study examined dimensions of young-adulthood development in lived experience reported by young persons (19 women, 18 men) with the disabling condition of kidney failure requiring chronic dialysis or kidney transplantation. In semistructured phone interviews, participants (ages 23–37) described their family/living situation, employment and community activity, current situation, and experience. Participants' qualitative responses about “the way you see things, do things, feel about things” and “how you feel about yourself” were examined to identify themes. Limited achievement of proposed “successful” dimensions of young adulthood characterized the study cohort, based on indicators included in the interview. In qualitative data, the theme of perceived stigma and spoiled identity (Goffman, 1963) was reflected in comments offered by participants regarding their self-confidence and motivation to pursue goals. A second theme in participants' qualitative responses was a sense of isolation from age peers who shared their condition, and participants expressed frustration around having an age-inappropriate condition (“why me?”). Perceived stigma and spoiled identity impact social ties and life goals and are understudied influences in the life course trajectory of young persons with kidney failure and the challenges inherent in navigating health status and developmental life course transitions.

For more than a decade, public opinion polls have shown that nearly 80% of Americans support hate crime legislation as a response to violence committed because of the victim's race, color, religion, and sexual orientation. Americans' widespread support for legislation aimed at bias-motivated crimes is not matched by the federal and state efforts devoted to responding to such crimes. This chapter describes the myriad factors contributing to America's limited police and prosecutorial response to hate crimes. After a discussion of the patchwork of state and federal legislation aimed at hate crimes, the chapter analyzes the substantial legislative and administrative structures that hamper the enforcement of hate crime law in the United States.

Prior research has found that staff accountants may be disappointed when their initial work expectations do not match their early work experiences and this disappointment can lead to negative job outcomes (AAA, 1993; Dean, Ferris, & Konstans, 1988; Carcello, Copeland, Hermanson, & Turner, 1991; Padget, Paulson, Hughes, Hughes, & Ernst and Young LLP, 2005). This paper reports information obtained from the staff auditors about their initial expectations on a variety of work factors, early work experiences related to those factors, and subsequent perceptions of the factors. Similar to prior research, the results show the new accountants had high initial expectations about the public accounting work environment and that their subsequent job perceptions were lower than their initial expectations. Explanations for the declines were not obvious, as many of the changes in perceptions were not significantly related to relevant work experiences. Given the decrease in job perceptions over time on a variety of factors, the results indicate that a gap exists between the initial work expectations of the new accountants and the work environment that they encounter during their first 18 months of employment. This gap is important because prior research indicates when employees have unmet expectations they have less positive job attitudes and behaviors (Padget et al., 2005; Dean et al., 1988). Further, this gap exists in spite of firms' efforts to increase communication with students via web sites, internships, and visits to college campuses, and efforts to improve the work environment (e.g., flexible work schedules, compressed workweeks, telecommuting, etc.).

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the social significance of digital technologies for researching and understanding active women's bodies, identities, practices, and politics. In critically surveying the rapidly expanding body of literature on women's social media use for sport and physical activity, the chapter highlights the multidisciplinary nature of much of this work and its feminist and social justice orientation toward understanding the uneven impacts of platformed engagement for women, particularly those who are socially marginalized.

The chapter synthesizes the current literature to identify feminist and sociological approaches to analyzing sporting women's social media use. It draws on the authors' own research as case study illustrations of key developments.

Findings identify opportunities and challenges for women navigating the complexities of social media encounters in their sporting and physical cultural lives, focusing on self-presentation, branding and digital labor, community-building, and activism. It proposes theoretical, methodological, and ethical directions for sociological interventions in this area of study.

Future research should investigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape, issues of social justice and marginalized voices, and the social conditions that sustain gender inequalities in sport and social media spaces.

The chapter contributes original insights on emerging directions in the study of women, sport, and social media. Furthermore, it addresses the challenges for social researchers responding to the uptake of new social media platforms by female athletes and physically active women.