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This chapter shares work carried out to use the discipline of Informing Science as a lens to carry out an analysis of the discipline of entrepreneurship. Focusing first at the level of the entrepreneurship discipline itself, recently advanced frameworks for practice-as-entrepreneurial-learning and for the scholarship of teaching and learning for entrepreneurship (SoTLE) are built upon using Gill’s work on academic informing systems to develop a framework that encourages viewing the entrepreneurship discipline as a system that informs entrepreneurial practice. While this may sound self-evident, we will explore how it implies something quite different from the teaching–research–scholarship paradigm to which most of us are accustomed.

To claim for communication professionals the ethical responsibility of contributing to the public debate within the realm of their function in scientific and technological organizations, giving people the power to analyze the information available to them and based on that make better-informed decisions on issues that affect their lives, is the sole purpose of this exercise. Departing from a focus on the messages – information, misinformation and disinformation – we defend to refocus on relations to enable people to make the distinction between them, and then fulfilling communication’s purpose of reflexion.

Through a review of literature, we set out to delimitate and contextualize the role of communication professionals in scientific and technological organizations in today’s social and political environments. We conclude that communication professionals in scientific and technological organizations do need to embrace the responsibility to contribute to the empowerment of citizens regarding their access to information and ability to navigate through the overwhelming amount of data they have access to daily.

As we witness the rise and expansion of populist movements throughout the globe, it is not of lesser importance to reflect on the role of scientific and technological organizations in the public debate. As it is here that public opinion forms, it is important that organizations involved in the scientific and technology development call on themselves and embrace it as part of their identity, the responsibility to inform the decision-making process of citizens with the purpose of bettering it.

This research examines the influence of parents on students studying the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and entering STEM careers. Participating youths were awarded scholarships from large funded US grant programmes. Cases of two graduate students (one female, one male) and one undergraduate student (male) are featured. The first two students in the convenience sample are biology and physics majors in a STEM teacher education program; the third is enrolled in computer science. National reports emphasizing the importance of parents on their children's education are presented, along with diverse international literature. The use of narrative in STEM curriculum and narrative inquiry in STEM research are also documented. Experience, story, and identity form the study's conceptual frame. The narrative inquiry research method employs broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying to elucidate the students' academic trajectories. Incidents of circumstantial and planned parent curriculum making surfaced when the data were serially interpreted. Other noteworthy themes included: (1) relationships between (student) learners and (teacher) parents, (2) invitations to inquiry, (3) modes of inquiry, (4) the improbability of certainty, and (5) changed narratives = changed lives. While policy briefs provide sweeping statements about parents' positive effects on their children, narrative inquiries such as this one illuminate parents' inquiry moves within home environments. These actions became retrospectively revealed in their adult children's lived narratives. These small stories, while not generalizable, map how students, shaped by their parents' nurturing, enter the STEM disciplines and STEM-related careers through multiple pathways in addition to the identified pipeline.

Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders) and Pacific students tend not to attain the same levels of educational success as New Zealanders of European descent. Addressing this problem is a particular challenge at tertiary level in science, engineering, and architecture and design (SEAD). Te Rōpū Āwhina (Āwhina), an initiative at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), aims to produce Māori and Pacific professionals who contribute to Māori and Pacific development and leadership. The objective of this analysis was to summarise quantitative results from the first 11 years of Āwhina and to show they are consistent with an Āwhina ‘effect’; that is, a positive influence on (combined) Māori and Pacific success in the SEAD disciplines. Individual-level records held in the VUW student database were used to generate smoothed trends in SEAD and non-SEAD graduate and postgraduate degree completions since 1991. Substantial improvements in SEAD Māori and Pacific completions occurred between 1999 and 2010, including a 50%- increase in Māori and Pacific postgraduate completions relative to all SEAD postgraduate completions. In the same period, non-SEAD Māori and Pacific postgraduate completions increased at a similar rate to all non-SEAD postgraduate completions. Results were consistent with a strong Āwhina effect, which has important implications for the nature of tertiary institutions, their cultural and social disconnection with Indigenous and minority students, and their social obligations and responsiveness. This analysis did not account for students who did not complete a qualification or include key confounders such as entry qualifications and gender. Definitive confirmation of an Āwhina effect is the subject of ongoing research.

Drawing upon the concepts of transmodernity, pluriversality and border thinking the author stands in a more practical fashion for the co-creation of an-other performative CMS which fosters the decolonization of (critical) management studies – as a way to contribute “to concretely changing the world(s) for the better” (as claimed by the organizers of the symposium “should critical management studies get anything done?” held at the Academy of Management Meeting in 2012 in Boston).

From a more practical and less opaque perspective on border thinking it is shown how and why border thinking can both enable and constrain critical scholars and people to move across the borders of the colonial difference and from Eurocentric modernity toward transmodern pluriversality.

The current performative turn of CMS fails to address the agency of critical knowledge as a potential reworking of Occidentalism which can be mobilized to “manage” the rise of alternatives and knowledges from the rest of the world in general and from emerging economies in particular.

Border thinking as a crucial concept from the coloniality/modernity research program from Latin America is taken as an important contribution from the colonial difference to the co-creation of decolonial management studies (DMS), an-other performative CMS which fosters the construction of a world in which many worlds and knowledges can coexist as a way to change it for the better.

Teacher assistants and support staff play a critical role in the educational outcomes of Indigenous students. Small steps are being made in ‘Closing the Gap’ in Australia between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational outcomes (Australian Government, 2013), and the trends are similar throughout other Indigenous populations. However, there is still much that needs to be done. This chapter will describe the role of teacher assistants and other support staff, and share pedagogy and practices that have been successful in engaging Indigenous students within an inclusive and responsive curriculum. The chapter will conclude with a summary of key concepts and recommendations for further research.

Assessing the literature on top management teams (TMTs) published through 2004, we found a predominantly U.S.-centric set of studies on TMTs and the upper echelons perspective (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Through 1996, this literature was virtually silent on the impact of increasing globalization of economic transactions on TMTs – surprising given emphases in strategy on multinational firms, their organizational forms, and modes of entry into foreign markets. We identify critical areas for research on international dimensions of TMTs, their relationships to national and organizational contexts, and their influence on firm outcomes in a world increasingly populated by firms addressing global markets.