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Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

Purpose – We use data from the United States and Finland, a literature review, and historical analysis to understand the concept and role of cool within global consumer culture.

Methodology/approach – This is a conceptual review and qualitative analysis of data from depth interviews, journals, and online discussion groups in two U.S. locations and one Finnish location.

Findings – Cool is a slang word connoting a certain style that involves masking and hiding emotions. As cool diffuses we find that it is both distilled and diluted. The concept itself has also evolved. What was once a low-profile means of survival and later a youthful rebellious alternative to class-based status systems has become commoditized.

Research limitations/implications – The study has been conducted in two cultures with a limited range of ages thought to be most susceptible to the appeal of being cool.

Practical limitations/implications – Marketers may not yet have exploited cool as effectively as they have exploited sex, but mainstream consumers now look for cool in the marketplace more than within themselves. The result is a continuous race to offer the next cool thing.

Originality/value of chapter – It is argued that coolness is a new status system largely replacing social class, especially among the young.

Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.

The field of behavioral business ethics has come a long way since its inception nearly five decades ago. Pioneered in part in response to a number of high-profile corporate scandals, the early field of business ethics was thought by many to be a fad that would recede along with the salience of the scandals of the day. Yet, this could not have been further from the truth. The need for behavioral business ethics research remains ever-present, as evidenced by the sustained number of scandals and unethical behavior within and by organizations. Moreover, research in this area has burgeoned. In the 1980s, only 54 articles had been published on this topic (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008); today, a similar search yields over 3,000 “hits.” In light of the area’s growth, we suggest the need to take a look back at the seminal work that sparked social scientific work in the field. In particular, this chapter has two main objectives. First, we provide a review of select foundational work. In so doing, we identify some of the key trends that characterized early knowledge development in the field. Second, we draw on this historical context to consider how past trends relate to current work and speak to future research opportunities.

The typical unqualified audit report of publicly traded firms in the United States indicates the nature of the audit and an opinion that the firm’s financial statements fairly present the financial position and the results of operations of the audited company. Accordingly, some users of the financial statements, including investors, do not consider the unqualified opinion to be very useful in providing other informational value about the particular audit. In this paper, the authors examined the views of two stakeholders in the US financial reporting system, auditors in large public accounting firms and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in the Fortune 1000. The authors elicited their perceptions involving a Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) proposed auditing standard commonly referred to as “the other information standard.” This standard, if adopted, would require the auditor to evaluate information other than the audited financial statements and the related audit report for (1) a material inconsistency, (2) a material misstatement of fact, or (3) both, and if they exist, communicate them in the auditor’s report. The authors developed their research instrument based upon its perceived potential effects on the audit if adopted, some of which were referenced in the exposure draft of the proposed standard (PCAOB, 2013). They found that a majority of each groups believed, among other effects, that the proposed standard would increase audit costs, subject both the auditor and the reporting firm to increased litigation risk, and that its implementation costs by affected firms would exceed any benefits to financial statement users created by the standard.