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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The basis of ethnic groups' economic status remains among the enduring controversies in both popular and social scientific discussions of inequality. While this debate commonly opposes cultural attributes to structures of opportunity and disadvantage, we point out that various policies—including banking, public employment, business development programs, and refugee resettlement—have also had important impacts on ethnic economies. Because our definition of the ethnic economy includes both the ethnic-owned economy of the self-employed as well as the ethnic-controlled economy, wherein ethnic networks help locate jobs in non-co-ethnic firms or the public sector, we are able to incorporate a wide range of groups and contexts in our analysis. Our results suggest that the economic status of certain ethnic groups in American society reflects the outcome of specific policies that helped or hindered the growth of their ethnic economies. We conclude that policies, such as public employment, which incorporate various ethnic groups, are a more viable means of nurturing ethnic economic growth than selective programs that benefit some groups while excluding others.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education instructors were forced to make necessary changes in the conversion from face to face instruction to the use of online and virtual platforms. Even before this shift, scholars have long advocated the introduction of active and constructivist learning practices, and to move away from the traditional lecture as a means to disseminate information in the classroom. This chapter highlights ways in which active learning and constructivist-related activities such as motivational activities, critical-thinking activities, creative-thinking activities, and collaborative learning activities can be employed in the online classroom for successful teaching practice. Also detailed is a case study of the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of a Jigsaw activity used in a Master’s level human resource development (HRD) course. HRD as a field takes well to learner centered instruction, as it is an applied discipline that is deeply concerned with the aspirational development of adults in training, organization change, and careers. Lessons learned from the deployment of active learning and constructivist-related activities within the case are adaptable and applicable for online instructors both in and outside of the field of HRD who are interested in building such experiences for students in online programs.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

Concern about special education's future is widespread. Now there are calls for special education's abandonment or its nonexistence in any environment other than general education (i.e., for full inclusion or some form of general education only). Some advocates for reform consider special education obsolete, to be rejected in favor of newer ideas known as inclusionary education, and they advocate abandoning special education.

Now may be the time for a second revolution in thinking about what special education is and does so that it evolves into a service that more consistently realizes its promise. Special education is likely to become extinct if its devolution continues. Its collapse would hasten the abandonment of public education. Alternatively, it could evolve to become a viable part of public education, a distinct entity, a clearly identifiable and viable part of educating all children appropriately in public schools.

Among the many causes of special education's devolution, some stand out prominently: (1) confusing must and may; (2) accepting illogic and imprecision of language; (3) responding to all diversities in the same way; (4) spurning science; (5) confusing attribute and person; (6) putting the worst possible face on special education; and (7) misconstruing least restrictive environment.

Better thinking and clearer communication are required to achieve special education's revitalization. These include calling things what they are and relying on new, younger leaders. Clear and wide understanding – consensus – about what special education is and does and acceptance of the idea that we must have it as a separate and distinct part of universal public education would be revolutionary.

In the rapidly changing and globalizing environment, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become increasingly important. In this study, we paid specific attention to the voluntary announcements of M&A budgets by Japanese firms. We discussed the antecedents and consequences of such announcements by incorporating the context of Japan, which has experienced an enduring economic downturn since 1990 and is in the process of adopting a Western style of governance. Drawing on signaling theory and impression management theory, this exploratory study intended to contribute to the literature by incorporating the influence of the social context and by arguing for the possibility that announcements of M&A budgets may be used not only for strategic purposes but also for impression management and to reduce information asymmetry.

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.