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Researchers have demonstrated that the individual and social identities of adolescents are constructed through interaction with other people as they move through various social sites: home, school, the community, and within the virtual social site created by media (Raissiquier, 1994; Weir, 1996; Willis, 2000).

This chapter explores the extent to which female public relations (PR) practitioners perform professionalism in the workplace by interrogating and examining their professional behaviours. Using an ethnographic approach, where the researcher is immersed in the field, it uncovers the lived experiences and behavioural responses of women working in PR agency environments in the United Kingdom and enables a rich description of professional behaviours to emerge.

Fawkes argues that research into roles in PR ‘has tended to assess roles using management rather than sociological theory’ (2014, p. 2). That is not to say that all PR research adopts the same paradigmatic stance. Several scholars have encouraged the development of a research agenda rooted in social theory. Holtzhausen called for a move away from what she termed the ‘modernist approach to organizations’ (2002, p. 251), which focuses on management discourse, and encouraged instead a focus on the postmodern concept of discourse, where meaning is constructed and conveyed through social and institutional practices.

In seeking to discover the ‘lived experience’ of female practitioners, this chapter locates professionalism in the context of their behaviours and enables individuals to articulate their understandings of the relationship between performance and professionalism. Using Goffman's (1959) work on social encounters as performances in conjunction with Foucauldian discourse and Feminist theory, this chapter explores the three stages of performing professionalism – preparation, performance and reception – through the eyes of women working in PR agencies in the United Kingdom to explore their lived experience and determine how gender affects their performance of professional behaviour.

Institutions of learning are charged with the social responsibility to prepare future professionals for the ever-changing demands of modern society. Universities should provide expanded opportunities for learning and may choose to do so in many ways. Service learning is one approach designed to provide an educational experience that fosters a deeper community investment through involvement and outreach. Service learning engages students in the community in order to help meet the needs of that community (Osteen & Perry, 2012). Universities have begun to use this as an experiential learning approach to prepare professionals to better address the needs of the local communities. Instructors can integrate these opportunities into coursework. As universities respond to societal changes, the infusion of service learning may be the method to do so. While providing benefits to the local community, students also experience growth through the use of these practices. Specifically, service learning activities serve to improve critical thinking skills and improve multicultural competency (Coffey, 2010). This chapter will explore opportunities for universities to integrate social responsibility into the curriculum. Case examples will be provided to showcase possible strategies designed to foster engagement. These examples highlight educational experiences, while also demonstrating contributions that universities can make to the neighboring community.

This chapter examines how Maragoli women farmers’ plot-level crop control, individual, and household variables affect yields. This chapter contributes to a holistic understanding of the ramifications of quantitative and qualitative factors informing women farmers’ plot-level undertakings and yields as well as their innovative and creative strategies for optimizing output. It broadens the existing debate in the sub-Saharan African agricultural production literature by suggesting a composite measure of plot-level crop control as one factor influencing women farmers’ yields even in situations where land is owned by someone else. It also provides a rich discussion of the various and interlocking qualitative factors distorting women farmers’ incentive structures, efforts to increase plot-level yields and their strategies for minimizing the detrimental effects of the same.

A multimethod quantitative and qualitative ethnographic case study approach was used in this study.

This chapter demonstrates that women strategically bargained and invested more of their productive resources on the plots where they anticipated the greatest individual gains.

This chapter underscores women farmers’ ability to boost agricultural output when there are appropriate incentives for them to do so and suggests the theoretical and practical relevance of secure control and property rights over the products of the land not for the household (head), but for the cultivator. The chapter demonstrates and reaffirms that Africa women farmers respond appropriately to incentives and suggests that there is need for a customized, renewed, and sustained emphasis on women farmers’ empowerment and inclusion in all levels in the agricultural sector in order to actualize increased yields. Investing in women farmers and implementing policies that narrow existing gender disparities in African agricultural production systems is holistically beneficial.

In 1976, in a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, Prime Minister James Callaghan asked ‘Why is it that such a high proportion of girls abandon science before leaving school?’ (Gillard, 2018). Little has changed over the last 40 years; a recent report from the National Audit Office (2018, p. 28) stated that only 8% of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) apprenticeships were taken up by women in 2016/2017 and that the shortage of STEM skills in the workforce is a key UK economic problem. However, just as the Aldridge marriage has been the source of considerable interest and the site of significant financial investment in terms of designer kitchens and expensive holidays, so has the issue of ‘girls in science’ been a consistently debated topic and taken up a large chunk of government and industry spending. Research (Archer et al., 2013) suggests that although children enjoy their science experiences in school, too few pupils aspire to a STEM career. It reveals that the pupils most likely to aspire to careers in science are those whose families have high ‘science capital’ which ‘refers to the science-related qualifications, understanding, knowledge (about science and “how it works”), interest and social contacts (e.g. “knowing someone who works in a science-related job”)’ (Archer et al., 2016, p. 3).

Episodes of The Archers are full of scientific talk, from herbal leys to plate meters. This chapter looks at how the science capital in Ambridge is shared. Why is Alice Carter an engineer and not Emma Grundy? Will Kiera Grundy choose physics A level? Who are the female STEM role models? How can the concept of science capital help us to understand the career paths of Ambridge residents? Will the young girls of Ambridge remedy the gender imbalance in STEM careers?