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School principals make sense of multiple messages, policies, and contexts within their school environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine specifically how school leaders make sense of hiring and subjective evaluation of on‐the‐job teacher performance.

This qualitative study drew from 42 interviews with 21 principals from a mid‐sized Florida school district. Two rounds of semi‐structured interviews (one to two hours each) were conducted with the informants over two summers (2005‐2006). The multi‐year study allows the authors to assess the consistency across principal participants.

Principals' personal beliefs, background, and experiences were found to shape their conceptions and preferences for teacher characteristics. School type (e.g. elementary, secondary, levels of poverty) also influenced principals' perceptions of and preferences for specific applicant and teacher characteristics. Principals in the sample, however, showed surprising consistency towards certain characteristics (caring, subject matter knowledge, strong teaching skills) and job fit (person‐job). Sampled principals reported that each vacancy is different and is highly dependent on the position, team, and individuals. Regardless of the position or school setting, federal, state, and district mandates strongly influenced how principals made sense of the hiring process and on‐the‐job performance.

The findings underscore the complexity of the human resource functions in education and raise important questions of how school leaders reconcile personal preferences and building‐level needs with demands from the district, state, and federal levels.

The authors' findings offer important insight into the complex conceptualizations that principals hold and the balances that must be struck in the face of policy and hiring constraints. How principals make sense of teacher quality, however, has not been examined. This study contributes to the extant research and makes a theoretical contribution to studies using a cognitive frame to understand school leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that agricultural commodity value chain development using multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) can fast-track improvement in the livelihoods of rural farming households. With the view that such partnerships can raise farmers’ incomes, the study uses the case of the organic pineapple (OP) value chain in Ntungamo, Western Uganda, to understand the governance features that hold the value chain partners together, to analyse the costs and margins to the participating farmers, to identify opportunities for demand-driven upgrading of the farmers’ skills and knowledge, and the role that partnerships play in such upgrading.

The study uses the qualitative tools of value chain analysis: value chain maps of stakeholders, processes and support services of the OP value chain, and a quantitative tool to analyse costs and margins to the participating farmers. Interviews were conducted with key informants from the OP innovation platform, and survey data collected for the planting season, February–July, 2014, across three farmer categories of certified organic, conventional, and farmers not participating in the innovation platform.

Careful selection of partnerships to develop the value chain is found to be critical. Partners to involve should be those that enable the upgrading of farmers’ knowledge, skills and technologies to position them for better markets. Partners should also include those that enable the improvement of margins to the farmers and efficiency of the value chain. The strategic MSPs should be bound by formal contracts, to ensure stable relationships in the value chain and hence sustainable market access for the farmers.

Although carried out on a specific value chain in a specific local context, this is not likely to limit the applicability of the findings to commodity value chains in a range of local contexts.

The study fulfils the need to highlight the role that stakeholder partnerships can play in value chain development and how they can be sustained by governance and institutional arrangements.

This paper aims to explore alternative literacy instruction with incarcerated youth, add to the body of existing literature documenting the literacy of those incarcerated and investigate the construction of book clubs through a critical lens.

This qualitative case study answered the following research questions: What can a critical book club reveal about the literacy lives of these incarcerated youth? What can we learn from incarcerated youth through a critical book club? Data were collected through participant observation and in-depth interviews and analyzed using a critical literacy framework.

Findings indicate students used text connections to critically reflect on selves and schools. They questioned issues of power, particularly the power of literacy in their own lives as well as the power of schools, teachers and curriculum. The paper concludes with the authors’ critical reflection on both the findings and process which results in implications for future book clubs in settings with incarcerated youth.

As educators, administrators and community members living in the “age of incarceration” (Hill, 2013), there is a social responsibility to design curriculum and pedagogy that expands instruction in correctional facilities.

The need for expanded literacy instruction in juvenile detention centers has been widely documented and supported; however, conventional methods of teaching literacy are not always successful for youth who may not have had positive experiences with traditional schooling. This study expands and explores literacy instruction with incarcerated youth through book clubs, an alternative literacy structure which challenges traditional curricula, pedagogical practices and culturally irrelevant texts which often contribute to the alienation and disempowerment of many students. Book clubs can facilitate new understandings through a critical lens.

Fiscal conditions and budget constraints in the United States have placed solutions to budget deficit problems at the center of the public policy debate. Preferences for deficit reduction strategies are likely to be heavily associated with particular ideologies and other demographic and economic variables. Therefore, since this study is a true randomized experiment, it provides strong evidence about the influence of question wording on deficit reduction preferences, and therefore the likelihood it is susceptible to manipulation. We find clear evidence that using the word ‘tax’ significantly and substantially influences respondents’ choices. This result is robust over two experimental trials about a year apart and whether or not control variables are included.

Cervical cancer (CxCa) incidence and mortality remain unacceptably high in South Carolina, USA, presenting an ideal opportunity for intervention. To address this need, Cervical Cancer-Free South Carolina developed an academic-community partnership with researchers and students at a public university to design, implement, and evaluate a theory-based CxCa communication campaign, It’s My Time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The goal of this campaign was to decrease CxCa by increasing human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and appropriate screening. This paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a successful theory-based CxCa prevention communication campaign for college women based on formative audience research and targeted messages delivered to audience segments through new and traditional communication channels. The health belief model (HBM) served as a theoretical framework for the campaign throughout development, implementation, and evaluation.

This campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of the HBM to address CxCa prevention, including HPV vaccine acceptability. The campaign aimed to increase perceptions of susceptibility, which were low, by emphasizing that HPV is a sexually transmitted infection. A community-based grassroots approach to addressing disparities in CxCa prevention increased benefits and decreased barriers. Social media emerged as a particularly appropriate platform to disseminate cues to action. In total, 60 percent of participants who responded to an anonymous web-based survey evaluation indicated that they received the HPV vaccine as a result of campaign messages.

This paper offers practical suggestions to campaign planners about building academic-community partnerships to develop theory-based communication campaigns that include conducting formative research, segmenting target audiences, engaging with young people, and incorporating social media.

This study aims to provide insights into ecosystem builder futurists’ work and their orientations toward creating more connected communities of the future.

Anticipation of and relationship with the future are not straightforward. How we approach the future and our relationship with it has underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions (Poli, 2010, 2017). Forecasting (Makridakis et al., 2008), foresight (Bishop and Hines, 2012; Hines and Bishop, 2013; Popper, 2008), futures studies (Bell, 2009; Gidley, 2017) and anticipatory logics (Miller and Poli, 2010; Miller et al., 2017; Nadin, 2010; Poli, 2017) inform this research study of a select group of futurists’ relationships with the future. This research explores ecosystem builder futurists’ work and their orientations toward creating more connected communities of the future. A primary driver of this research aims to understand how futurists with emergentist understandings think about and work with their clients to better understand how to facilitate individual and community transformations through anticipatory future perspectives.

This qualitative study was designed to explore the why, where and how of the ecosystem builder futurists. The “why” question of their work focused on capacity building, disruption and community for evolving systems revealing an emergentist orientation to the future. The “where” question, focusing on where their passions and ideas for futures work came from, revealed a commitment to forge new territories and support communities through the change process. Finally, the “how” questions revealed using both/and methods of traditional and innovative approaches with a special focus on changing the hearts and minds of those who participated in their community change initiatives.

A total of 15 ecosystem futurists participated in this study. Their perspectives were strongly affiliated and aligned with ecosystem building and communities of the future ideas. The narrow focus, however, is important to represent this particular population of the futurists.

There is a great need for ecosystem futurists who can work with communities for social and community transformations. This paper introduces ecosystem builder futurists as a unique population of futurists with specific drivers for and perspectives of change.

Especially in post-normal, mid-pandemic times, there will be more opportunities and need for ecosystem builder futurists to engage groups of individuals in transformative and community building processes. This study focuses on ecosystem futurists and how they work toward fundamental, community change.

Futurists work across many areas and emerging fields. A search of futurist activities reveals some of these areas including Marketing, Team Building, Coaching, Strategic Planning, Partner Management, Marketing Strategy, Ecosystem Building and Sustainable Community Development, to name a few. The purpose of this study is to describe the perspectives and underlying drivers of a particular group of futurists who have been working in large and small communities, organizations, governments and with clients with an underlying focus on creating communities of the future.

Nuclear weapons confront us as the challenge of our times. To understand the special psychological and moral issues raised by nuclear arsenals and their use, we must first grasp the special nature of these weapons. In a recent book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the authors highlighted a fact which often escapes public attention; namely, nuclear weapons, many times more powerful than the 12.5 kiloton uranium bomb and the 22 kiloton plutonium bomb dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are qualitatively different from conventional explosives.

This paper aims to explain the development of fraud prevention disclosure index (FPDI) for Malaysian public universities.

The paper reported a comprehensive review on fraud prevention and control plans of several international policies and of local and international universities.

The final 8 categories and 100 items under review have been developed in an instrument, the proposed FPDI, to measure the level of commitment of public universities in preventing fraud.

The FPDI will serve as an evaluation tool to measure the level of commitment of public universities toward preventing fraud practices through disclosure practices.

The FPDI is hoped to inculcate anti-fraud culture amongst public universities and to promote accountability, widen and strengthen good organization’s ethics, create ethical work place environment and enhance corporate governance framework by instilling a culture of professional conduct that is free from corruption.

This paper is among the first paper that develops the index specifically to measure the universities’ level of commitment to prevent fraud.

The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of innocent suspects to produce accurate alibis, as well as to identify procedures police interviewers can use to increase the probability of generating accurate alibis.

In Study 1, 54 university students had a lecture (target event) end at either the normal time (schema group) or 25 min early (non-schema group) and then attempted to generate an alibi for the target event after either a short, moderate or long delay. In Study 2, 20 students had a lecture end 25 min early and underwent an interview regarding their whereabouts using a reverse-order interview technique designed to disrupt schema usage.

Results from Study 1 suggested that participants relied on schemas to generate their alibis, which led to false alibis for the non-schema group, and this reliance was more pronounced as the delay between event and recall increased. In Study 2, all but one participant produced a false alibi, suggesting reverse order is ineffective in increasing accurate recall in alibi situations.

Results from the two studies revealed that people can produce false alibis easily in mock police interviews – a finding that appears to result from the reliance on schemas. These findings highlight the relative ease with which innocent individuals can produce false alibis. Further research, specific to the alibi generation process, is needed to give police interviewers the tools to produce more accurate and detailed alibis.

This research provides additional evidence regarding the role of schemas in alibi generation. Contrary to findings from the eyewitness area, reverse-order instructions failed to disrupt schema reliance and do not appear to be an effective alibi-elicitation technique.