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The transition services requirement was added to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990. Congress included this mandate in the IDEA to ensure that students with disabilities would be prepared for post-school life. The mandate charges school district personnel with planning and implementing transition services as part of special education programming provided to all eligible students with disabilities when they reach age 16 or earlier if required by state law. The purpose of this chapter is to review the legal requirements regarding transition services and the delivery of transition programming to students with disabilities.

This chapter provides a theoretical and empirical examination of young people’s role in identifying and solving problems in their communities from a social justice perspective. The complex political processes in South Africa stymie a top-down approach for advancing social justice. Therefore, this study focuses on a bottom-up stance to nurture social justice efforts by concentrating on the role of the youth, younger than 18 years, in initiating change in their communities. Such engagement aligns with the principles outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted in 1989 that aims to enrich both the individual and the community (Dirsuweit & Mohamed, 2016; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1989). The University of South Africa is involved in a community outreach program of this nature, commissioned by Empowervate Trust, a South African non-profit organization that manages the Youth Citizen’s Action Campaign (Y-CAP), which equips learners with the skills to solve societal issues in their respective communities. This chapter thus attempts to clarify what active citizenship means to the youth, by focusing on the findings from focus-group interviews with South African learners who are involved with community development projects that advance social justice initiatives in their communities through the Y-CAP endeavor.

A company that is registered with share capital may issue different classes of shares and may confer rights on members, which place them in different classes in the company’s organisational structure. This paper is concerned with the propensity for encroachment on such vested class rights as companies strive to wriggle out of business challenges spawn by the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the extent of protection that the law accords to the different classes of shareholders and members in a company especially when the company seeks to vary the vested class rights.

A doctrinal methodology, which relies on existing literature, case law and statutory instruments, is adopted to explore the nature of class rights and the adequacies of the remedial measures availed by statute to the aggrieved bearers of class rights in the context of the South African Companies Act 71 of 2008 with inferences drawn from the UK companies statute and case law.

The findings indicate that accessing the remedies available to aggrieved shareholders under the relevant statutory provisions are fraught with conditionality, which could make them elusive to those who may seek to rely on such provisions to vindicate any encroachment on their class rights.

The paper embodies cogent information on the interpretation and application of the relevant statutory provisions geared at the protection of shareholders class rights, which should serve as guides to companies and the courts in dealing with matters that affect the vested class rights of shareholders and members of a company.

The paper shows that protections offered to classes of shareholders under the law can also be extended to classes of members who are not necessarily shareholders, and that shareholders who seek to vindicate their class rights may conveniently rely on Section 163 that provides for unfair prejudice remedy to avoid the onerous conditions under Section 164 of the South African Companies Act 71 of 2008, which directly deals with class rights.

We argue that by conducting systematic research with communities rather than on communities, community-based research (CBR) methods can both advance the study of human interaction and strengthen public understanding and appreciation of social sciences. CBR, among other methods, can also address social scientists’ ethical and social commitments. We recap the history of calls by leading sociologists for rigorous, empirical, community-engaged research. We introduce CBR methods as empirically grounded methods for conducting social research with social actors. We define terms and describe the range of methods that we include in the umbrella term, “community-based research.” After providing exemplars of community-based research, we review CBR’s advantages and challenges. We, next, summarize an intervention that we undertook as members of the Publication Committee of the URBAN Research Network’s Sociology section in which the committee developed and disseminated guidelines for peer review of community-based research. We also share initial responses from journal editors. In the conclusion, we revisit the potential of community-based research and note the consequences of neglecting community-based research traditions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptualisation of the Smart Sustainable City (SSC) with new concepts of resilience thinking in relation to urgent societal challenges facing the built environment. The paper aims to identify novel methodologies for smart reuse of heritage sites with a pluralist past as integral to inclusive urban development.

SSC concepts in the global literature are studied to define a new reference framework for integrated urban planning strategies in which cultural resilience and co-creation matter. This framework, augmented by UNESCO’s holistic recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), was tested in two investigative projects: the historic centre of South Africa’s capital Tshwane and the proximate former Westfort leprosy colony.

The research confirms that SSC concepts need enlargement to become more inclusive in acknowledging “cultural diversity” of communities and engaging “chrono-diversity” of extant fabric. A paradigm shift in the discourse on integrated urban (re)development and adaptive reuse of built heritage is identified, influenced by resilience and sustainability thinking. Both projects show that different architectural intervention strategies are required to modulate built fabric and its emergent qualities and to unlock embedded cultural energy.

Together with a critical review of SSC concepts and the HUL in relation to urban (re)development, this paper provides innovative methodologies on creative adaptation of urban heritage, reconciling “hard” and “soft” issues, tested in the highly resilient systems of Tshwane.

The study explores experiences of African immigrants in their self-employment journey. South Africa has been receiving many African immigrants seeking for socio-economic survival. This presents a gap to understand the self-employment journey of such immigrants post-settlement.

A qualitative inquiry is used with semi-structured interviews using a sample of African immigrants based in South Africa. Narrative enquiry was utilised in trying to understand the African immigrant self-employment journey.

The findings show strategies used by African immigrant entrepreneurs in their self-employment journey. These include immigrant relying on established relationships to respond to contextual challenges. Further, immigrant entrepreneurs turned to borrowing from family, including personal savings and using fronts as a capital generation strategy.

Based on the findings strategies are suggested as a useful precursor in advancing understanding of the African immigrant self-employment journey. This becomes useful especially considering ideals for assisting post-settlement of migrants.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between the determinants of relationship marketing and the behavioural component of these determinants within a non-Western retail stores setting.

A quantitative approach was employed, using 19-item, seven-point Likert scaled questionnaire administered to 350 participants with 67 per cent usable response rate. Data was analysed using exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s α internal consistency; correlation analysis and One-Way Analysis of Variance test.

Trust-Quality services emerged as the most outstanding determinant of relationship marketing within the retail stores context followed by relational orientation, commitment and proximity. Quality services were found to have the most significant positive impact on trust whereas trust was found to have a strong positive impact on commitment. Relational orientation was found to have a strong positive impact on trust, commitment and quality services but proximity was found to be a docile factor determining commitment and relational orientation. Finally, consumers were identified as being more relationally oriented than retailers and all categories of consumers can be served with same blend of relationship marketing strategies.

Since findings could not be generalized across other sectors and regions, guides for testing the proposed research model are put forward.

Relationship marketing implementation within the context of retail stores will be more successful if based on delivery of quality services. Consumers are also more likely to patronize closer than distant retail stores. As such, even if retail firms build strong trust, commitment and relational orientation with customers through quality services, consumers will still patronize stores that are closer to them more than stores in distant locations. Siting retail stores in locations with the largest pool of customers’ is therefore central to enhancing retail stores performance. All categories of customers could be served with same stream of relationship marketing strategies because designing different schemes of relationship marketing programmes for different customer categories were found to be counter-productive.

This paper identified 16 attributes that are important to consumers under four dimensions: Trust-Quality services, relational orientation, commitment and proximity within the retail stores context. The findings are acknowledged to be unique because they emerged from a largely under-researched collectivistic emerging market where relationship marketing formation is key.