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The records surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) have been subject to unique treatment in their management and opening. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Records Act) mandated that the records would be opened in full by 2017, unless there was intervention from the sitting president. This study aims to examine the extent to which access to the JFK assassination records has been granted. It evaluates how open the archive is, and the consequences of withholding government records. It examines how the continued non-disclosure of this archive has helped to fuel the controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death.

This research was approached as traditional historical document analysis, reviewing the JFK assassination records releases from 2017–2018 and the broader landscape of access to information in America. A random sampling of the open and redacted records was used to undertake a statistical analysis on the amount of information that has been withheld. It was supplemented with freedom of information requests intended to reveal further information on the approach taken to redaction. The work was situated within a broader global literature review.

The research identified the limits to access to the JFK assassination records that exist because of the continued postponement and redaction of information by US federal government agencies. It found that the ambiguous language used for exemptions in the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the JFK Records Act has allowed agencies the freedom to interpret and limit access to information if they desired. Furthermore, agencies have had the power to hold and sanitise their own records. The work identifies how these approaches have caused questions, inconsistences, a lack of transparency and accountability in the US government. The lack of centralised processes and related explanations can be seen to fuel further controversies and conspiracies.

Using a systematic research methodology, this work presents a careful analysis of the varying processes and their implications for understanding of the events that surrounded Kennedy’s assassination. Lessons learnt can be applied to the general management of freedom of information and access to information.

This research examines the effect of team diversity on customer behavior (purchase likelihood) associated with sustainable luxury products and further considers the mediating role of customer skepticism and the moderating role of the growth mindset in these relationships.

Study 1 aims to confirm the direct effect of team diversity on purchase intention and the mediating effect of customer skepticism. Featuring a fictitious brand, Study 2 seeks to test the moderating effects of a growth mindset. This research recruits participants located in the USA who have shopping experiences with a luxury product.

The findings support the notion that team diversity can mitigate customers' skepticism while enhancing purchase likelihood. Moreover, this effect is stronger among those with a growth mindset. As such, the findings suggest that communicating the heterogeneous composition of team members can benefit sustainable luxury brands.

Underpinned by the signaling theory and incremental theory, this research examines the effects of team diversity on customer behavior (purchase likelihood) related to sustainable luxury products, as well as the role of customer skepticism (as a mediator) and a growth mindset (as a moderator) in these relationships. Thus, the findings broaden the current diversity research which has predominantly focused on team decision-making and performance.

Knowledge of how social movements move, diffuse, and expand collective action events is central to movement scholarship and activist practice. Our purpose is to extend sociological knowledge about how movements (sometimes) diffuse and amplify insurgent actions, that is, how movements move. We extend movement diffusion theory by drawing a conceptual analogue with military theory and practice applied to the case of the organized and highly disciplined nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We emphasize emplacement in a base-mission extension model whereby a movement base is built in a community establishing a social movement school for inculcating discipline and performative training in cadre who engage in insurgent operations extended from that base to outlying events and campaigns. Our data are drawn from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted with participants of the Nashville civil rights movement. The analytic strategy employs a variant of the “extended case method,” where extension is constituted by movement agents following paths from base to outlying campaigns or events. Evidence shows that the Nashville movement established an exemplary local movement base that led to important changes in that city but also spawned traveling movement cadre who moved movement actions in an extensive series of pathways linking the Nashville base to events and campaigns across the southern theater of the civil rights movement. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.

Chapter 6 explores the cultural impact of mental health, addiction, and dual diagnosis challenges with a specific focus on Irish society. The chapter takes a staggered approach whereby each type of challenge is separated and discussed individually, before being joined together through discussions on dual diagnosis as presented in Section 6.4. These discussions are designed to highlight the cultural deviance that is perceived by other people towards those with such diagnosis over the years that such diagnosis have been prevalent in history. In particular, the discussions around dual diagnosis here will strengthen the discussion in Chapter 4: ‘The Conundrum of Dual Diagnosis’ and will set the groundwork for the remainder of this text.

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing assessment of executive compensation by investigating the nexus between managerial entrenchment factors, adopting a multifaceted perspective encompassing both economic and non-economic dimensions.

This research employs pooled cross-sectional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and Least Squares with Dummy Variables (LSDV) models with fixed effects to examine the determinants of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation.

This research identifies firm size, performance (via ROA and Tobin’s Q), and CEO characteristics (age, tenure, stock ownership, MBA degree) as significant determinants of executive compensation at the 0.05 level. In contrast, the prestige of educational institutions, doctoral degrees, and the MBA’s relevance to short-term performance, along with CEO tenure, do not significantly affect pay. Additionally, the study highlights the significance of industry type (manufacturing vs technology) in shaping compensation, emphasizing the role of firm metrics and CEO credentials in designing executive pay packages.

This research introduces an innovative approach to controlling unobserved heterogeneity and adjusting for the dynamic nature of CEO compensation attributes across diverse CEO characteristics. By integrating both pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) models, the study addresses the challenges posed by time-invariant variables and unobservable heterogeneity. Such issues have historically skewed the accuracy of traditional OLS models in identifying the comprehensive array of factors—both economic and non-economic—that influence CEO compensation. This novel methodological framework significantly advances the examination of unobservable variables that may vary not only across the firms selected for analysis but also over time periods, thereby offering a more detailed understanding of the determinants of CEO pay.

In this chapter, the authors critically examine the application of unmeasured latent method factors (ULMFs) in human resource and organizational behavior (HROB) research, focusing on addressing common method variance (CMV). The authors explore the development and usage of ULMF to mitigate CMV and highlight key debates concerning measurement error in the HROB literature. The authors also discuss the implications of biased effect sizes and how such bias can lead HR professionals to oversell interventions. The authors provide evidence supporting the effectiveness of ULMF when a specific assumption is held: a single latent method factor contributes to the data. However, the authors dispute this assumption, noting that CMV is likely multidimensional; that is, it is complex and difficult to fix with statistical methods alone. Importantly, the authors highlight the significance of maintaining a multidimensional view of CMV, challenging the simplification of a CMV as a single source. The authors close by offering recommendations for using ULMFs in practice as well as more research into more complex forms of CMV.

Sociologists have long thought of the integration of people in communities – social integration – and hierarchical social systems – systemic integration – as contradictory goals. What strategies allow organizations to reconcile social and systemic integration? We examine this question through 40 in-depth, longitudinal interviews with leaders of nonprofit organizations that engage in the dual pursuit of social and systemic integration. Two processes reveal how the internal structure of organizations often mirrors the ways in which organizations are embedded in their local environments. When organizations engage in loose demographic coupling, relegating those who “match” the community to the work of social integration, they produce internal inequalities and justify them by claiming community building as sacred work. When engaging in community anchoring, organizations challenge internal and external inequalities simultaneously, but this process comes with costs. Our findings contribute to a constructivist understanding of community, the mechanisms by which organizations produce inequalities, and a place-based conception of organizations as embedded in community.

Body weight has a long history of functioning as a symbol of one’s beauty, social status, morality, discipline, and health. It has also been a standard inflicted much more intensely on women than men. While US culture has long idealized thinness for women, even at risky extremes, there is growing evidence that weight standards are broadening. Larger bodies are becoming more visible and accepted, while desire for and approval of a thin ideal has diminished. However, the continued widespread prevalence of anti-fat attitudes and stigma leaves uncertainty about just how much weight standards are changing. This study used an online survey (n = 320) to directly compare evaluations of thin, fat, and average size women through measures of negative stereotypes, prejudicial attitudes, and perceptions about quality of life. Results indicated that, as hypothesized, thin women were perceived less favorably than average weight women. However, fat women were perceived less favorably than both average and thin women. Men were harsher than women in their evaluations of only fat women. Additionally, participants being underweight or overweight did not produce an ingroup bias in their evaluations of underweight and overweight targets, respectively. That is, participants did not rate their own group more favorably, with the exception of overweight participants having lower prejudice toward overweight targets. These findings add to the emerging evidence that women’s weight standards are in transition, marked by an increasingly negative perception of thin women, though not necessarily growing positivity toward fat women. This evidence further points toward the need for more extensive research on attitudes of people across the entire weight spectrum.