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In our societal context, the neoliberal competitive and knowledge-oriented culture still exerts a stranglehold on teachers' sense of professional autonomy giving rise to a deficit image of them as ‘excessively entitled’. The purpose of this chapter is to eschew this deficit view of teachers by bringing their agentive side to the fore. First, it explores the concept of ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ in terms of the prevalent characteristics of the culture of teaching in schools and the nature of authority wielded by teachers in this culture and its negative consequence on student learning using an excerpt from an English as Second Language (ESL) classroom in India where this study is set. This episode helps expose the teacher's unawareness of the gaps between their intention and action, a hallmark of excessive entitlement. Second, it juxtaposes an alternative image of ‘teacher as researcher’ to foreground teachers' ‘transformative activist stance’ which revolves around their ideological becoming in agentively striving to realise their ‘best-loved self’. Framed within Vygotskian Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the principle of ‘double stimulation’ provides a powerful analytical lens to unpack the complex discursive dynamics of their practice nested within historically developing contradictions. These contradictions work tacitly to drive a wedge between teachers' intentions and action making them feel excessively entitled to passively acquiesce with the existing order of things. This study provides some signposts for teacher education about creating an environment where teachers can reclaim their transformative agency freeing themselves from the ‘excessive entitlement’ that binds their practice to the status quo and diminishes their relationships with students.

In an age of educational reform which incentivises increased digitisation and standardisation, teachers are expected to embrace the rise of ‘new’ tools and pedagogies with limited agency to inform, question or direct what ‘newness’ must be brought into their classrooms. Drawing on my research with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators in South Africa and using an ‘excessive entitlement’ lens, I showcase how teachers' lack of agency can result in ‘defensive’ and ‘coercive’ practices in the classroom which are a far cry from the education transformation imagined according to either global and local imaginaries for teaching and learning. If we are interested in an educational revolution, I argue that a fundamental reorientation in education recognising teachers' agency in informing change is necessary. To do so requires theoretically driven intervention methodologies which view the competing demands placed on teachers as entry points to developing their agency and volition to find practices which work for them and their students in the classroom. To that end, I illustrate how Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) informed interventions like Change Laboratories could aid in this fundamental repositioning for teachers regarding transformational efforts and their far-reaching potential for educational revolution becoming conscious of and overcoming their feelings of excessive entitlement.

Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for teachers seeking to instill in their students habits of critical, creative, and lateral thinking. In Australia as elsewhere, blueprint educational documents embody lofty aspirational statements of inclusion and investment in people and their potential. Yoked to this is a regime routinely imposing high-stakes basic-skills testing on school students, with increasingly constrictive ways of doing, while privileging competition over collaboration. This chapter explores more informal, organic learning. This self-study narrative inquiry explores my career in terms of a struggle to be my most evolved, enlightened self, as opposed to a small-minded, small-hearted mini-me. To balance this, I examine responsible autonomy (including my own), rather than freedom. This chapter also explores investment in humans, with the reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. It draws and reflects upon events in or impacting my hometown, Sydney, Australia, focusing largely on WorldPride, the Women's World Cup, and a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, all of which took place as I compiled this chapter. Accordingly, the narrative focuses primarily on sexuality, gender, and race. I explore the capacity of my surroundings to teach me and my capacity to learn from my surroundings. The findings and discussion comprise diary-type entries of significant events and their implications for (my) excessive entitlement. The final section of this chapter reviews what and how I have learned.

Located at the place where excessive entitlement and the “best-loved self” intersect, this research illustrates what happens when the excessive entitlement of one educator trumps that of another. Then, in a perverse sort of way, those who are excessively entitled may even imply that the other is acting excessively entitled. This is how the “not getting your due is your due” theme emerged in the two exemplary cases that are spotlighted. Excessive entitlement is the belief that one's voice, opinion, and assessment hold more weight than others, whereas the best-loved self is the image to which educators ideally aspire. Given the contested nature of universities, it is not surprising that tensions occur around due – with due being the scholarly attention one legitimately expects to receive. The two featured narratives of experience present “amalgams of experience” lived in multiple academic contexts – with both narrative accounts not turning out as expected. The first story chronicles the choosing of an outstanding doctoral student for a prestigious award; the second one tells how a professor who received two national honors was celebrated at her institution. Through using narrative inquiry as both a research method and a form of representation, the researcher also was able to suggest how people might move beyond excessive entitlement. Narrative inquiry's well-known interpretive tools of fictionalization, broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying, employed repeatedly throughout this chapter, produced deeper meanings and richer understandings that could result to more generous and informed actions for everyone involved.

Like most in education, I rarely take the opportunity to question and slow down enough to reflect on ideas and intentionally notice the subtle shifts in my thoughts. Life is hurried, and finding quiet reflective moments is difficult but not impossible. Encouraged to confront experiences of excessive entitlement in relation to the social, cultural, and political world, I learned that as with much in life there is a give and take, a negotiation of sorts, which if allowed leads to understanding. The interconnectedness of practitioners' varying experiences with administrators and educational policies raises the question of who affects whom and causes me to reflect on my research questions: 1. What is my relationship with excessive teacher entitlement? 2. Am I implicit in its production? If so, how and why?

In this chapter, I reflect on my cognitive and emotional relationship with excessive entitlement as an embodied experience through autoethnography methodology and phenomenology. By troubling or worrying the notion of excessive entitlement, I confront my beliefs through conversations with student teachers and veteran teachers, examining the interconnectedness of how people are implicit in its production. As a researcher and participant, the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology allow me to orient myself to my lived experiences as an art teacher, teacher leader, and faculty member and leader at a private university. Pulling from journal entries, emails, written “ponderings,” noted conversations, and memory, data support the notion that excessive entitlement occurs at all levels in education, and awareness is the first step toward understanding.

Publicly available datasets in the USA present data suppression issues that limit the ability to investigate entrepreneurial subgroups like military veterans, which account for about one in ten entrepreneurs in the USA. Thus, despite public desire to support veteran entrepreneurs (“vetrepreneurs”), there is a limited descriptive understanding on the relationship between veteran business owner demographics, such as gender and race, and their business survival and growth. We address this limited understanding in this article by providing descriptive evidence on veteran-owned business survival and growth, emphasizing variation across race and gender.

We use limited-access longitudinal microdata to provide descriptive evidence on the survival and growth of veteran-owned firms across race and gender.

Findings indicate statistically significant variation across demographic subgroups’ business survival and employment growth. For example, veteran-owned firms have high women ownership rates, greater employment, revenues and payrolls, but also lower employment and revenue growth. More generally we provide descriptive evidence that military experience or the military community help women overcome the gender gap in small business survival.

This type of descriptive research is common among entrepreneurial researchers, however, peer-reviewed research specific to US veterans is very limited. These descriptive results are useful for policymakers and for spurring future policy research related to veteran entrepreneurs.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant declines in international tourist arrivals and receipts. It has also influenced destination preference, tourist demographic, travel motivation, and behavior. Recognizing health and safety as the new considerations in pursuing tourism activities in the better normal, this necessitated a reassessment of the current tourism industry by directing the attention from the usual destination-centric perspective to a value chain perspective. This chapter proposes a new paradigm for the better normal value chain by deconstructing the concepts of travel, tourism, and travel sectors and revisiting the concept of the tourism value chain (TVC) by mapping out the chain and its functional levels and integrating travel, tourism, and hospitality sectors in one value chain. Policymaking approaches such as reorganizing the value chain, empowering stakeholder involvement through coopetition, and resilience building in the face of possible adversities in the future should be adapted to achieve this suggested paradigm's goals. This analysis provides stakeholders with a broader understanding of the needed interventions in future-proofing the industry backed by industry trends in the better normal while fostering collaboration and offering flexibility to cope better in other possible shocks in the future.

Based on qualitative data from a large study exploring Muslim experiences in the workplace, this chapter explains how Muslim dress standards inform identity and are influenced by US cultural ideals about self-presentation and perceived anti-Muslim hostility. Theoretical sampling was used to find 25 men and 59 women, 32 of whom are veiled. These individuals worked at major corporations as numerical minorities or held professions where they encountered non-Muslims regularly. Informed by theories of orientalism and social identity, findings examine hegemonic representations of organizational power and describe how men could employ masculine practices to navigate anti-Muslim discourse and foster a sense of belonging at work. Within immigrant-centered workplaces, women face cultural backlash for appropriating Western styles deemed immodest. While working outside their community, women who wore hijabs emphasized their femininity through softer colors, makeup, or “unpinning” their veil to offset the visceral reaction to their hijab. Thus, adapting to workplace dress expectations is structured by intersections of gender, religion, and workplace location. This chapter illustrates how Muslim dress strategies indirectly reflect how Western standards of dress, behavior, and self-expression determine qualifications and approachability within workplace structures, marginalizing Muslims and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies.

In the current context of increasing awareness about dramatic societal challenges, a growing number of businesses, including both small enterprises and large corporations, are increasingly embracing more socially oriented behaviors and aligning their innovative strategies and business models to address specific societal needs. Widespread expectations toward more inclusive and sustainable forms of entrepreneurship are determining the need to prioritize objectives toward individuals, society, and stakeholders, beyond mere profit. This study advocates a human-centered perspective in entrepreneurial theory, recognizing human capital’s relevance in the contemporary economic landscape.

Employing a qualitative approach, the authors investigated 17 Italian innovative start-ups with a strong social orientation. Through the Gioia methodology, the authors examined the antecedents of three dimensions within the humane entrepreneurship framework – Sustainable Orientation, Entrepreneurial Orientation, and Human Resources Orientation – and their role in fostering Humane Entrepreneurial Orientation. Innovative start-ups’ outcomes reveal that three antecedents – namely, prior engagement in voluntary activities, connections within the local community, and adept relational skills – exert influence on the development of humane entrepreneurship.