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Interest in psychological resilience has grown rapidly in the last couple of decades (Britt, Sinclair, & McFadden, 2016; King & Rothstein, 2010; Youssef & Luthans, 2007). Psychological resilience occurs when a person can “recover, re-bound, bounce-back, adjust or even thrive” in the face of adversity (Garcia-Dia, DiNapoli, Garcia-Ona, Jakubowski, & O’flaherty, 2013, p. 264). As such, resilience can be conceptualized as a state-like and malleable construct that can be enhanced in response to stressful events (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016). It incorporates a dynamic process by which individuals use protective factors (internal and external) to positively adapt to stress over time (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Rutter, 1987). Building on the dual-pathway model of resilience, we integrate adaptive and proactive coping to the resilience development process and add a heretofore unexamined perspective to the ways in which resilience changes over time. We propose that resilience development trajectories differ depending on the type of adversity or stress experienced in combination with the use of adaptive and proactive coping. We outline the need for future longitudinal studies to examine these relationships and the implications for developing resilience interventions in the workplace.

The launch of the Football Association's (FA) Women's Super League in 2011 was a major milestone towards the professionalisation of women's football in England. The league's formation aimed to increase the competitiveness of elite women's football in England at domestic and international level (Dunn & Welford, 2015). In 2014 the league expanded, creating a second division now known as the FA Women's Championship. This chapter explores the impact of the professionalisation of women's football in England on the second tier of women's football, by examining how players and staff at a Women's Championship club are negotiating the transition from amateur to semi-professional status. This qualitative project adopted a single case-study approach. Observations took place on home match-days to explore the match-day experience. Follow-up semi-structured interviews were then carried out with players and staff. The empirical data highlighted the key challenges and opportunities faced by clubs and their players as women's football continues to develop in this professional era. The introduction of the Women's Championship has helped to bridge the gap between amateur and professional club football in England. However, the experiences of the players and staff illustrate that operating effectively in the Women's Championship required significant sacrifice. Players were required to meet the more professional demands that were being placed upon them, without receiving any significant financial rewards for their commitments. Paid staff roles were underpinned by precarity, with the funded staff roles disappearing should the club not be able to maintain its Championship status.

Age and gender intersect, often lowering quality of life for older women. Microlevel patterns include ignoring older women in one’s presence, flattening their identities to only their status as older women. Macrolevel patterns include the erasure of older women, with cultural (media) representations, organizational practices and policies and social policies that ignore the existence of older women or distort their characteristics in ways that diminish the likelihood of equitable treatment. Using autoethnography, conversations with a small group of older women, and scholarly and popular literature, we describe varieties of microlevel experiences and responses to them. Focusing on macrolevel erasure, we describe some of the effects of combined ageism and sexism, and we look at activists’ and organizational responses aimed at changing public awareness and attitudes toward age and gendering. Policy changes are suggested to make the social treatment of older women more equitable, including attention to housing, health care, and public education. We note specific past achievements that demonstrate policy change is possible.

Buying secondhand clothing is not only interesting for consumers wanting to save money but also for sustainable clothing enthusiasts. It is now among a number of consumption practices which slow down fast fashion production while saving 10 to 20 times the energy (Fletcher, 2008, p. 100). While most of the recent scholarly work focuses on secondhand consumers (Bianchi & Birtwistle, 2010; Franklin, 2011; Norum, 2015), this paper aims to examine business activities. This perspective from economic anthropology enhances understandings of secondhand clothing, as research to-date has tended to neglect the semiotic function of clothing while underlining exchanges. To gain insight into the dynamics of the sector in Germany today, two businesses from Hamburg have been ethnographically examined by the author since 2014. This study outlines their work practices and explains the development of this high-end segment of the market from the 1970s until the digital age. For businesses, the digitalization of the trade has had massive effects on their business practice because it seems to solve inherent problems connected to the selling of pre-owned clothing. I argue that the digitalization did not only promote acceptance of buying secondhand clothing in Germany but also the emergence of new businesses models.

The influence of extralocally produced texts, such as professional standards and systems of accreditation, on the ruling relations that govern teachers’ work and their learning about that work is a matter of concern in Australia, as it is in Canada, UK, and USA. This chapter explains how a dialogic analysis and the construction of individual maps of social relations were employed to reveal the influences that governed teachers’ learning about their work at the frontline. A dialogic analysis of research conversations about learning, based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, revealed the existence of both centralizing, hegemonic discourses associated with a managerial agenda and contextualized, heterogeneous discourses supportive of transformative learning. It also revealed the uneven influence of extralocally produced governing texts on both the locally produced texts and the “doings” of individuals. The production and use of “individual” maps represents a variation on the way “mapping” has generally been used by institutional ethnographers. From these informant specific maps, we can begin to observe some broad patterns in relation to the coordination of people’s “doings” both within a given context and from one context to another.

It has often been alleged that the financial markets, with all their speculative excesses, wastefully absorb resources that could be better employed in the real economy. Fritz Machlup, originally a student of Ludwig von Mises, dealt with that charge in the aftermath of the 1929 crash. His defense of the stock market remains germane to our time. In it, he argues that the stock exchange offers an important alternative mechanism of allocating savings to investment, while generally being a way station through which money travels on its way to the real economy either to finance capital projects or to be spent on consumer goods. To the extent the stock market ever absorbs capital, it is only during stock market booms. Yet these are generated by the uncertain course of central bank monetary expansion. Bull and bear markets cycles are, at bottom, politically driven events.

This essay tackles the Obama “phenomenon,” from his candidacy to his election, as a manifestation of the new “color-blind racism” that has characterized U.S. racial politics in the post-civil rights era. Rather than symbolizing the “end of race,” or indeed a “miracle,” Obama's election is a predictable result of contemporary U.S. electoral politics. In fact, Obama is a middle-of-the-road Democrat whose policies since taking office have been almost perfectly in line with his predecessors, especially in terms of his failure to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities. In this essay, I review the concept of color-blind racism and its application to the Obama phenomenon. I also revisit some of my past predictions for Obama's presidency and evaluate their accuracy halfway through his term. Finally, I offer suggestions for constructing a genuine social movement to push Obama and future politicians to provide real, progressive “change we can believe in.”

This chapter is based on a chapter I added for the third edition of my book, Racism without Racists. Louise Seamster, a wonderful graduate student at Duke, helped me update some material, locate new sources, and rework some sections, as well as abridge some of the many footnotes (interested readers can consult the chapter). I kept the first person to maintain the more direct and engaged tone of the original piece and because the ideas (the good, the bad, and the ugly ones) in the chapter are mine, and thus, I wish to remain entirely responsible for them.