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This introductory chapter begins by outlining the background of this book: how the concept of excessive teacher entitlement took shape and was progressively enriched through my collaborative work with Cheryl J. Craig. Our ongoing informal dialogues gave rise to an invisible college where we co-created new meanings to deepen the understanding of professional inertia. We saw professional inertia as a manifestation of excessive teacher/faculty entitlement constantly adrift in a yin and yang relationship with their best-loved self. This insight came from challenging the narrow mainstream view of the notion of excessive entitlement as a purely volitional act of autonomous individuals which leads to blaming and pathologizing teachers/faculty. Instead, a Vygotskian cultural-historical perspective is proposed. This perspective facilitates a more complex historicized view of the phenomenon by directing attention to the historically and culturally mediated nature of excessive teacher/faculty entitlement and the means to alleviate it. The healing touch to excessive teacher/faculty entitlement repeatedly surfaces as humanizing pedagogy. This involves helping teachers/faculty develop empowered entitlement and work towards realizing their dreams, their best-loved self. Finally, this introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the 15 chapters that follow. They explore the notion of excessive teacher/faculty entitlement in diverse sociocultural contexts and examine promising approaches to address this problem from different theoretical and methodological angles. You are invited to join us in this rich journey of inquiry and transformation.

This chapter investigates the experiences of doctoral students and supervisors in the doctoral process, focusing on the potential impact of imbalances in the distribution of power. In this respect, there are troublesome manifestations of excessive faculty entitlement that appear to be a source of inequality and injustice. These phenomena call into question the crucial relationship of support expected of doctoral students, as thesis supervisors have a fundamental role to play in guiding them towards the doctorate and ensuring their successful entry into the research community. Looking at the issue from the angle of the theory of social fields, I examine instances of dysfunction in supervisory experiences. Such problematic practices tend to conform to the relationships and traditions that sustain and (re)produce the practices of the academy, constraining the establishment of what Bakhtin describes as a dialogical relationship, between doctoral students and supervisors. I examine this problem from my own experience, both as a doctoral student and as a supervisor. I approach the question by combining self-study and narrative inquiry to make use of the data from my experience to analyse the issues raised during the supervision of doctoral programmes. I connect accounts drawn from literature, real-life testimonies and a corpus of discussions and notes to explore the manifestations of excessive faculty entitlement in the form of asymmetries and difficulties that can negatively impact the quality of supervision.

Teachers are generally interested in practical ideas for their classroom without being inclined to reflect on the theory behind them. Teacher aversion to theory has been a constant source of frustration for teacher educators who conduct in-service programs in the Indian context. Teachers' disinclination to think theoretically and recognize the need to change to create more equitable educational ecologies in a rapidly evolving multicultural world can easily be taken to signify an “excessive entitled attitude,” a personality deficiency. An investigation into understanding the source of what seemed to be “excessive teacher entitled attitude” led me to become self-reflexive about my own journey as a teacher. This chapter, which unravels my reflective journey as a teacher, uses narrative inquiry to make sense of my “stories of experience”. It is an intersubjective process intertwining teacher narratives with my personal narrative. Self-reflectivity facilitates the liberation from “excessive entitled attitude” by shining a light on it and paving the way for learning and the development of new attitudes toward the self, the other and the world. The findings show the complex recursive path negotiated by me in becoming aware of the way my “excessive entitled attitude” in my position of authority as a teacher blocked my connection to my students. It also shows the place of theoretical thinking in my transformation into a more thoughtful teacher agentively creating inclusive learning spaces for all students. The story of my transformation and the attendant change in my attitude toward myself and others helps others – teachers/educators/readers – retell their stories “with added possibilities.”

The authors propose a solder joint recognition method based on eigenspace technology.

The original solder joint image is transformed into a small set of feature subspace called “eigensolder”, which is the eigenvector of the training set and can represent a solder joint well. Then, the eigensolder feature is extracted by projecting the new solder joint image into the subspace, and the Euclidean distance measure is used to classify the solder joint.

The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional classification method in solder joint recognition, and it can achieve 96.43 per cent recognition rate using only 15 eigenvalue images. It is suitable for the classification with small samples.

Traditional classification method like neural network and statistical method cost long time. Here, Eigensolder method is used to extract feature. Eigensolder method is more efficient, as it uses the principal component analysis method to reduce the feature dimension of input image and only measure the distance to classify.

This chapter presents three Chinese teachers' narrative accounts about how they live in dilemmatic spaces due to excessive entitlement. Still, the teachers move forward with transformative agency. The thick description of the three teacher participants has been reported elsewhere as the narratives of Lee – a math teacher, Ping – a Chinese language teacher and Wang – a school principal. In this chapter, however, ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ is used as a new lens to assist me in revisiting their stories of living in dilemmatic spaces. Narrative inquiry as a method unpacks the three teachers' life experiences. Although Lee, Ping and Wang encounter different entitlements and various dilemmas, their transformative agency in transitioning from a survival mode to thriving human beings brings out the similarities in their experiences. Using Vygotskian philosophy and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), this chapter focuses on the teachers' transformative agency as breaking away from given boundaries in their professional lives and taking up initiatives that confront the tacit excessive entitlement in and around them. Furthermore, transformative agency is promising in that it helps develop new practices in teacher education. Finally, the new understanding emanating by viewing the three subjects' experiences from the angle of excessive entitlement has the potential to inspire teachers in other contexts to become conscious of manifestations of excessive entitlement not only in themselves or others they interact with but also in the macro context we live in. This consciousness also increases the likelihood of the urge to find ways to ameliorate excessive entitlement and to move closer to one's cherished professional values.

This chapter identifies the broad interdisciplinary ideologies of entitlement in order to situate and understand the potential theoretical informants of excessiveness in teacher entitlement. Although the authors' perspectives and experiences on the theme of entitlement are located in the US educational system, this is accompanied by an awareness of the need to examine the topic internationally since the topic needs to “be reconsidered in terms of contextual variables.”

Psychological and organizational entitlement were the prevalent strains of entitlement that emerged in the reviewed literature and “academic entitlement” specific to the field of education. Therefore, three strands, psychological, organizational and academic, form the thematic categories for this scoping literature review.

Most literature on “academic entitlement” deals with excessive entitlement amongst students. No reference to excessive teacher entitlement was found. However, specific gaps were found in: (1) what qualifies as excessive teacher entitlement, (2) research scholarship on teacher entitlement, and (3) entitlement studies specifically aimed at global reach and applicable to teachers.

The theoretical informants of teacher entitlement identified in this study indicate that the phenomenon goes beyond individual mindset to encompass the mediation of sociocultural and political factors in its construction, thus rendering a simple theory of excessiveness in association with teacher entitlement improbable at this time.

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of teachers' “entitled attitude” that manifested itself as resistance to change in the midst of a curricular reform in the Indian school context. For teachers long socialized into a teacher-centered culture, the change expected was nothing less than a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense. However, conclusions drawn from studies involving cursory surveys and teacher observation pinned the problem to teachers' “entitled attitude,” an unwillingness to exert themselves beyond the minimum level required by school policies. This view reflects a lack of acknowledgement of teachers as persons with values and the capacity to think and feel as potential agents of community practices such as schooling. My study investigates the wider sociocultural historical and political basis of teachers' putative “entitled attitude” informed by Lev Vygotsky's dialectical approach. It accesses the interrelated history of a teacher at a number of levels using the teacher's life history to create the narrative. This “genetic” analysis helps illuminate what the curricular change means to teachers inside out. The findings are used to unravel the nature of support that would help teachers realize their agency and sway them from using entitlement as a compensatory mechanism to deflect change.

Algorithm bias refers to repetitive computer program errors that give some users more weight than others. The aim of this article is to provide a deeper insight of algorithm bias in AI-enabled ERP software customization. Although algorithmic bias in machine learning models has uneven, unfair and unjust impacts, research on it is mostly anecdotal and scattered.

As guided by the previous research (Akter et al., 2022), this study presents the possible design bias (model, data and method) one may experience with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software customization algorithm. This study then presents the artificial intelligence (AI) version of ERP customization algorithm using k-nearest neighbours algorithm.

This study illustrates the possible bias when the prioritized requirements customization estimation (PRCE) algorithm available in the ERP literature is executed without any AI. Then, the authors present their newly developed AI version of the PRCE algorithm that uses ML techniques. The authors then discuss its adjoining algorithmic bias with an illustration. Further, the authors also draw a roadmap for managing algorithmic bias during ERP customization in practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has attempted to understand the algorithmic bias that occurs during the execution of the ERP customization algorithm (with or without AI).

The notion of excessive teacher entitlement arose out of concerns with trying to understand and find a language to describe the paradox of faculty/teachers' intransigence in the face of the flexibility required of them to promote the learning and well-being of all in the institutions they serve. Through unique narratives, the authors trace the parallel paths they negotiated in their challenging curricular journeys, which led them to unmute teachers' voices cached in reform stories. The first author, Tara Ratnam, coined the term “excessive teacher entitlement” to characterize the putative deficit view of teachers that is projected onto them and how the concept of the teachers' “best-loved self,” which the second author, Cheryl Craig, developed, embraces teachers' input and complements “excessive teacher entitlement,” albeit from a different direction and perspective. This introduction also provides a bird's-eye view of the diverse ways and contexts in which leading international authors examine excessive teacher entitlement in the 17 chapters that follow.

As Ratnam makes clear, a cultural–historical perspective on teacher/faculty excessive entitlement is indispensable if we are to use this concept to work with, rather than undermine, education practitioners. In this chapter, a networked relational model of activity is proposed as a tool for understanding excessive entitlement from a cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective, so that the transformative potential of both entitlement and the modeling of it may be harnessed. The networked relational model, which represents CHAT activity systems as a hand-draw or painted network of relationships between actors and artifacts, allows its creators, in their capacity as researchers or academics, to use it as an imaginative artifact in the Wartofskian sense. That is, by representing activity systems of academic performance as networks of interacting entities, the emergence of excessive entitlement can be traced to, and perhaps mitigated through the relationships that they represent. In this regard, the why, what, and how artifacts proposed by Engeström are taken up as useful means for enhancing the functioning of the networked relational model not just as a tool for analyses of entitlement but also a means for envisioning alternative countercultures into being.