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Adopting a dual processing cognitive perspective, this study explores the decision-making processes past the start-up stage that small entrepreneurial businesses employ to grow. The author examines how entrepreneurs evaluate and make decisions on growth opportunities in their business environment. The author uses cognitive style as a theoretical lens to capture differences in information processing, combining interviews and psychometric questionnaires to analyse cognitive styles. The longitudinal mixed methods approach illustrates the richness of the entrepreneur’s decision-making process, which the author tracks over a two-year period. The author determines how intuitive and analytical cognitive styles are used by entrepreneurs and the contribution these styles make to decision-making. The findings show that the two cognitive styles are versatile as entrepreneurs adjust and adapt their cognitive style over time, in keeping with the situational factors of their business environment. The author also finds marked differences between novice and mature entrepreneurs and that experienced entrepreneurs exhibited greater levels of cognitive versatility, which was directly linked to their prior experience. The study has significant implications for future research, which should consider the question how an entrepreneur’s cognitive style is dependent on the business context and their prior experience.

Today’s work environment requires a new type of leader development. It is no longer enough for leaders to be qualified and knowledgeable. Leaders must be focused, adaptable, and resilient in order to be effective amid the increasingly distracting and chaotic organizational world. We argue that current methods of leader development need to evolve to encompass leader well-being and focus on intrapersonal competencies in order to adequately prepare leaders for today’s stressful work world. We provide a holistic development framework for leaders which we believe is a better match for the intrapersonal capabilities required by leadership roles. Our approach is two-fold. First, we believe it is important to educate leaders on the potential interaction between the external sources of stress and leaders’ neurophysiological and subjective well-being. Second, we believe leaders need different development experiences, ones that can help renew psychological resources. We review four categories of holistic leadership practices – mindfulness, social connections, positive emotion inductions, and body-based practices – which can help to counter the effects of overload and exhaustion. We also discuss the future of holistic leader development and suggest directions for future research.

Considering the widespread focus on the academic achievement and social behavior of Black boys, there has been a limited focus on Black girls. Recent data from the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights show disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates for girls with Black girls suspended at higher rates (12%) than girls from other racial groups, and boys, of any other race/ethnicity. However, there has been limited discourse and attention about this disproportionality in suspension and expulsion, and other exclusionary practices experienced by Black girls. We frame this chapter through the lens of the bio-ecological systems and Integrative Model for the Study of Developmental Competences in Minority Children, and more importantly Critical Race Theory and FemCrit framework. We seek to make visible how the multiple systems that directly and indirectly influence and impact young Black girls' development, learning, and school and life success must be examined through the intersectionality of race and gender. Using national data we present some descriptive information on Black girls' home and early education environments, as well as their academic, socio-emotional, and health development in the early years. We also explore extant literature to connect how young Black girls' educational experiences must be intentionally attended to as it is damaging for their educational and life success. We provide practice, policy, and research implications and the importance of examining and addressing the unique experiences of Black girls and the pernicious impact of disparities and inequities in education.

This chapter compares a ‘deific decree’ insanity case with constitutional originalism debates as a way to understand the boundaries of the legal person and the nature of law. The criminal defendant who claims innocence on the ground that ‘God told me to’ does not embody a conflict between law and religion, but a conflict between law’s demand for intersubjectivity and the subjectivity of a ‘higher truth known only to me’. In the same way, the originalist interpreter of the constitution rejects precedent in favour of a higher truth that need not be ‘like’ anything before. One approach to broaching this conflict between law and revelation is to understand law’s domain as temporal and incomplete – to imagine a humble rather than absolute law. On this view, the person is also not ‘absolute subjectivity’, but is compelled by legal fidelity to treat like alike and therefore under an obligation to imagine a ‘me’ as ‘we’. Or, to put it another way, to bring the person and the law into relationship is to reject a ‘revelatory’ interpretation of ‘original’ or ‘divine’ law in favour of an incompletely intersubjective common law that links me to we through customs and time. At the same time, by acknowledging law’s incompleteness, we can see unreasonable revelation sometimes as a possibility and not always as an insanity.

Over the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has focused on market solutions (charter schools, privatization, and vouchers) and teacher evaluation through high stakes standardized testing of students. In this debate, teachers and their unions are often characterized as the problem. Our research offers an alternate path in the debate, a perspective that looks at schools as systems – the way schools are organized and the way decisions are made. We focus on examples of collaboration through the creation of long-term labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions and school administrators that improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized. We analyzed how these efforts were created and sustained in six public school districts over the past two decades, and what they can teach us about the impact of significant involvement of faculty and their local union leadership, working closely with district administration. We argue that collaboration between teachers, their unions, and administrators is both possible and necessary for any meaningful and lasting public school reform.