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This paper is concerned with the cultural components of change and district coherence. The purpose of this paper is to present two district cases studies, illustrating their experiences with a particular initiative that guided local leaders through both structural and cultural changes.

The paper uses two qualitative case studies to illustrate how a new initiative led by an external partner might help local district leaders learn to shift from financial pass-through or compliance-oriented observer to coherence-making, capacity-building force for schools. Cases were conducted in New Hampshire, USA, studying two districts implementing an RTI-related initiative.

The project was an opportunity to use a common objective – improving learning for all students – and several common school elements – team meetings, student data and job-embedded professional development – in combination to impact how staff work and how they work together for the benefit of students. In particular, team-based leadership, instructional coaching, and collaboration structured around instruction and student data were all powerful practices with structural and cultural impacts.

It remains to be seen if the districts can both initiate these changes on their own as well as sustain these culture-making roles over time.

The paper illustrates several activities that other districts may use to work toward becoming cultural learning organizations.

The value of district central offices taking on new roles, such as learning organization or cultural coherence maker, is established by authors like Honig. This paper illustrates on way district offices might learn to take on these roles.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Most managers can become excellent leaders if they are supplied with books and training that help them develop their leadership skills. So says the head of an institute which promises to develop character‐based leadership skills. A statement with which most of us might agree? Possibly but then again, maybe not.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

In Thailand, the number of higher education institutions (HEIs) offering international programmes has surged dramatically. Internationalisation is seen as key to competing in the higher education market, modernising educational programming, and generating new streams of revenue. Yet, such rapid change is disorientating for the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) in the Thai context. That said, there is little disagreement on what it is not; it is not Thai. This chapter investigates apparent efforts to ‘de-place’ Thailand from IHE and considers how these attempts may connect to (post-)colonial tensions between sovereignty and civilisation. Through a synthesis of scholarship in the areas of higher education, cultural geography and Thai studies, the authors construct a framework for exploring how IHE is both imagined and experienced in Thailand. In particular, they re-examine datasets from studies they conducted with stakeholders over recent years, including executive leadership, international faculty members, and university students. Through a series of narrative portraits, a dialogue of voices is constructed that reflect distinct orientations to ‘Thainess’ in the IHE. The authors argue that a wider and more inclusive orientation to internationalisation is not only respectful of local identity but is enhanced by it. Ultimately, the hope of this study is to offer a vision of what an ‘emplaced’ idea of IHE in Thailand might look like, one grounded in an orientation unique to a particular place with its own cultural and social coordinates.

The International Leadership Association’s Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs (Ritch & Mengel, 2009) provides a framework to attend to leadership program development, redesign, evaluation, organized program review, questions concerning academic legitimacy and developing common program benchmarks. This article provides a critique of the Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs and, in particular, the five major categories: Conceptual Framework, Context, Content, Teaching and Learning, and Outcomes/Assessment. The article also draws upon scholarly research within the field to provide both breadth and depth to the different Guiding Questions categories. Finally, the goal of this article is to encourage a collaborative dialogue which will ultimately increase the effectiveness of the Guiding Questions.

For more than a decade, public opinion polls have shown that nearly 80% of Americans support hate crime legislation as a response to violence committed because of the victim's race, color, religion, and sexual orientation. Americans' widespread support for legislation aimed at bias-motivated crimes is not matched by the federal and state efforts devoted to responding to such crimes. This chapter describes the myriad factors contributing to America's limited police and prosecutorial response to hate crimes. After a discussion of the patchwork of state and federal legislation aimed at hate crimes, the chapter analyzes the substantial legislative and administrative structures that hamper the enforcement of hate crime law in the United States.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of the sociological model of professionalisation known as the “professional project” put forward by Magali Larson, which has become the prevailing paradigm for accounting historians.

The paper challenges the use of the concepts of monopoly, social closure, collective social mobility and the quest for status as applied to the history of accountancy. The arguments are made on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

The use of the concept of monopoly is not justified in the case of accounting societies or firms. The only monopoly the accountants required was the exclusive right to the titles, for example, CA in Britain and CPA in the USA. They were right to argue that the credentials were merely to distinguish themselves in the market place from untrained accountants. The validity of the concept of social closure via artificial barriers to entry is questioned and new evidence is provided that the elite accountants have always recruited heavily from classes lower in the social hierarchy than themselves. The concept of the collective social mobility project is found wanting on a priori and empirical grounds; accountants behaved no differently to other business classes and have probably not enhanced their social status since the formation of their societies.

The paper offers, in the case of accountancy, one of the few critiques of the accepted model of professionalisation. It demonstrates the weak explanatory power of the sociological paradigms used by accounting historians.

One of the newest crimes to be put on the books is stalking, usually defined as repeatedly being in the presence of another person with the intent to cause emotional distress or bodily harm after being warned or requested not to do so. Stalking must be done over a period of time to indicate a pattern or continuity of purpose. Threats against a person or person's family may be stated or implied in stalking. Stalking victims are followed and harassed at work, at school, and at home. Stalking can also be done electronically, either using computers to send harassing e‐mail messages or by jamming telefacsimile machines with unwanted transmissions. There have been numerous high‐profile stalking cases that gained a great deal of publicity and focused attention on stalking. “Celebrity stalking” cases came to the public's attention in 1982 when actress Theresa Saldana was stabbed by a stalker. In 1989 actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot and killed by a man who had stalked her for two years. In the 1990s the assault on skater Nancy Kerrigan, television talk shows and movies, and nonfiction works on stalking, including cases that ended with the death of the stalking victim, have focused public attention on this issue.

We study the relationship between underwriter prestige, family control, and IPO underpricing in an international setting. Data are collected for 5,789 firms that went public across twenty‐five countries between 1995 and 2002. We find that non‐penny‐stock and non‐U.S. IPOs from countries where firms are predominately family‐controlled benefit from associations with well‐known investment bankers; i.e., these firms are less underpriced than similar firms from countries with a low level of family control. At the same time, our findings support prior evidence that suggests that underwriter prestige is positively related to underpricing in the U.S. IPO market. Family‐controlled firms should consider the findings of this study, which identifies factors that are associated with more successful IPO outcomes.