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This paper sets a case study of missing children in the Republic of Ireland against a review of international research to explore broader understandings and responses to the problem.

The study begins by reviewing the literature on pioneering American initiatives dating back to the 1970s and more recent literature from Great Britain where a series of high-profile scandals involving sexual exploitation of teenage girls provoked a number of controversial inquiries into the police and social work professions. The present study was prompted by an evaluation of the 116 000 Missing Children Hotline which was introduced to Ireland in 2012 under the auspices of the European Union (EU) Daphne III Programme by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC).

The central conclusion emerging from analysis of the evidence is that Missing Children Hotlines remain rooted in representations of ‘stranger danger’ and disconnected from repeat runaway children who feature prominently in police reports from formal care settings or family homes and who are actively targeted by sexual predators and criminal gangs. The implications are that systemic change requires grounding in research strategies which combine police data with anthropological studies to give legitimacy to the voices of runway and sexually exploited children.

The study offers original international perspectives on missing children to epistemological research communities in the fields of social work, criminology and policing with recommendations that Missing Children and Runaway Safe-lines are targeted systemically at keeping runaway children, homeless children and at-risk-youth safe and off the streets.

Purpose – Using the example of the Dene Games competition, this chapter examines the connections between contemporary sports and the games of the Dene (Athapaskan), a group of indigenous cultures inhabiting the subarctic regions of the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is based on participant-observation and individual interviews conducted during attendance at the Dene Games gatherings over the course of several years.

Findings – I argue that the indigenous Dene Games gathering, where traditional games are organised as a contemporary sports competition, opens a space for the reconstitution of indigenous physical activity practices. The tensions that occur when participation in indigenous games articulates to the practical logic of competitive sports, identify the Dene Games as a space of active cultural contestation.

Originality/value – The chapter examines the articulation of historically disparate social practises. It views the hysteretic effects of a pre-existing indigenous physical activity practice as a point of reference for resistance to the normative constraints emanating from the organisational modality of contemporary sports, without offering up an explanation that relies on voluntaristic assumptions of agency. It adopts this perspective in order to avoid grasping the indigenous practice as the operationalised object of its own intervention, a ‘museum piece’.

Corporate diversification is a strategy that enables corporations to expand their core business into other businesses. In Malaysia, corporate diversification continues to represent a fundamental organizational structure. Some two-thirds of Malaysian firms are diversified. However, when compared to developed countries such as the US and the UK, we find that firms are moving toward non-diversification. The study is based on the population framework consisting of all of the public limited companies (PLCs) listed on the Bursa Malaysia stock exchange from 2007 to 2012. A dynamic panel model system generalized method of moments (GMM) was used to analyze the diversification and firm’s performance theories.

The empirical findings demonstrated that diversification is better than non-diversification firms for the curvilinear relationship between diversification and firm’s performance (ROA and Tobin-Q) when using the entropy index and relatedness is taken into consideration. The research further concluded that related and unrelated diversification also has a positive relationship with performance, but diversification must be the dominant (focused) and cannot be too broad in nature. Diversification that is too broad may cause a positive relationship to turn in to a negative relationship toward performance in both related and unrelated instances of diversification.

Cultural visibility is closely linked to physical and social mobility, and access to – or denial of – free movement through private and public spaces powerfully shapes individual and social identities. As Liam Kennedy has shown in the context of urban space, “the operations of power are everywhere evident in space: space is hierarchical – zoned, segregated, gated – and encodes both freedoms and restrictions – of mobility, of access, of vision” (2000, pp. 169–170). A consideration of how film articulates a relationship between space and identity might thus begin by breaking down the concept of space itself into three distinct yet interconnected areas of analysis: first, the notion of socially produced space, as shown in the work of Henri Lefebvre and others; second, the idea of audience space or the architectural space of the theater; and finally, the theory of film space or the space of the screen. Given this essay’s limited scope, the latter will be examined in more detail than the first two, but I would like to stress the underlying interconnectedness of the three. While, for example, formalist studies of film aesthetics may be just as valuable as in-depth studies of changing viewing habits, audience demographics, and exhibition technologies, film interpretation should strive to keep in view the variety of spatial formations and conditions that might come to bear on any particular visual text.

This essay charts an intellectual journey. Geoffrey M. Hodgson became an institutional economist in the 1980s. He explains how he discovered institutional economics and what strains of institutional thought were attractive for him. Another issue raised in this essay is how institutional researchers organize and move forward. Hodgson argues for an interdisciplinary approach, but this is not without its problems.

This paper is the initial published report of an ongoing research project focused on the occupational world and culture of the real-estate developer. 1 Data sources include intensive interviews with (mostly) California developers and associated occupational groups (e.g. architects, planners), participant observation of developer-oriented workshops and conferences, and diverse publications including: (1) the work of social science colleagues who have dealt – sometimes directly, mostly tangentially, with the topic; (2) biographies and autobiographies of contemporary and historic individuals who are “captured” by my classificatory scheme, that is, who I can clearly categorize as being in the development business or who are, at minimum, fellow travellers; (3) newspaper articles, columns, and op-ed pieces dealing with individual developers, with development projects and with support of or opposition to either; (4) social histories which capture the “who did what and when” details of growth and patterning of specific human settlements; (5) information available on the internet (and there is a great deal of it) dealing with both individual developers and with developer-related organizations; (6) publications (newsletters, journals, and so forth) of organizations which either directly represent or are enmeshed with or are in opposition to this occupational group; and (7) fictional works (films, short stories, TV, novels, newspaper and magazine cartoons, etc.) in which one or more of the characters is a developer.1 It is perhaps not surprising that this first report should deal with matters of symbolism, of imagery: As a self-identified symbolic interactionist and, more tellingly perhaps, as a student of Anselm Strauss, 2 Strauss’ Images of the American City (1961) and his edited, The American City: A Sourcebook of Urban Imagery (1968) were among the first works I encountered by him and they continue to be major influences on my thinking about urban matters of all sorts.2 these are the sort of issues that come most readily to mind whenever I am surveying data on almost any phenomenon. And while there are many, many other “stories” to be told about this occupation, I think it is fair to assert that all of them – or at least those dealing with the contemporary situation – will have to be understood against the backdrop of what I have come to think of as the developers’ “image problem.”

In what follows, I will first, overview my rationale for undertaking this study; second, provide some data to support the claims made by the title of the piece, i.e. that developers are seen as villains and that theirs is reasonably captioned a “stigmatized occupation” and then offer other data to question the accuracy of that image; third, propose a triplet of (among, undoubtedly, many other) reasons for this apparent mis-match between image and “reality”: and finally, in a concluding section, speculate a bit about consequences of this occupational stigmatization.

A renewed interest in the hunting hypothesis has focused on the control and distribution of meat. A frequent observation among foragers is that large game prey resources are often widely distributed in a manner that suggests to some researchers that hunters do not own their prey and thus cannot direct meat distribution to their families. The ‘show-off’ model has been evoked to argue that hunters hunt in order to signal status rather than to provision their families. In contrast, detailed prey distribution data from the whale hunters of Lamalera, Indonesia, show that hunters do in fact own specific shares of prey. Whales are indeed very large game, but rather than a public good, a harvested whale carcass at Lamalera consists of privately owned shares, delineated by a complex and mutually agreed-upon set of norms. Results show that hunting in Lamalera is mutualistic, involving multifaceted coordination between many individuals. Rights to shares of the harvest are contingent primarily upon hunt participation either directly as a hunter, as a craftsman, or as a corporate member. If big game hunting does not preclude hunters from owning the meat they harvest, then hunting may be less about simply ‘show’ and more about family provisioning than suggested by the show-off model.