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The racial reckoning of 2020, alongside the collective trauma of the global Covid-19 pandemic, led to a proliferation of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) offerings within the US higher education system. At the same time, university social justice spaces found a reduction in their staffing, restriction of their work, and an increase of outsourced DEI contributions from non-justice focused locations. This research based, and semi-autobiographical chapter situated Buolamwini's work on coded bias, is grounded in the work of Spivak and Butler, and O'Neil's contributions on mathematical mismanagement. It charts the systematic dismantling of social justice efforts at one mid-sized regional public university as their work was replaced with invalidated and outsourced DEI efforts and gamed with numerical retention requirements, which did little to remedy the genuine inequity built within higher education systems. This chapter offers inferences regarding what those changes mean for inclusion efforts within higher education writ large, particularly with regard to students with marginalized identities (queer, trans, and BIPOC students) who face systemic oppression in the higher education system.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

Family businesses feature prominently in economies, including the South African wine industry, using websites to convey their family identity. This research paper aims to explore the family identity elements that family wineries use on their websites, their alignment and how these are communicated online.

Based on Gioia’s methodology, a two-pronged approach was used to analyze 113 wineries’ websites’ text using Atlas. ti from an interpretivist perspective.

South African wineries use corporate identity, corporate personality and corporate expression to illustrate their familiness on their websites. It is portrayed through their family name and heritage, supported by their direction, purpose and aspirations, which emerge from the family identity and personality. These are dynamic and expressed through verbal and visual elements. Wineries described their behaviour, relevant competencies and passion as personality traits. Sustainability was considered an integral part of their brand promise, closely related to their family identity and personality, reflecting their family-oriented philosophy. These findings highlight the integration that exists among these components.

Theoretically, this study proposes a family business brand identity framework emphasising the centrality of familiness to its identity, personality and expression. Using websites to illustrate this familiness is emphasised with the recommendation that family businesses leverage this unique attribute in their identity to communicate their authenticity.

This study contributes to understanding what family wineries communicate on their websites, specifically by examining the elements necessary to create a family business brand based on the interrelationship between family identity, personality and expression with familiness at its core, resulting in a proposed family business brand identity framework.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which interdisciplinary (HASS, i.e. non-STEM) factors—in particular, accounting, stakeholder management and accountability—enable, influence and motivate large human exploration ventures, principally in maritime and space fields, utilizing Columbus’s and Chinese explorations of the 1400s as the primary setting.

The study analyzes archival data from narrative and interpretational history, including both academic and non-academic sources, that relate to two global historical events, the Columbus and Ming Chinese exploration eras (c. 1400–1500), as a parallel to the modern “Space Race”. Existing studies on pertinent HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) enablers, influencers and motivators are utilized in the analysis. The authors draw upon the concepts of stakeholder theory and the construct of accountability in their analysis.

Findings suggest that non-STEM considerations—politics, finance, accountability, culture, theology and others—played crucial roles in enabling Western Europe (Columbus) to reach the Americas before China or other global powers, demonstrating the pivotal importance of HASS factors in human advancements and exploration.

In seeking to answer those questions, this study identifies only those factors (HASS or STEM) that may support the success or failure in execution of the exploration and development of a region such as the New World or Space. Moreover, the study has the following limitation. Relative successes, failures, drivers and enablers of exploratory ventures are drawn almost exclusively from the documented historical records of the nations, entities and individuals (China and Europe) who conducted those ventures. A paucity of objective sources in some fields, and the need to set appropriate boundaries for the study, also necessitate such limitation.

It is observable that many of those HASS factors also appear to have been influencers in modern era Space projects. For Apollo and Soyuz, success factors such as the relative economics of USA and USSR, their political ideologies, accountabilities and organizational priorities have clear echoes. What the successful voyages of Columbus and Apollo also have in common is an appetite to take risks for an uncertain return, whether as sponsor or voyager; an understanding of financial management and benefits measurement, and a leadership (Isabella I, John F. Kennedy) possessing a vision, ideology and governmental apparatus to further the venture’s goals.

Whilst various historical studies have examined influences behind the oceangoing explorations of the 1400s and the colonization of the “New World”, this article takes an original approach of analyzing those motivations and other factors collectively, in interdisciplinary terms (HASS and STEM). This approach also has the potential to provide a novel method of examining accountability and performance in modern exploratory ventures, such as crewed space missions.

The past is important for various known and unknown reasons. This paper aims to reveal and justify unacknowledged reasons why, when and how managers should consider leveraging the pasts of previously successful but currently declining brands to restore their more desirable historical market positions.

This conceptual paper combines marketing and branding theory with historical branding examples, anecdotes and inductive inferences to develop and justify brand-pastness as a theoretically-grounded and managerially-actionable repositioning concept that could be applied to resurrect declining brands.

The emergent historically-grounded brand-pastness framework generates innovative insights that could be applied in the future. These insights explain when, why and how brand managers could apply brand-pastness to resurrect declining brands. The framework also facilitates the development of a brand-pastness-based research agenda. The agenda is driven by questions structured to address the nature, scope and potential applications of brand-pastness as a new concept and useful repositioning tool.

This paper’s recommendations are limited by their conceptual and inductive origins. However, a research agenda is developed to guide and structure future empirical investigations of the branding antecedents to and consequences of a prospective brand-pastness construct.

This paper introduces, conceptualizes and justifies the potential value of a historically-grounded concept called brand-pastness. The concept may prove beneficial when marketing managers use brand-pastness to reposition and resurrect declining brands by re-instilling targeted consumers’ historical perceptions of brands’ past superiority.