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The Public Organisation Risk Management concept challenges managers to develop a means of systematically identifying and managing key features of the organisation’s uncertainty field (its risks, uncertainties, the unknown and emergent, and the human perception/behaviour component). This presents an immense challenge, as it seems an organisation would need – in some sense – to identify all aspects of the environment before then isolating that subset of the most important risks and uncertainties. Clearly this is impossible, but a conscious awareness of this limitation might be valuable in its own right.

Assessment and analysis refers to the systematic and ongoing process by which a public organisation identifies, analyses, and measures the key components of its uncertainty field. A foundation concept that governs assessment and analysis is the view that public organisations are, in effect, collections of contracts, obligations, commitments, and agreements between the government and resource holders. Those arrangements serve as means by which the public organisation becomes exposed to the elements of the uncertainty field. Those elements, in turn, arise from the physical, social, political, economic, legal, operational, and cognitive environments.

A more detailed exposition of assessment and analysis appears in both Chapters Six and Seven. Here, in Chapter Five the goal is to set the foundation for such an exploration. Key terms and concepts are presented, and some core issues are introduced. As with all chapters, the discussion will address what have been identified as ‘traditional’ as well as enterprise risk management influenced perspectives. This in turn will lead to some coverage of alternative thinking about the assessment and analysis process.

Purpose – Drawing on Transformative Learning (TL) theory, the authors suggest a new and novel way to approach the study of violent radicalization.

Methodology/Approach – First, their argument is supported by the development of a Transformative Radicalization (TR) framework that borrows and adapts the core tenets of TL theory. Second, they provide a preliminary illustrative exploration of TR using two autobiographical accounts of militant radicalization (Islamist and Anarchist) from the UK and Canada.

Findings – Radicalization is a cognitive and emotional process of change that prepares and motivates an individual to pursue violent behavior. That process of change is incremental; individuals learn and adopt novel political, social, ideological, and/or religious ideals that justify and legitimize indiscriminate violence. The TR framework provides a more nuanced appreciation for the cognitive aspects involved in this process. The authors’ empirical illustrations provide guidance on how subsequent research might use original interview data on individual radicalization processes to develop more in-depth, cross-case comparisons.

Originality/Value – This theory builds a cross-disciplinary understanding of violent radicalization that highlights the way adults learn, alter their meaning perspectives, and change their behavior.

From the 1960s onwards, students and members of the academic community on growing numbers of college and university campuses in the United States chose to confront the issue of apartheid by advocating divestment from corporations or financial institutions with any sort of presence in or relationship with South Africa. Student divestment advocates faced serious opposition from university administrators as well as opponents of institutional divestiture both at home and abroad. Despite these challenges, the academic community in the United States was one of the first arenas where anti-apartheid activism coalesced. This chapter examines the campaigns of students and educators who participated in the debate over divestment – to engage with the South African government and apartheid through dialogue and communication or to disengage completely from the country through withdrawal of financial investments. The anti-apartheid efforts of the academic community at Michigan State University, one of the first large research universities in the United States to confront the issue of apartheid and divestment at the university level and beyond, serves as a window to view academic activism against apartheid. The Southern Africa Liberation Committee (SALC), a consortium of students, faculty, and community members dedicated to aiding the liberation struggle of Southern Africa, led the efforts at Michigan State and collaborated with allies across Michigan and the United States. SALC focused most of its efforts on South Africa, though the organization also confronted the issue of South Africa's controversial occupation of South West Africa and the ongoing civil war in Angola.

This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.

This study adopted the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) because of its sophisticated imaging techniques in eliciting mental models. Scholars across disciplines have been exploring paradigms beyond positivism due to the question about the adequacy of quantitative measures to capture complete accounts and to deal with vital problems. The marketing literature also advocates the need of a new methodology to examine consumers’ underlying thought and behavior that might help alleviate the industry's inability to translate research findings directly into practices. This study elicited tourists’ mental models, which were depicted on an integrated consensus map with three metaphoric themes. Marketers might translate these metaphoric themes directly into practices. The results of this study strongly support the use of qualitative methodology, more specifically the ZMET, as a means for obtaining the underlying tourists’ behavior that often remain far beyond the reach of traditional research methods.

In this chapter we focus on food sovereignty and agroecology, in the transnational peasant social movement La Via Campesina, as issues which help us analyze mechanisms of internal convergence in rural social movements. We examine such convergence through the building of collective processes, and in the construction of mobilizing frames for collective action. In particular, we analyze the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North, and South; peasant, indigenous, and rural proletarian; etc.) that take place within it. This dialog among the “absences” left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas, has led to a process of convergence that has yielded important “emergences,” which range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty concept – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.