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Influenced by postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, cultural studies and humanities researchers have critiqued ways that old age plays out in lived realities – including effects of ageism and power loss in both private and public spheres. Generally, older people are perceived negatively and as less powerful than younger people. Age tends to trump most other social identity dimensions in negative ways so that aging is an eventuality that many people the world over dread or fear.

In recent years, age has been treated as a social, political and economic issue that draws from anxiety and fear associated with the advancing life course. Some nations outlaw age discrimination in the workplace, but others do not. So, while improved sanitation, diet and health care means that many people live longer, they still face enduring negative stereotypes about aging processes. Chapter 8 sharpens the focus on social identity marked by age and dimensions that overlap with age – in the larger social milieu and in organizational contexts. Several theoretical ties bind this chapter’s exploration of age and aging, including critical/cultural studies, feminism, critical gerontology, and postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives. To explore research on aging and identity, this chapter is divided into subthemes: sociocultural perspectives on and theorizing about aging, age categories and birth cohorts, aging effects for organizations, aging effects for employees, and age with other social identity intersectionalities.

When entrepreneurs create new ventures, they struggle with making consequential decisions under severe restrictions such as tight deadlines, limited resources, and lack of information. Making challenging decisions inherently requires creativity as entrepreneurs improvise and work around the limitations they face. Under these conditions, entrepreneurs resort to their heuristics and biases instead of rational decision models. Entrepreneurs employ – sometimes for better and sometimes for worse – a myriad of rule-setting heuristics and experience-based biases to navigate the difficult path between novelty and utility. In this chapter, the authors answer Shepherd, Williams, and Patzelt’s (2015) call for research into how entrepreneurs leverage heuristics and biases in decision-making and the benefits they gain as a result. The authors explore how entrepreneurs introduce heuristics and biases at different stages of their decision-making process using a qualitative study of 21 new ventures. The results attest to entrepreneurs’ ingenuity and creativity in managing complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

Gunung Mulu National Park (GMNP) is one of the two protected areas with UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) status in Malaysia. Until now, this area can only be accessed by tourists via air and water transportation only. Recently, the government has proposed the construction of a road connecting GMNP to several areas, including Miri City through a high-impact infrastructure project. However, this project might instigate the potential benefits and challenges in terms of tourism development and community well-being. As custodians of the park, their support for this initiative needs to be dismantled so that the management of the national park can still be implemented holistically and does not jeopardise the current UNESCO status of WHS. WHS is UNESCO-designated area of cultural, historical, scientific, or other significant value, legally safeguarded by international agreements, and preserved for the benefit of future generations due to its exceptional value to humanity. Thus, this study aims to examine challenges and socioeconomic impacts of the proposed road among key informants' perspectives at Long Terawan Village, Long Iman Village, Batu Bungan Village and GMNP Headquarters. The study was conducted via in-depth interviews with 10 community members residing in the settlement, including a tribal chief, boatman, lodging operator, park guide and farmer, all of whom are professionals and representatives of the local community. They were designated as key informants on account of their extensive engagement and development within the community. Through a thematic analysis, their perspectives on the proposed roads to be built in the area were elucidated. The study offers pragmatic understanding of socioeconomic impact assessment, which could inform strategic decision-making by incorporating information regarding potential benefits and challenges of the proposed road construction to an isolated protected area.

This chapter shares work carried out to use the discipline of Informing Science as a lens to carry out an analysis of the discipline of entrepreneurship. Focusing first at the level of the entrepreneurship discipline itself, recently advanced frameworks for practice-as-entrepreneurial-learning and for the scholarship of teaching and learning for entrepreneurship (SoTLE) are built upon using Gill’s work on academic informing systems to develop a framework that encourages viewing the entrepreneurship discipline as a system that informs entrepreneurial practice. While this may sound self-evident, we will explore how it implies something quite different from the teaching–research–scholarship paradigm to which most of us are accustomed.

This article discusses the methodological implications of a recent study on Luxembourg's offshore financial center. Insight from actor-network theory was essential in undertaking its ethnographic research with elites from the country's state and financial institutions. My intention in documenting this approach is to provide a template for ethnographers studying other localized contexts of global politico-economic significance, in which elite actors usually seek to curtail the enquiries of investigators. With this actor-network from Luxembourg as an example, I demonstrate how elite and difficult-to-access milieus can be entered via “networking” coupled with outreach via interviews and email correspondence. As I show, by initiating various modalities of entry into the context in question, ethnographers can establish themselves within an actor-network for the purposes of conducting interviews and participant observation with elite interlocutors.

Drawing on ethnographic research among far-right youth movements, this chapter discusses the view of a “new Europe” as manifested in young activists' discourses and practices. In arguing that it is necessary to better understand local contexts of political mobilization, it simultaneously foregrounds the transnational orientation of young far-right militants and the interplay of local and translocal factors in shaping their activism. In so doing, this chapter seeks to shed light on the background and the main rationale for their alternative conceptualizing of Europe and to situate it in a long tradition of thinking about Europe, recognizing similarities with the developments in the early twentieth century.

In his March 1986 article in Newsweek, Russell Watson exposed “Queen Imelda” Marcos's life of indulgence as the Philippines' First Lady in the opening paragraph:Three thousand pairs of shoes, size eight and a half. Five shelves of unused Gucci handbags, still stuffed with paper, price tags still attached. Five hundred bras, mostly black, and a trunk full of girdles, 40 and 42 inches around the hips. Huge bottles of perfume, vats of Christian Dior wrinkle cream, a walk-in-safe littered with dozens of empty jewelry cases. When the palace of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos was opened to the public as a museum last week, foreigners and Filipinos alike gawked at what the former First Lady had left behind. “It was the worst case of conspicuous consumption I have ever seen,” said an American visitor, Rep. Stephen Solarz. “Compared to her, Marie Antoinette was a bag lady.” (Watson, 1986, p. 14)

This chapter explores knowledge practices around the subject of capital punishment. Capital sentencing jurisprudence and certain strands of academic scholarship on the death penalty have certain resonances with recent developments in reflexive cultural anthropology. Using the notion of productive unraveling, this chapter seeks to reinforce relations between these various knowledge practices by conceiving of them as situated on the same ground, already interwoven with one another. This chapter presents itself as both an example of and a call for the development of interconnections between these various kinds of expert knowledges concerning the death penalty.