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This chapter describes two courses in which university students were involved with community partners, in one case a local school system and in the other, a local nonformal educational institution. The authors begin with a discussion of the benefits of civic engagement through service learning in an academic setting and describe the integration of socio-scientific issues of local importance and a service-learning aspect into the courses. The authors follow with a discussion of the impacts the project has had on each of the partners involved in the collaboration. The authors conclude with lessons learned as a result of the project and future plans for the partnership.

The Lockheed scandal was exposed during the 4 February 1976 hearings of the Sub-Committee on Multinational Corporations of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. These hearings revealed that Lockheed Aircraft Corporation paid illegal payments in several countries including Japan to promote the sale of its planes to prevent bankruptcy. The Securities Exchange Commission obtained documents showing that Lockheed paid more than US$10 million to Yoshio Kodama, a “fixer” and Lockheed's secret representative, and the Marubeni Corporation, which was Lockheed's agent in Japan since 1959. During the same hearings on 6 February, A. Carl Kotchian, vice president of Lockheed, informed the committee that a senior Japanese government official received US$2 million from Marubeni and that his company relied on Kenji Osano, a close associate of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, as an intermediary in its efforts to sell 21 Lockheed's L-1001 Tristar airbuses to All Nippon Airways (ANA) (Macdougall, 1988, pp. 193–195).

Professional ethics require researchers to disclose all risks to participants in their studies. Changes in the legal climate in the United States and new modes of surveillance and communication call into question the effectiveness of measures used by researchers to protect participants from the risks they now face. This paper explores existing and newly enhanced risks to participants in social movement studies and examines problems with confidentiality agreements and informed consent procedures, two avenues that scholars traditionally use to protect research participants. The utility of Certificates of Confidentiality and researcher privilege also are examined as means to safeguard the privacy and security of research participants. The conclusion raises larger issues about the accountability of scholars to their research participants and the nature of risk in today's changing political climate. These include how to weigh potential risks and benefits to social movements and activists who are studied, the consequences for scholarship if scholars avoid studying movements and activists that pose risks, and the need for scholars to collaborate with research participants to tailor ethical research practices and to use institutional resources to challenge threats to the privacy and integrity of the people and groups they study.

Ethnographers in the field aim to familiarise themselves with processes and practices of local cultures in their chosen research setting. This usually means that they collect a wide range of data using diverse, multiple methods such as participant observation, interviewing and document collection. As we have suggested previously, the gaze of ethnographers often tends to be drawn to visible and audible activities; therefore, we also wanted to ask how to observe, record and analyse silence. We argued that it is more difficult for participant observers to focus on mundane everyday practices and stillness and silence than it is to record the use of voice and movement during lessons and breaks (Gordon, Holland, Lahelma, & Tolonen, 2005). Here, I shift the focus and examine how a researcher looks at what is eventful and striking in the field. Usually, in the course of a school day there are numerous incidents that are clearly visible to the ethnographer's gaze or loudly audible to her ears. I ask what strikes the researchers as particularly symptomatic among the many observations they make in the course of the day; why and how are some incidents interpreted as laden with significant meanings.

Theories of the business cycle can be classified into two main groups, exogenous and endogenous, according to the way they explain economic fluctuations – either as responses of the economy to factors that are external (exogenous shocks) or as upturns and downturns of the economic system internally generated (by endogenous factors). In endogenous theories, investment is generally a key variable to explain the dynamic status of the economy. This essay examines the role of investment in endogenous theories. Two contrasting views on how changes in investment and profitability push the economy towards expansion or contraction are represented by the insights of Kalecki, Keynes, Matthews and Minsky versus those of Marx and Mitchell. Hyman Minsky claimed that investment ‘calls the tune’ to indicate that investment is the only variable not determined by other variables, so that future profits, investment and the dynamic status of the economy are determined by current investment and investment in the near past. However, this hypothesis does not appear to be supported by available empirical data for 251 quarters of the US economy. Statistical evidence rather supports the hypothesis of causality in the direction of profits determining investment and, in this way, leading the economy towards boom or bust.