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In the context of organizational change, identifying, and organizing the various roles of change agents remains a challenge for practitioners and scholars alike. This chapter examines how different agents can enable an effective change process. Empirical evidence from three hospitals illustrates the process of transformation and its underlying arrangements to identify agents and their roles. The findings underline the importance of designing a coherent system of agents, determining where they come from, their role during the process, and how this may change throughout the change process. Managerial choices in the cases are discussed, leading to implications for theory and practice.

This study examines how budgetary support (BS), teamwork, and organizational commitment to employees (OCE) affect firm performance across two countries, Malaysia and the United States. By surveying senior managers of 165 small and medium enterprises, this study finds that teamwork and BS each has a direct effect on OCE and firm performance. Further, results indicate that OCE mediates the relationship between BS, teamwork, and firm performance. In Malaysia, but not in the United States, we find that teamwork affects performance directly. In the United States, but not in Malaysia, we find that BS affects performance, and there is an interaction effect between BS and management influence. We attribute the effects to the different national cultures and social-exchange relations and highlight the contributions to the budgeting research, organizational commitment literature, and to practice.

This chapter explores economic development and entrepreneurship among Aboriginal¹ people in Canada as a particular instance of Indigenous entrepreneurship and development activity worldwide. In turn, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and the economic development that flows from it, can be considered a particular sub-set of ethnic entrepreneurship. What makes Indigenous entrepreneurship a particular and distinct instance of ethic entrepreneurship is the strong tie between the process and place – the historic lands of the particular Indigenous group involved. With Aboriginal populations there is also often a strong component of “nation-building,” or more correctly re-building. This is in contrast with instances of entrepreneurship associated with ethnic groups that have migrated to new places and are pursuing economic opportunities there in ways that distinguish them from the non-ethnic population.

This article reviews the quantitative marketing literature on artificial intelligence (AI) through an economics lens. We apply the framework in Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence to systematically categorize 96 research papers on AI in marketing academia into five levels of impact, which are prediction, decision, tool, strategy, and society. For each paper, we further identify each individual component of a task, the research question, the AI model used, and the broad decision type. Overall, we find there are fewer marketing papers focusing on strategy and society, and accordingly, we discuss future research opportunities in those areas.

X = multiple interpretations

The digital technological revolution offers new ways for classrooms to operate and challenges the concept of whether brick and mortar schools should exist at all. At the same time, the changes to society as we move from a knowledge-based economy to an intelligent and innovation-based economy challenges us to reassess the purpose of education. This chapter investigates an overarching counterfactual question, “What if compulsory schooling was invented in the twenty-first century”? We used a foresight methodology, based on “anticipation,” to conceptualize possible models for a future system of compulsory schooling arising from an analysis of contemporary catalysts for remodeling. While anticipation does not predict the future, the concept is that when a current system and a model of a system interplay, they impact each other to change both the present as well as possible futures. The design principles of cities, such as Freiburg (Germany), Poundbury (England), and Christie Walk (Australia), which have been developed around the idea of ecologically sustainable and decentralized cities, are focused on approaches to living that can provide a springboard for exploring the impact of changing employment, economic, technological, and social change on future schooling models. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has opened up a new field of study to investigate neuroscience, which can inform teaching practice. Postmodern and indigenous ways of thinking provide different insights about how schooling might be reconceptualized. Alternative models of future schooling are conceptualized about (i) the role of the learner and teacher, (ii) design of a school, and (iii) the purpose of compulsory schooling. For each area of remodeling, deviations to current practices as well as paradigm shifts are framed as part of scenario building. Related questions include: how schooling might be different if it had been created today for the first time? How might it better meet the needs of contemporary society? What aspects of schooling now might be lost if it was only invented in the twenty-first century? What are possible side effects from any change ideas as part of research practice? A vital aspect of this chapter is to explore the concept of learning as a general concept versus the more specific concept of schooling. We are at the precipice of a new vision of schooling based on a counterfactual way of thinking about the future of schooling as we have known it in the West.

As Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have pointed out, the US TV serial Supernatural owes much of its success to the way it combines horror with family drama, strengthening the affective involvement of viewers in the lives of its protagonists, the monster-hunting Winchester brothers. The notion of home – presented variously as a domestic, feminine space from which the Winchesters and their compatriots are excluded; a mobile and contingent space of masculine bonding; and a hybrid space which allows for self-expression outside prescribed gender norms, but which also holds the potential for danger – is central.

Heather L. Duda has pointed to the ways monster hunters are excluded from the normative institutions of their societies, and this is certainly true of the Winchesters, who live in their family car and are unable to maintain ‘normal’ homes. Later seasons give them a home in the form of an underground bunker, not designed as a domestic space, but nonetheless a place where their hypermasculine behaviours can be relaxed. This chapter examines the tensions that emerge in this apparent move from a traditional narrative of the home as feminine space under threat to something more ambivalent, where masculine identity itself may be in danger.