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We analyze several dimensions of food security in Ethiopia, taking into account projected population growth, economic growth, and price information to estimate future food consumption by income decile. The analysis looks at the potential impact of large consumer price increases on food security metrics. We use the new USDA/ERS demand-based modeling framework in order to carry out this study. The modeling approach captures economic behavior by making food demand systematically responsive to income and price changes based on a demand specification well-grounded in microeconomic foundations. The projected change in food consumption can be apportioned to population growth, income growth, and changes in food prices and real exchange rates. We found that Ethiopia is highly food insecure, with 54% of the population consuming less than 2,100 calories a day at calibration levels. Income growth under unchanged prices mitigates food insecurity with the number of food-insecure people falling to 42.5 million in 2016. If domestic prices were free to fall with world market prices, the food-insecure population would decrease farther to 36.1 million. If domestic prices increased because of domestic supply shocks and constrained imports, the food-insecure population could rise to 64.7 million. The food gap (i.e., the amount of food necessary to eliminate Ethiopia’s food insecurity) would reach 3.6 million tons. The practical implications of this are that measures of food security are sensitive to changes in prices. Maintaining higher prices when global prices are low maintains higher levels of food insecurity than would otherwise prevail. Expanded access to lower cost imports could significantly improve food security in Ethiopia.

Teacher educators are expected to create experiences for pre-service teachers to prepare them for the world of teaching and the ever-changing contexts of schools and teaching. In this article, we discussed integrating two different aspects of teacher education—field-based instruction and technology—through the use of Evernote^®, a digital note-taking and archiving application, to create digital interactive student notebooks. Our goal was to provide other practitioners with insight into our use of Evernote^® to address two different pedagogical goals of a field-based course: 1) to enrich our pedagogies through the use of a digital interactive notebook with pre-service teachers who were spending more time in Pre-Kindergarten-12 social studies classrooms, and 2) to teach pre-service teachers to use a particular cloud-based technology that could be implemented in their future classrooms. We described Evernote^®, how we used it to work against the notorious theory and practice gap in teacher preparation, and discussed the importance of taking the time in teacher education to teach technology to digital natives.

This article presents a General Theory of Social Systems. This general theory proposes a model and method for the design, behaviour, and development of social systems. The model advanced is an exposition of the universal composition of social systems in three‐dimensions. The accompanying prescribed method offers dissection and analysis of past, present, and planned systems from Micro to Meta scales in isolation and relation to external systems.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how young women from diverse national backgrounds adopt or resist feminist identities. This research is founded on three questions. First, what role does feminism play in the lives of young women from varying geographical and cultural locations? Second, how do media represent and shape understandings of feminism and enactments of femininity? Third, what is the interplay between the perceived relevance of feminism and focus on heterosexual partnering?

Methodology/approach – The research is based on semistructured individual interviews with 13 women. The theoretical framework is based on social movements, feminist, and postfeminist literature.

Findings – I found that the women adhered to media-fabricated stereotypes of feminists such as bra burners, and that despite their differing cultural backgrounds, they shared strikingly similar understandings of feminism. When asked questions about the film Bridget Jones's Diary, many of the women were conflicted with a simultaneous desire for independence and a yearning for traditional heterosexual relationships. The tensions surrounding tradition and modernity, coupled with the perception that feminism is the purview of lesbians resulted in many of them resisting feminist identities.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter highlights the complexities and contradictions exhibited by young women negotiating feminist identities. It demonstrates how difficult it is for feminism to change with respect to broader shifts in social life when it is saddled with such monolithic and static stereotypes. We must strongly consider the future of feminism if young women fail to see its relevance to their lives.

This article notes the growing attractiveness of concepts “borrowed” from chaos theory in organizational studies. Many of these interpretations display sentiments broadly congruent with a “postmodern” approach to organization. Indeed chaos theory itself is presented as part of a similar postmodern shift within natural science. However, these sentiments have been subject to stinging criticism by scientists. Here, the deterministic underpinning of chaos theory is used to show that chaos theory is an entirely modernist enterprise. In this case the indeterministic messages taken by organizational theorists are something of a misunderstanding. Consequently, I discuss whether this is enough to threaten the interdisciplinary status of chaos theory, particularly when it is used in a self-consciously ‘metaphorical’ fashion.

Since the emergence of the Internet in the twentieth century and the rapid growth of different types of information technologies (IT), our lives, either personal or professional, have become digitised. Adoption and diffusion of IT enhance individuals and organisational performance, yet scholars discovered a dual nature of IT in which IT usage may have negative aspects too. First, the inability to cope with IT in a healthy manner creates stress in users, termed technostress. Second, digitisation and adoption of new technologies (e.g. IoT and multi-cloud environments) have increased vulnerabilities to information security (InfoSec) threats. Although organisations utilise counteraction strategies (e.g., security systems, security policies), end-users remain the top source of security incidents. Existing behavioural research has approached technostress and InfoSec independently. However, it is not clear how technology-stressors influence employees’ security-related behaviours. This chapter reviews the interaction effect of these concepts in detail by proposing a conceptual model that explains that technostress is the main reason for employees’ non-compliance with security policies in which users with high-level perceptions of technostress are more likely to violate InfoSec policies. Counteraction strategies to mitigate technostress and security threats are also discussed.

This paper describes how psychosocial interventions (PSI) have been integrated into an undergraduate mental health nursing programme. The first part of the paper provides the broad context of PSI in nurse education and justifies the need to incorporate skills for PSI into the undergraduate nursing curriculum. A variety of educational theories and research are presented, which have informed the development, structure and delivery of the skills programme underpinned by PSI into the undergraduate programme. The successes and limitations of this skills programme are considered in light of the key issues and challenges concerning the integration of PSI skills into undergraduate nursing education.

“Change or perish” has become a corporate mantra (Abrahamson, 2000). What happens when change becomes excessive? We define excessive change as when organizations pursue several seemingly unrelated and perhaps conflicting changes simultaneously, or when organizations introduce new changes before previous changes have been completed. When change is perceived as excessive, organizational members react in various ways. In this paper we draw on existing literature in strategy and management to theoretically develop the phenomenon of excessive change, ways of coping with excessive change, and organizational consequences of excessive change. Implications include how excessive change can be managed as well as suggestions for future research.

Recent research identifies several attributes that lead to the value proposition of a diversity-training program: corporate engagement in diversity training; participants' perceptions of how such programs aid their peers; self-analysis of participants in training; and perceptions regarding the benefit of diversity training for subordinates. The aim of this paper is to test a corresponding four-antecedent model of the value of diversity training from the point of view of hotel managers.

A survey instrument was devised and sent to a random sample of hotel properties that asked managers questions related to the value of diversity training. Multiple regression analysis and t-tests were used as methods of data analyses.

Results from 242 responses returned by managers of 96 hotels indicated that managers perceive themselves and the corporate executives to significantly add value to the organization through diversity training. Furthermore, ethnic minority managers do not value diversity training significantly more highly than their non-minority counterparts do; similarly, little difference exists between genders on the four indicators of diversity-training efficacy.

This study examined only one aspect of diversity management – diversity training. Among other limitations are the small sample and low response rates, which made it difficult to compare ethnic groups to one another.

Through this study, managers' perceptions about which groups of employees add value following diversity training are presented. The findings are likely to help hospitality corporations to implement diversity training more efficiently.

This study indicates that hotel managers value diversity training and suggests the need for organizations to understand how to prioritize various organizational levels for such training.