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The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), formerly the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, has exerted a profound influence on the education of students with disabilities. In 2004 major changes were made to the IDEA when it was amended in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. The category of disabilities that was most profoundly affected by these changes may have been the category of learning disabilities. In this chapter we (a) review the development and major components of the IDEA, (b) explain the important changes in the 2004 amendments for the education of students with learning disabilities, focusing on two specific requirements, and (c) reflect on possible changes in future amendments to the IDEA.

Within the past few years, a new phenomenon has taken place among the world's leading microfinance institutions (MFIs) – entry into new capital markets through initial public offerings (IPOs). “Going public” launches MFIs into a new frontier, not only presenting challenges but also providing new opportunities for the institutions and the clients they serve.

Modern interactionism asserts that both the P (person) and the E (environment or situation) should be considered simultaneously in predicting attitudes and behaviors. In this paper, we apply the interactionist view to salesforce research. Specifically, we use salesforce socialization as an example to illustrate how interactionist concepts from psychology can be effectively applied in salesforce research. The role of qualitative research in this context is explored.

The purpose of this study is to understand how a salesperson’s preset goals, customer satisfaction levels and past performance affect the extent of goal achievement, as well as how job-specific attitudes and emotions affect the relationship between preset goals and goal achievement.

This study uses a modeling framework with both main, moderating and mediating effects, using transaction data and survey results from a telecommunications firm.

The results indicate that preset goals and customer satisfaction, interestingly, have an inverted-U relationships with goal achievement. Further, attitudes and emotions regarding workplace conduciveness and workplace ethics and diversity, reduce the effect preset goals have on goal achievement. However, attitudes and emotions regarding workplace philosophy strengthens the effect preset goals have on goal achievement, whereas with disagreement, this relationship diminishes.

Two of the primary limitations of this study are: one, because of the cross-sectional nature of the study, there is limited opportunity to control for unobserved heterogeneity; and two, performance goal achievement, though is important for the firm, is one of many potential goals that affect a salesperson. For example, customer satisfaction goals or a one-time special event goals could play a role. Therefore, only using performance goal achievement could be a limitation of this study.

This study contributes to academic literature in three ways. First, it demonstrates the diminishing effect of customer satisfaction on goal achievement. Second, it identifies an inverse U-shaped relationship between preset goals and goal achievement. Finally, it examines how attitudes and emotions regarding workplace culture (conduciveness, ethics and diversity and philosophy) affect the relationship between preset goals and goal achievement.

Commodity racism, as conceived by Anne McClintock (1995), describes a novel cultural formation, binding difference, power, and consumption to one another, a creation at the interface of imperialism and industrialism in the late 19th century that offered an emergent language to simultaneously make sense of difference, fashion identity, cultivate desire, and sell stuff. Importantly, as it remapped the world, placing peoples and cultures in ranked social locations, it also reconfigured gender, the body, and taste as it rerouted the flows between public and private spheres. At its core, as expressed quite clearly in the soap advertisements McClintock analyzes, commodity racism stated the (then) accepted facts of white supremacy, underscoring the propriety of imperial expansion and settling, in many ways, for consumers hailed through it the racial question of the day.