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As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

The purpose of this chapter is to expand our understanding of the types of Black families that are using Parent PLUS, the types of institutions that rely on Parent PLUS the most, and the outcomes of students who use Parent PLUS to finance their first year of college.

I used descriptive analyses on several datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS, BPS:04/09, and NPSAS.

The data revealed that (a) of Parent PLUS borrowers, greater shares of low-income Black families are borrowing than White families; (b) many institutions that serve Black students (including HBCUs) give out small amounts of institutional aid but also have much smaller endowments than non-Black-serving institutions; and (c) many families who borrow in their first year stop borrowing in their second year – and of those who stop borrowing, many transfer institutions.

Serving as a starting point in the conversation to Black families borrowing PLUS, this study is not causal and is limited by the unavailability of student-level data on PLUS borrowers. Estimating from nationally representative studies and examining Black-serving institutions is the next-best approximation.

The efforts to standardize financial aid award letters and provide better consumer information to parents must also include PLUS. Moreover, we need to find sustainable solutions for PLUS-reliant institutions to increase their capacity to provide institutional aid.

This chapter contributes to conversation around a controversial financial aid product that has been largely understudied, and in particular for Black families who borrow PLUS at the highest rates.

Since March (1991) presented his ideas on organizational learning, hundreds of empirical tests have been conducted on relationships among the activities of exploration, exploitation, ambidexterity, and firm performance. Despite continued interest in his ideas, there has not been a systematic assessment of extant research to reveal whether, and to what extent, these activities relate to firm performance. This study uses meta-analysis to take a next step by aggregating results of 117 studies from more than 21,000 firms. I find strong performance effects for exploration and exploitation, but contrary to received theory, I discover ambidexterity yields weaker effects than a focus on either exploration or exploitation. Thus, I leverage these findings to offer future research opportunities.

Given prior limited research on boards in clean-tech enterprises, we investigate what constitutes an effective board exploring in-depth: who the board members are, what roles they perform and how these roles are performed.

Our study is an inductive, multiple case study of five clean-tech enterprises established in Norway.

We find that board composition in terms of complementary resources that the top management team lacks added by outside directors, their increased engagement in the board service role and board behavioural integration are important constituents of board effectiveness, which in turn translates into the increased levels of the firm’s strategic action capabilities, both action speed and breadth.

We suggest that these three constituents (prevalence of outside directors, board service role engagement and board behavioural integration) together make up the board contribution, which is most valued by clean-tech enterprises in the earliest stages of their development. Future research could be conducted in other types of high-tech start-ups and/or in other hybrid social enterprises to strengthen the generalizability of our findings.

While the mainstream governance research focuses on for-profit boards in large established companies, our study adds to the research on non-for-profit governance and boards in clean-tech enterprises that are both small entrepreneurial and hybrid social enterprises.

In this study we investigated the effects of news reports on acquirer short-term performance. Our focus was on the extent to which key deal characteristics – the type of deal, during a merger wave or not or the presence of a significant premium – are made explicit. Moreover, we looked for the effect of the assessment of the deal characteristics by different key informants: board members, top management team members, and analysts. Configurations derived using the set-theoretic approach suggest that media-transmitted signals form complex interrelations among content and informant. We found that investors react positively to deals that are surrounded by unequivocal signals of synergy potential: they contain explicitly stated deal characteristics as well as deal endorsements from the boards and/or top management of acquirer and target companies. Analysts’ assessments of the deals seem to bear little influence on investor reaction. Meanwhile, investors react negatively to deals with low or absent media coverage as well as deals surrounded by signals of ambiguous synergy potential.

Climate change is a global threat to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. In an increasingly urbanized world, homeowners play an important role in climate adaptation and environmental sustainability through decisions to landscape and manage their residential properties.

In this chapter, we review the potential impacts of climate change on environmental sustainability in urban ecosystems and highlight the role of urban and suburban residents in conserving biodiversity. We focus extensively on the interactions of homeowners and residential landscapes in urban coastal and desert environments.

Understanding how human-environment interactions are linked with a changing climate is especially relevant for coastal and desert cities in the United States, which are already experiencing visible impacts of climate change. In fact, many homeowners are already making decisions in response to environmental change, and these decisions will ultimately shape the future structure, function and sustainability of these critically important ecosystems.

Considering the close relationship between biodiversity and the health and well-being of human societies, understanding how climate change and other social motivations affect the landscaping decisions of urban residents will be critical for predicting and enhancing sustainability in these social-ecological systems.

Social scientists often speculate that both acculturation and socioeconomic status are factors that may explain differences in the body weight between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, yet prior research has not explicitly theorized and tested the pathways that lead both of these upstream factors to contribute to ethnic/nativity disparities in weight. We make this contribution to the literature by developing a conceptual model drawing from Glass and McAtee’s (2006) risk regulation framework. We test this model by analyzing data from the 1999–2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Our conceptual model treats acculturation and socioeconomic status as risk regulators, or social factors that place individuals in positions where they are at risk for health risk behaviors that negatively influence health outcomes. We specifically argue that acculturation and low socioeconomic status contribute to less healthy diets, lower physical activity, and chronic stress, which then increases the risk of weight gain. We further contend that pathways from ethnicity/nativity and through acculturation and socioeconomic status likely explain disparities in weight gain between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican immigrants and whites. Study results largely support our conceptual model and have implications for thinking about solutions for reducing ethnic/nativity disparities in weight.

Technology offers great potential to gifted, talented, and creative (GCT) students, including students who are twice exceptional (i.e., students who are GCT as well as identified with a disability). However, little research exists regarding the use and evidence-base base of technologies for these populations. This chapter presents technology to support students who are GCT as well as students identified as twice exceptional, including assistive technology to support students in content area instruction. Although, an evidence-base is needed for using technology in education for GCT and twice-exceptional students, existing research supports using the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies with these students.