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In the United Kingdom under the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010, there was a shift of power away from local towards central government, leading to a situation in which the role of public service organisations could appear to be mainly implementing priorities set by central government and complying with national standards, enforced through the setting of targets and the use of performance management frameworks. The key performance management systems, and the standards within them, became increasingly focused on outcomes, defined as the results that services produce that have an impact on the lives of service users and citizens – the benefits of the service rather than the volume or quality of the outputs (Willis & Bovaird, 2011).

This chapter details how local racial contexts and educators’ readings of those contexts shape actions they took in sponsoring Black students. Sponsorship was understood as the process in which agents provide, stymie, and/or enhance access to valued resources. The author utilized data collected during a yearlong ethnography of two high schools – one urban and the other suburban – both within a metropolitan Midwestern city. Findings from the study highlighted that teachers’ involvement in sponsorship was shaped by how they understood local racial disparities and contrasting views of equality. First, teachers noted residential segregation patterns as evidence of past and present manifestations of systemic racism that disadvantaged Black students. Second, they relied on their knowledge of racialized educational disparities to shape equitable actions. Third, teachers employed a restrictive equality approach to argue that access to high-performing schools was enough for some Black students in order to neglect modifying assignments. The need exists for researchers to examine complexities of sponsorship and how racism (re)shapes actions sponsors take toward fostering Black student academic success. Additionally, it is important for teachers to deepen their understanding of systemic racism and its manifestations within particular localities.

Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

Although the concept of social capital is rightly associated with Putnam (2000), arguably its roots lie further back in the nineteenth century, but were first articulated in a “contemporary sense” in 1916 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2001, p. 41). The authors begin their analysis by summarizing the main types of capital: economic, social, political, human, cultural and symbolic, before exploring the different types of social capital, including bonding, bridging and linking. These are then linked to a variety of related concepts, including: social enterprise, social networks, social value, community development, community resilience and sociability (Cook, Halsall, & Wankhade, 2015). It is argued that social capital is central to these, and is of increasing importance across the globe within the context of the threats and opportunities posed by globalization on the one hand (including the spread of COVID-19) and of potential deglobalization on the other, in part as a reaction to COVID-19 and pre-existing nationalist trends toward limitation of global interactions. The discussion is supported by examination of a range of case studies drawn from societies of contrasting types, including the UK, USA, China, Bangladesh and South Africa. The authors conclude their analysis via consideration of how social capital can be expanded further in order to help meet contemporary and future challenges from whichever direction it arises.

The act of becoming ‘heavily tattooed’, with its historical association with deviant subcultures, continues to carry a social stigma and evoke negative sanctions. This is especially so for women, who must also contend with gender norms within the highly masculinised tattoo subculture. For women, the experience of becoming heavily tattooed comes to represent an embodied resistance to normative ideals of beauty, against which the participants construct their own alternative gender and beauty philosophies. Besides gender norms, the tattoo world has specific ethos which divides the serious subcultural member from those more casually connected to it. The physical parameter of the subculture finds people gathering in tattoo studios and at tattoo conventions, as well as consuming tattoo-oriented media, such as magazines and television shows. This study draws on in-depth interviews with 36 participants across the United States who consider themselves serious tattoo collectors. From their stories, we learn about the importance of participating in this leisure activity and how becoming heavily tattooed impacts their sense of self, gender and identity.

Masculinity and heavy metal share a clear and well-documented relationship, with many of the key texts on metal centering around its representation of gender (Walser, 1993; Weinstein, 1991). Less discussed is masculinity in Australian metal, as Australian metal itself remains underrepresented in scholarly research. In this chapter we discuss the music, media and image of Parkway Drive – a popular metalcore band from Byron Bay, Australia – via a reading of two of the band’s feature-length rockumentary films. We draw on concepts and theories of gender (Butler, 2006), and public image (Leonard, 2007), as well as studies of Australian masculinity, specifically those pertaining to mateship, surfing, and adventurousness. As the metalcore subgenre has not been widely studied, this approach provides a basis for understanding the subgenre as well as its relationship to gender, commercial success, and Australian heavy metal, focussing on the decidedly Anglo-Australian representation of masculinity performed by Parkway Drive. We argue that the band typifies a distinctly Australian type of hegemonic masculinity, one that draws on discussion of Australian identity, beach culture and surfing. We further examine the band’s use of ‘rockumentary’ tropes to build their public image and to tighten affective bonds with viewers.