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This chapter examines the educational barriers that homeless youth face in one large urban area. The text reviews the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act and discusses how California has attempted to follow the federal mandates, and the implications for Los Angeles. The chapter utilizes interviews with 120 homeless youth and 45 policymakers, school counselors, and after-school program coordinators in Los Angeles to understand how youth experience the education system. The authors identify aspects of the federal mandate that impede the educational progress of homeless youth. The findings highlight that homeless youth are not a homogenous group and educational supports need to be designed recognizing the diversity of their needs. Implications for policy and program implementation are discussed as they pertain to one large city in order to generate future research that might support, contradict, or expand upon the findings.

A strong relationship exists in many cultures between ethnic identity and educational success. This study was conducted at a teacher training university in Southwest China in 1997. It examines how ethnic minority students, through a series of micro-level interactions, construct “scholar selves” within their families, villages, and schools. The study also looks at how macro-level structural supports, built into the Chinese education system, help minority students overcome obstacles to academic success. These supports include special schools and classes for ethnic students, training teachers for nationality areas, financial support for minority education and additional points awarded on national examinations. The chapter suggests what scholars and practitioners might learn from an educational system that demonstrates the characteristics of flexibility, inclusiveness and cohesiveness.

Living on the Boundaries: Urban Marginality in National and International Contexts examines the complex, often controversial issues impacting those who live on the margins of society in our densely populated cities. The topic warrants research compiled by an international array of scholars and intellectuals from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, economics, political science, psychology, education, public health, law, criminology, history, urban studies, geography and demography, and urban planning, among others. This volume, from the first chapter to the last, richly details and informs us about the human condition, from multidisciplinary perspectives, about urban life in global contexts. Why is the study of urban life and urban marginality so consequential? The answer is simple. Because of the unprecedented pace of urbanization, a majority of humans now live in highly dense areas, in our cities. It is our cities which project the visual imagery of the stark class divisions in society. By 2050, it is projected that two thirds of the world's population will live in cities. Any volume which attempts to present dynamic issues in global contexts moves us toward resolving many of the conflicting and confounding issues which plague humankind, in the present, and will be with us in the future, if workable solutions are not found. As one reads the ensuing pages, you cannot help but come away better informed, noting the symmetry of complex societal issues of urban marginality across national boundaries.

The transition from graduate student to new faculty member can be an exciting and challenging period in an academic career. New faculty members must successfully balance service obligations, research demands, and teaching responsibilities. Numerous guides have been developed to assist new faculty members in developing their careers. This selective bibliography identifies sources that can assist both graduate students and new faculty members as they develop their academic career.

After briefly covering Bill Freudenburg’s early years, this essay reviews his major scholarly contributions and professional accomplishments while a faculty member at Washington State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Bill’s unique strengths – especially his keen sociological imagination – and crucial conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions are highlighted, as well as his commitment to providing valuable mentoring for students and colleagues. The enduring importance of his work is ensured by the continuing application and extension of his ideas by other scholars.

Computing ethics represents a long established, yet rapidly evolving, discipline that grows in complexity and scope on a near-daily basis. Therefore, to help understand some of that scope it is essential to incorporate a range of perspectives, from a range of stakeholders, on current and emerging ethical challenges associated with computer technology. This study aims to achieve this by using, a three-pronged, stakeholder analysis of Computer Science academics, ICT industry professionals, and citizen groups was undertaken to explore what they consider to be crucial computing ethics concerns. The overlap between these stakeholder groups are explored, as well as whether their concerns are reflected in the existing literature.

Data collection was performed using focus groups, and the data was analysed using a thematic analysis. The data was also analysed to determine if there were overlaps between the literature and the stakeholders’ concerns and attitudes towards computing ethics.

The results of the focus group analysis show a mixture of overlapping concerns between the different groups, as well as some concerns that are unique to each of the specific groups. All groups stressed the importance of data as a key topic in computing ethics. This includes concerns around the accuracy, completeness and representativeness of data sets used to develop computing applications. Academics were concerned with the best ways to teach computing ethics to university students. Industry professionals believed that a lack of diversity in software teams resulted in important questions not being asked during design and development. Citizens discussed at length the negative and unexpected impacts of social media applications. These are all topics that have gained broad coverage in the literature.

In recent years, the impact of ICT on society and the environment at large has grown tremendously. From this fast-paced growth, a myriad of ethical concerns have arisen. The analysis aims to shed light on what a diverse group of stakeholders consider the most important social impacts of technology and whether these concerns are reflected in the literature on computing ethics. The outcomes of this analysis will form the basis for new teaching content that will be developed in future to help illuminate and address these concerns.

The multi-stakeholder analysis provides individual and differing perspectives on the issues related to the rapidly evolving discipline of computing ethics.

This comparative study qualitatively explores how linguistic minority immigrants and refugees experienced the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku disasters, including their coping mechanisms and their perceived vulnerabilities and resilience. The data used for this qualitative analysis was primarily drawn from 28 in-depth interviews with linguistic minority immigrants and refugees and their supporting organization staff conducted in 2015–2016. Additional material was drawn from two publicly available data sets. Immigrants and refugees are typically thought of as being more vulnerable in disasters. However, findings drawn from this research demonstrate the nonlinearity, complexity, and contextuality of social vulnerabilities in disasters, suggesting that they are not necessarily powerless help-seekers in some cases. Using Bourdieu’s capital theory, this study demonstrates how immigrants and refugees were active social agents in these disasters. Consequently, we need to reconceptualize the social vulnerability approach. Some study participants had experiences of going through wars and everyday disasters, which made them more resilient. This is conceptualized here as earned strength, which can be a significant resource in disasters for the socially vulnerable. This chapter hopes to answer some critical questions regarding the social vulnerability approach: how do we incorporate the structure–agency concept, how do we theoretically deal with the contextuality/nonlinearity of social vulnerability in disasters, and how do we conceptualize a research study that can seek more practical and generalizable findings, instead of event-driven and disaster-specific findings?

In this chapter, I suggest three conceptual tools developed by William R. Freudenburg and colleagues that characterize the failure of institutions to carry out their duties – recreancy, atrophy of vigilance, and bureaucratic slippage – are of use beyond environmental sociology in the framing of the September 11, 2001 disaster. Using testimony and findings from primary materials such as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Joint Inquiry hearings and report (2002, 2004a, 2004b) and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004) alongside insider accounts, I discuss how Freudenburg’s tools have the potential to theorize institutional failures that occur in national security decision making. I also suggest these tools may be of particular interest to the U.S. intelligence community in its own investigation of various types of risk and failures.

This paper aims to introduce the implicit firm theory, distinguishing between the belief that firms can (incremental firm theory) or cannot (entity firm theory) readily change in response to marketplace demands. It is proposed and shown, that firm theory beliefs influence customer-engagement attitudes and intentions.

Study 1 tests the relationship between firm theory, self-theory and knowledge-sharing attitudes. Study 2a tests differences between incremental and entity firm theorists in response to firm failure. Study 2b examines the relationship between firm theory and blame attributions on post-failure loyalty. Study 3 explores the effect of firm theory on perceptions of control and blame attributions following repeated firm failures.

Study 1 shows firm theory influences consumer knowledge-sharing attitudes beyond the effect of self-theory. Study 2a shows incremental firm theorists are more likely to remain loyal to a firm following failure and less likely to share negative word-of-mouth. Study 2b shows that blame attributions mediate the relationship between firm theory and loyalty intentions, with incremental theorists ascribing less blame. Study 3 shows incremental firm theorists significantly increase blame following multiple failures, while entity firm theorists do not.

Results are based on scenario-based surveys and experimental methods; their applicability in more complex real-world customer-firm relationships warrants additional study.

Firms should account for a customer’s firm theory in their communications, emphasizing situational factors to reduce post-failure blame among incremental firm theorists.

Establishes that consumers hold beliefs regarding the malleability of firm traits, which influence their firm engagement intentions.