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This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

Labour emerged as a political party with an egalitarian mission, pledged to tackle the stark inequalities that disfigured British society. But since the advent of New Labour this mission has been radically redefined, signalled by a shift from egalitarianism to meritocracy. This chapter is divided into three sections, each exploring themes on the party’s orientation to inequality, dealing, respectively, with the New Labour government (1997–2010), the period of the Miliband leadership (2010–2015) and, finally Labour under the Corbyn leadership (2015 to the present). It investigates, during the first two phases, the conceptual and ideological shifts in attitudes to equality, what has prompted them and how they have been articulated in policy forms. In the third period – Labour under Corbyn – where progress on policy development has been slow, it changes focus to concentrate on one of the most formidable barriers to the egalitarian project, mounting popular resistance, and the party’s response to this.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a way of thinking about the technical and social subsystems in the context of e‐commerce adoption.

An interpretive research approach was used to investigate the employee management issues in service industries as they implemented B2C e‐commerce. Two case studies were selected, both retail banks in Australia. One case study was a major bank, the other a smaller bank in a niche market.

Employees who interact with customers using B2C technologies require different levels of skill and capability than those required in face‐to‐face interactions. This has implications for human resource management processes such as job design, recruitment and retention, performance management and training.

The study was small in scale and therefore limited in scope. Other service organisations and industries may have quite different information ecologies and business strategies.

The coactive commerce system provides a concrete way for researchers and practitioners to better align technology, customers and employees to achieve competitive advantage.

This research shows that it is important to understand B2C e‐commerce technologies in conjunction with business practices and in their broader context. It is important to understand how a service organisation's business strategy, technology strategy, business processes and employee management work together to provide an appropriate level of service to customers and achieve sustainable competitive advantage and strategic positioning. This is a complex set of factors.

The coactive commerce system extends the socio‐technical framework to provide a more explicit way to analyse both the social and technical subsystems in an organisation by integrating the human resource management aspects into the theoretical mix in the electronic commerce and information systems literature. This is important because the employee interaction with the customer is the way the customer perceives the organisation.

This study aims to further an understanding of hospitality employees’ perceptions of their customers in the context of service encounter by utilizing the concepts of contact hypothesis and cultural distance in a multi-ethnic environment. The study compares perceptions of Chinese immigrants working in restaurants of their British patrons (from a remote culture) and Chinese patrons (from a proximate culture). The service encounter takes place in the London Chinatown. The dynamics of Chinatown as a “third space” adds complexity to service encounter and employee perceptions.

A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 118 Chinese restaurant employees in the Soho area of the London Chinatown. Perception questions were based on interviews undertaken in an earlier phase of the research. A paired t-test was run to identify significant differences in the Chinese restaurant employees’ perceptions of the Chinese and British patrons. Discriminant analysis was performed to determine which perception variables discriminated the most between the two patron groups.

Despite cultural proximity, the perceptions held by Chinese restaurant employees of their nationals were negative compared to the perceptions of British patrons. Out of 16, in 15 areas of measurement, there were significant differences in the Chinese restaurant employees’ perceptions’ of their Chinese and British guests. Six variables that discriminated the most between the two groups of guests were no tips, not polite, loud, no compliment, messy and demanding.

Research in ethnic and minority quarters, such as Chinatown in London, may suffer from “recall bias”, or in this case from making the difference between customer groups. Also, the Chinese are not a homogeneous group. For example, despite cultural similarity with mainstream culture, cultural and behavioral characteristics may exist between residents from the South, North and Hong Kong.

The cultural diversity of the industry’s employees necessitates managing cultural diversity effectively, especially in the sectors that rely heavily on guest–employee interaction. Perceptions affect attitudes and behavior. Training programs about perception and its roots may bridge the service gap in high-contact service encounters.

This study provides a ground for future empirical research into understanding the immigrant employees’ perceptions of their guests, nationals versus non-nationals and the ways for improving these perceptions. Taking the example of Chinatown as a dynamic “third space” is another approach to understanding the effects of “ethnoscape” on encounters in a more globalized village.

Gender differences in leadership and issues around differential progression of male and female leaders are receiving more attention in the fields of human resource and leadership development. However, little is known about how interventions designed to support female leaders are being experienced within real-world contexts of global organizations. There is limited research and discussion on how such interventions are experienced at a more systemic level. This study aims to contribute at this very level.

This study reports on a predominantly coaching-based development program that was designed to further the careers of female leaders within a complex multi-national organization. The study was conducted in a large, global health-care corporation employing 100,000 people based in over 120 countries. The qualitative research design for this study was exploratory, involving a reflexive process at each of the two stages.

The findings from this qualitative research take the debate on “the gendered organization” further by including the voices of female leaders. They demonstrate that whilst theoretically the concept of the “ideal worker” may inhibit progression, this is not necessarily a barrier to career advancement. Coaching, both individual and group, is shown to have a powerful effect on promoting reflection, self-confidence and focus.

There are two research limitations. While confidentiality was promised, the responses of some interviewees were nevertheless still guarded. Other limitations relate to the extent to which this study can be generalized to other contexts, as it was conducted inside a single global corporation.

The study addresses the complex and urgent topic of differential progression and makes a broader contribution by offering a systemic perspective on gender and development in global organizations.

This study explores the framing of messages delivered by 105 Fortune 500 companies across 21 sectors in June 2020 in response to three social justice issues that took prominence that month in the United States: racial inequity, immigration laws and LGBTQ rights.

Researchers compiled a list of the top five companies in each sector on the 2020 Fortune 500 list, with a resulting list of N = 21 sectors and N = 105 companies. A database of corporate statements was compiled along with a comprehensive list of recurring themes. Quantitative framing analysis was used to examine each corporate statement.

Seventy percent of the companies examined made statements about the issue of racial injustice, 58% about LGBTQ issues and only 6% about immigration policy. Coders identified the most frequent message type coded on each social justice issue: racial inequity –“Working Together”; immigration policy – “Celebration”; LGBTQ rights – “Celebration.”

This study relied on a quantitative analysis of themes, but it did not analyze the specific language or media used. Further examination of rhetorical choices could uncover additional meanings in the messages.

Companies are increasingly called upon to speak out on controversial issues. This can be challenging for communicators who are deciding how to respond. This study sheds light on the common frames used in corporate statements.

No studies to date have adopted a content analysis approach to assess the content of corporate activist statements. Examining the messages is important because, as more companies become increasingly vocal about social issues, stakeholders utilize this information to judge the sincerity of both the company and the message.

This chapter offers a deeper understanding of the symbols and meanings attached to tourists’ special possessions as well as of the functions they fulfill in contemporary consumption. Nineteen informants have been interviewed and observed at home in a naturalistic interpretive perspective. Interview transcripts, field notes, and pictorial material were analyzed and interpreted through the grounded theory approach. This results in a new typology of symbolic souvenirs including touristic trinkets, destination stereotypes, paper mementoes, and picked-up objects. Such a typology relates to four major functions souvenirs may fulfill in terms of meanings and identity construction, that is, categorization, self-expression, connectedness, and self-creation.