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We argue that voice – the sound that people produce when they speak – is an important resource for entrepreneurs, especially when they are pitching to potential investors. We integrate evidence from entrepreneurship, social psychology and linguistics to show that the voice can be regarded both as a tool for entrepreneurs to utilize and as a vital source of information allowing listeners to make judgements about the speaker and their message. To better understand how the voice may be used and interpreted in investment pitches, we develop a model of the relationship between the entrepreneurial voice and investor judgments. Voice depends on entrepreneurs’ characteristics including gender and communication goals but can be utilized to express emotions (purposefully or not) and signal qualities such as competence and trustworthiness. How potential investors interpret these displays depends on cultural expectations and stereotypes. Our review illustrates that female entrepreneurs may find it more difficult to persuade investors due to their naturally higher voice pitch and bias against speech patterns prevalent among young women. We highlight directions for future research exploring the voice as a unique cultural resource for entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to present an annotated bibliography of the new poetry volumes from the Poet's House 2008 Poetry Showcase.

The titles were selected from the Poet's House 2008 Poetry Showcase as titles that are both challenging and accessible.

This list provides the librarian and reader with a guide to collection development in poetry.

This is one of the few lists of its kind showcasing contemporary poetry.

Despite the appeal of studying successful organizations, valuable tools have also been developed by social scientists for understanding organizations that fail. This study applies one such tool − a model of stages of decline − to the case of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations), an organization that has arguably been in decline for decades. The AFL-CIO is an interesting case due to the lack of agreement among key constituencies about the appropriate criteria for measuring organizational performance. Reformers and conservatives have struggled over this issue, each viewing the conflict over performance criteria as crucial in determining who will ultimately control the organization. As the AFL-CIO has moved through successive stages of decline, struggle over the organizational mission has grown increasingly intense, finally leading to the exit of major constituencies. This study confirms the value of the concept of stages of decline, and underscores the role of internal politics, especially in a non-profit organization, in setting the criteria for evaluating performance.

This chapter presents an exploration of the phenomenon of speaking with, or perhaps better stated “through,” a device. Autobiographical works and other published accounts of perceptions of Speech-Generating Devices (SGDs) by persons who have used them are reviewed. The bulk of the chapter focuses on insights gathered from research into the lived experiences of young people who use SGDs. Emerging themes focus on what is “said” by a person who cannot speak, how SGDs announce one’s being in the word, the challenge of one’s words not being one’s own, and the constant sense of being out of time. Reflections on these themes provide insights for practice in the fields of speech language pathology, education, and rehabilitation engineering. The importance of further qualitative inquiry as a method to gather and listen to the voices and experiences of these often unheard individuals is stressed.

Changes are occuring at a startling fillip in our society and our world. One of the changes is the need to revamp how persons with disabilities are treated and educated. In the United States of America, laws have been pulmulgated to reduce the plight of learners with disabilties. As a result, myriad intervention strategies have been instituted to identify, assess, label, place, and educate these learners. However, some interventions continue to be very traditional. To go beyond tradition and adequately maximize the fullest potential of learners with disabilties, we must value the “specialness” of special education as a powerful intervention program, listen to new voices with new ideas, and debunk deficit thinking that are prejudicial, especially in helping people with disabilities to survive in our competitive society. Interestingly, the chapters in this book have exposed the different intervention options for learners with disabilities. Clearly, without innovative interventions for these learners, special education will be a failure.

Narrative accounts of subjective consumer experience are, in one form or another, an essential of qualitative market research. Ethnographic research and ethnographic poetry have obvious connections with the literary form, yet this form has had limited application. Based on the assumption that poetry as a craft is a somewhat limited narrative in ethnographic studies and specifically in studies that attend a consumer vulnerability agenda, this paper aims to contribute to a literary-based perspective. This paper advocates for ethnographic poetry as a consideration of disseminating qualitative data for those researchers immersed in ethnographic research with diverse and vulnerable populations.

The paper draws on a range of extant literature to draw out the distinguishing features of ethnographic poetry, in which to situate ethnographic narratives of two studies of consumer vulnerability. To assist in this, scholarly discussion in the paper is interposed with a series of interludes written in the ethnographic poetic style. These interludes are intended to epitomise merits of such an interpretive research approach.

This is a research paper seeking to draw attention to, and develop a relatively neglected research approach, ethnographic poetry. Researcher reflections, drawn from two ethnographic studies, suggest some tangible consequences of this research to generate further discussion of consumer vulnerability.

The overall aim is to extend discussion of the particular qualities of ethnographic poetry that might contribute to better serve qualitative research approaches, when conducting ethnographic research.

The paper advocates a stronger focus on ethnographic poetry to liberate the imagination of researchers and readers alike to enrich and compliment the analysis of narrative forms of qualitative data drawn from an ethnographic approach.

This paper addresses the concept of ethnographic poetry, stemming from narrative-based qualitative research, which will be entirely new to many researchers and practitioners. It suggests tangible benefits that this new perception could bring to ethnographic research.

This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.

This paper investigates the fit for purpose of the flip model proposed by Max Planck Society and Plan S for the African environment. This flipped model is examined against the backdrop of African imperatives, which is much broader than just flipping a journal pricing model from subscription to open access. This paper also seeks a viable alternative model that supports the growth of African scholarship and the dissemination thereof.

This paper adopts a descriptive research methodology, which allows for an in-depth analysis of a phenomenon. By using this method, this paper describes a flip model proposed by global north entities, which do not augur well for the growth of the OA movement in Africa.

The findings demonstrate that the global north centric flipped model exacerbates the inequality in the publishing landscape by further marginalizing the research voices from the global south. Africa is in dire need of an alternative that denorthernizes the publishing landscape, promote equity and equality, and is more inclusive of the research voices from Africa. South African academic libraries have demonstrated their willingness to experiment with and roll-out library publishing services. This proof of concept has been extended into a continental platform for the publication and dissemination of African scholarship.

This paper will be of interest to those who are grappling with viable alternatives to the current flip models, which include, inter alia, university leadership. This paper will also be of interest to global north libraries who are embarking on library publishing without the social justice obligation but are committed to the OA movement.