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Purpose – This study examines parents’ financial stress associated with obtaining care for young children while employed in unstable low-wage jobs. The child care subsidy program aims to both improve child care quality and support employment, and we expect that a substantial infusion of resources into this program would reduce parents’ financial stress.

Methodology/approach – We use a mixed-methods research design to study parents’ financial costs of child care, how predictable the cost of child care is to a parent, and what strategies parents employ to manage child care costs.

Findings – We find that parents perceive the subsidy program essential to their ability to manage the needs of their children and working. Yet, receiving subsidies does not appear to alleviate parents’ financial stress because child care costs continue to consume a large share of the family's income and subsidy policies make it difficult for parents to predict their portion of the costs. Parents manage the large and unpredictable expense of child care by decreasing other expenditures and increasing debt.

Practical implications – Changing subsidy policies so they better fit the reality of these families’ lives could result in a more substantive stress reduction. States can reduce unpredictability by reducing and stabilizing participants’ child care cost burden and revising eligibility policy.

Originality/value of paper – This research project fills an important gap in our knowledge about financial stress of low-income working families, provides insights into the role subsidy program participation plays in these parents’ lives, and informs discussion of subsidy policy.

Clifford Broman is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His general research area is psychosocial factors in physical and emotional health. Recent research has focused on the role of race/ethnicity in substance use; psychosocial stress; and family formation behaviors and attitudes among African-Americans. His recent publications have appeared in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Race and Social Problems, and Psychological Services.

Beginning in 2007, many countries around the globe began to experience substantial downturns in their respective economies. Stock markets began to falter, unemployment rates began to climb, and it became readily apparent that a worldwide economic recession was underway.

This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons learned.

This paper defines four phases of implementing an open innovation program: Learn, Pilot, Scale and Sustain. It provides guidance on the time required for each phase and recommendations for how to utilize a CoE to succeed. Recommendations are based upon the experience of NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate, and experience at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard running hundreds of challenges with research and development organizations.

Lessons learned include the importance of grounding innovation initiatives in the business strategy, assessing the portfolio of work to select problems most amenable to solving via crowdsourcing methodology, framing problems that external parties can solve, thinking strategically about early wins, selecting the right platforms, developing criteria for evaluation, and advancing a culture of innovation. Establishing a CoE provides an effective infrastructure to address both technical and cultural issues.

The NASA experience spanned more than seven years from initial learnings about open innovation concepts to the successful scaling and sustaining of an open innovation program; this paper provides recommendations on how to decrease this timeline to three years.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This paper draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

In this chapter, we present a case study that explicates the work that two Black boys undergo to write their narratives despite the low expectations of their academic abilities espoused by their White teacher. Orienting ourselves within a critical race theory framework, we relied upon storytelling to tell the stories of John and Seth, two young Black boys whose science interests fueled their engagement across school subjects despite the semantic deficit-oriented positioning of their academic abilities by the White teachers and staff within their school. Throughout this chapter, we center their experiences to argue that understanding the inherent underrepresentation of Black men in science-based professions requires an examination of the pivotal educational moments preceding this disparity. Rich and culturally responsive science teaching may support equity for Black boys, but John and Seth's stories illustrate that these practices alone will only perpetuate the status quo unless teachers challenge their dispositions regarding who their students are and what they are capable of. We conclude by offering suggestions for practitioners to consider when designing and implementing equitable student-centered science instruction.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.