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Strategic decisions leaders make involving organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), divestitures, and downsizing, which can influence and/or interact with other organizational factors. For example, within the context of M&A, changes impact financial performance, firm behaviors, and organizational culture. In addition, strategic decisions for these types of change can also interrelate with other more intrapersonal factors, including both leaders’ and employees’ health and well-being. Employee stress, also referred to as “merger syndrome,” outlines individual negative impacts of the changes including, but not limited to, cynicism and distrust, change wariness, and burnout, all accumulating to psychological effects including increases in detachment to work, stress, and sick leave. In this chapter, the authors outline the different impacts M&A phases have on stress and well-being and how they interrelate with the strategic decisions leaders make. The authors also outline future research opportunities and practical implications for how leaders and employees could better manage future major changes such as M&A activities.

In the introduction to Beyond Bombshells, Jeffrey A Brown lists examples of blockbuster films with leading female heroines and proclaims that they have ‘challenged the assumption that action movies are a strictly male domain’ (2015, p. 6). His examples include, but are not limited to, the Kill Bill films (2003, 2005), The Hunger Games (2012), Brave (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), all of which demonstrate the rise in popularity of the woman-led action film. However, these films also demonstrate a reluctance of the action film to detach itself from masculinity. Despite their female leads, these action films still foreground masculinity. The films have darker colour palettes and their female leads tend to have masculine coded traits and hobbies, suggesting that women can succeed within this genre only by distancing themselves from femininity.

This chapter analyses the subversion of the genre conventions of action by exploring the use of feminine objects in director Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020). Written and directed by women, Birds of Prey is a notable turn in the action genre as it makes use of feminine objects (hair ties, glitter, fashion, jewellery) within action sequences that don't just allow a female presence within the action, but centre feminine power. By relocating femininity and masculinity to objects rather than bodies, new ways of understanding how genre conventions are not fixed but fluid are opened up for further exploration.

Like many faculty teaching in the social sciences or humanities, I've often been frustrated when students show no evidence of having completed assigned readings for my discussion-centric literature classes. I recently taught a short story class that emphasized my high expectations for student participation, and the means by which students would collaboratively and nightly analyze assigned texts: Twitter. My students soon embraced Twitter as a collaboration tool, and increasingly came to class with improved attitudes toward, and readiness for, class discussions. The nightly peer-review process made possible by Twitter helped students improve their spoken and written arguments, and deepen their understanding of challenging texts. This chapter tells the story of the discoveries I made about teaching student-centered classes, and about using Twitter as a sandbox where students would share their ideas before coming to the well-attended lectures and class discussions. The chapter concludes with ten recommended strategies for teaching with Twitter.

This chapter offers a critical reading of a range of television narratives centred on diverse populations of the articulate dead, including grim reapers (Dead Like Me), sort-of-ghosts (American Horror Story), zombies (iZombie), what appear to be ‘just regular dead people’ (The Good Place, Les Revenants) and some other creepy and unusual manifestations of the undead (Intruders, The Fades). It suggests that the preponderance of the articulate dead on television is symptomatic of a broader cultural desire to talk both about death and with the dead. It also suggests that there are numerous opportunities to learn from fictional engagement with death and the dead, foregrounding the ways in which televisual narratives can operate to reiterate, critique and engage with social and cultural messages. The chapter takes a playful approach and seeks to distil some key ‘self-help’ aphorisms that the dead in these series might offer the living about how to approach life, death and everything inbetween, as they tell their audiences to ‘look within’ to identify the greatest threats to their selfhood, to persevere because ‘it’s never too late to change’, and to ‘never forget’ the dead and what they might have scarified for the living.

“Dora! Dora!” squealed my 18-month-old son from his stroller on the crowded subway platform. I scanned the crowd but could not locate the source of his excitement. Then a young girl turned her back to us and I saw on her purple backpack the face of “Dora the Explorer,” whose name had made its way into my son's small vocabulary. This scene could have easily taken place in any city or town in the US; young children of all ethnicities are familiar with Dora's animated television program. Worldwide, parents have spent over $3 billion on Dora the Explorer merchandise since 2001, and most products feature English and Spanish phrases (Jiménez, 2005). And Dora is not alone: her show was just the first in a recent wave of animated educational children's programs featuring Latino main characters and dialogue in Spanish.

Internet of things (IoT) and Big Data, which are among the pioneers of Industry 4.0 technologies, have gained great importance in recent years. Within the scope of Industry 4.0, organizations are trying to undertake digital transformation by adapting these two important technologies to their business processes. Undoubtedly, while this transformation provides great advantages for organizations in terms of management, organization, and marketing, it also carries disadvantages such as difficulties and complexity regarding the privacy of the collected data and systems. However, IoT and Big Data Analytics play a role as restructuring factors for products, services, and especially business processes. This study discusses the impact of IoT and Big Data Analytics on the digital transformation of organizations from the perspective of corporate culture, marketing, and management. Simultaneously, the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic that the world has experienced recently, on the business of institutions, are also discussed. By adopting IoT and Big Data Analytics, the attitudes, benefits, and challenges of the institutions that are or are not willing to realize digital transformation during the epidemic process are examined, and a projection is tried to be made to the post-COVID-19 period. While the study specifically highlights the positive effects of IoT and Big Data Analytics on the business, it sheds light on available opportunities and provides useful implications for managers and marketers.