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The ATF case is a succinct opportunity to explore the many special features of leadership succession for a family business. In 2009 the company was passing the baton to the oldest of three sons in the second-generation family business.

ATF produced metal and plastic fasteners for, primarily, the automotive industry. ATF had grown into a company with more than $50 million in annual revenues. The company had grown in large part through alliances with other family businesses around the world. First-generation patriarch Don Surber had led the company since he acquired it in 1982. Don was known for his charismatic leadership style and his focus on driving value through a network approach.

The case traces the career paths of all three sons and looks at the succession through the eyes of the oldest son, Jason Surber. The elements, constituents, and challenges of succession are evident. The fundamental insight is that business leadership succession is far more than just passing the business leadership baton. It also requires attention to the family, the board, the whole system of external stakeholders, and the future of ownership.

The epilogue in this note covers the period from 2009 to 2012 by describing what Jason did to earn credibility, to incorporate his brothers, and to define his personal leadership philosophy and style. The epilogue thus provides students with an opportunity to consider and define their own personal philosophy of management leadership and their own style. They will see the art of melding styles from the past with their own for the future.

This paper aims to examine the sixteenth-century Nahua society of central Mexico to answer the question, what commercial ethical norms operated in the sixteenth-century Nahua society? After decades of trying, Western business models and managerial theories have not met expectations in terms of fostering a socially and environmentally sustainable future. Qualitatively different approaches are needed, and one way to find them is to look at business models, norms and practices that operated in societies that were isolated from Western influences.

This paper contributes to efforts to find and analyze historical texts that include business practices. In particular, this study uses grounded theory techniques to examine the presence of ethical commercial norms in one of history’s foundational ethnographic texts, The Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century study of Nahua society.

This study identified six commercial ethical norms that structured Nahua commerce: “care for others,” “exercise prudence,” “tell the truth,” “be respectful of others,” “show reverence to the gods” and “be humble.” Confidence in these findings was enhanced by their “qualitative degrees of freedom,” whereby these norms were found to operate in other sectors of Nahua society.

This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating ethical norms of commerce that can emerge in isolation from Western cultures; providing a rigorous and novel methodology for deriving norms from historical texts; and expanding knowledge of business practices beyond modern Western contexts.

The purpose of this study is to examine and interpret the characteristics of social responsibility in general, and business responsibility in particular, that were evident during a period in European history that was plagued by widespread social problems and change. Based on that interpretation, the authors explore the lessons those characteristics may have for social responsibility in a contemporary world that is facing similar conditions.

The paper presents a qualitative analysis of the proceedings of the Bienfaisance Congress held in Frankfurt in 1857, where societal leaders from different nations met to answer the question, who has responsibility for whom, and for what? The authors use grounded theory, as it is operationalized in what is known as the “Gioia template,” to conduct a structured analysis of this particular text, and to in turn produce a theoretical interpretation of how that question was answered.

The interpretation from this study is that congress participants articulated certain established dimensions of responsibility (individual, organizational, national), as well as one new dimension (international), and did so by differentiating boundaries of responsibility; in turn, the authors suggest that these dimensions and boundaries work together to form a nested system of responsibilities.

There is limited empirical evidence available that documents the variety of responsibility-based initiatives that were being conducted during the 19th century. An analysis of the congress proceedings allows us to gain a better understanding of how the 19th-century world, particularly the upper echelons of European society, approached the question of under what conditions actors in different domains have responsibility for another. While the implications are limited by the analysis of the proceedings of one congress that was attended by elites, they do provide a snapshot of how Europe sought to articulate a system of bounded responsibilities during a time of widespread social problems and change.

Although the nested system of responsibilities framework that emerged from the grounded theory analysis is not applicable to all situations, it should sensitize policymakers and business leaders to the need to address social problems in a systemic way.

The authors both present a systems-based framework for understanding how responsibility is differentiated among actors (individual, organizational, state and international) and demonstrate how a theoretical interpretation of historical documents can be accomplished through the use of grounded theory, as operationalized through the Gioia template.

This personal narrative describes the results of a tragic gun accident involving my young son and his close friend. In this autobiographical narrative, I trace the effects of youthful offender laws on my family and explain how our state's juvenile justice system transformed our family's lives for over three years. In addition, as both a participant and a sociologist observer, I show how race and class have conditioned the accident's outcome. As Griffith and Smith's (2005) work on mothering for schooling illustrates, social class greatly affects the relationship between school and family.

In our case, largely because of my training as a researcher and my husband's background in education and psychology, we were able to make the juvenile justice system work as positively as possible for our son. And, because of my privileged position as an academic, I am now able to make visible the effects of youthful offender laws on one youthful offender and his parents.

Few studies have addressed the experiences of a graduate’s transition from university to the world of work. Understanding how graduates react and respond to this journey will provide universities with the ability to prepare and equip students for the road ahead. The purpose of this particular Australian case study was to extend understanding of the experience of making the transition from university to work, and to identify questions for further study. Data were collected using semi‐structured interviews, which were transcribed and analysed for clusters of common themes. Four themes emerged from the case study: “an uncertain feeling”, “inflated expectations”, “the work experience paradox” and “a low time”. It is hoped that understanding this graduate’s experiences will assist higher education institutions, recruiting companies and students to better understand and prepare for this significant life passage.

This paper reports on the processes and outcomes of a collaborative self-study conducted by three beginning teacher educators who sought to examine the efficacy of their teaching practices while working with student teachers in the field. By systematically embracing opportunities to explore mutually pressing issues and concerns manifest across the student teaching semester, the authors found that collaborative self-study provided a useful framework for considering their pedagogical reasoning and decision making as they encouraged student teachers to engage in rationale-based practice. The understandings gleaned from this study provided the authors with a basis upon which to reexamine their developing teacher educator pedagogies, as well as to critique the nature and structure of their teacher education program.

This case illustrates the concept of consolidation and how freight forwarders use it to reduce transportation costs. The student must compare a ship-direct model against vehicular consolidation, then consider temporal consolidation, investigate the differences between a freight broker and a freight forwarder, and develop a rate analysis for use in negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why accountants who moved from accounting firms to public service adapted their identities to reduce insecurity. The literature on accountant identity highlights insecurity caused by promotion criterion to partnership, which requires accountants to win new work for their employers and leads to overtime, as a serious problem which has permeated the accounting profession. However, there have been few studies that explore whether accountants who moved to the public service, where they have stronger job security and can enjoy work-life balance, have resolved the insecurity problem, although a neoliberalism turn accompanied by New Public Management-style reforms has increased the number of accountants in public service. Therefore, the authors of the current study aim to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the identity transitions of South Korean (hereafter Korean) accountants who joined the public service.

The authors theorise the nature of the process of identity adaptation with conceptual tools from Pierre Bourdieu, such as habitus and capital, and examine whether the accountants took a “vision-of-division” or a “di-vision” strategy in the public service to secure their identity. For this purpose, the authors interviewed accountants and their non-accountant colleagues, and investigated other written sources, such as newspaper articles and business cards.

The authors found that Korean accountants in Big-4 firms dealt with the same insecurity issues as accountants in western countries and perceived public service as an attractive alternative to remove this insecurity. However, accountants who joined the public service found themselves confronted with different types of problems, such as accounting/costing work being regarded as demeaning, which made their identity insecure. Therefore, some accountants took a di-vision strategy that makes the difference between themselves and typical public servants less visible by avoiding accounting/costing work, using bureaucratic designations and de-emphasising their accounting credentials. Accountants took this strategy because the symbolic value of their accountancy qualifications grew weaker over time, due to the increase in the number of qualified accountants, and because the public service field valued bureaucratic habitus and capital more highly than those of the accountants.

From a methodological aspect, the authors collected participants’ business cards and analysed which designations/credentials they chose in order to create a certain perception. This analysis helped the authors understand how accountants work on their identity by de-emphasising accounting credentials to secure their identity in an organisational field. In a theoretical dimension, the current study argues that the symbolic capital of accounting credentials is dependent on the organisational and social context in line with Bourdieu, and, contrary to Bourdieu, on the supply and demand in the professional labour market.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to trace the history of the cultural myth that children, especially boys, experience an abrupt heterosexual awakening during pubescence, from its origin during the 1950s to the present, with particular attention to a decrease in the age posited for such an awakening, from fourteen or fifteen to eight or nine or even earlier, until finally children are presented as heterosexually desiring from birth.

Methodology – The methodology is a content analysis of a sample of mass media texts starring or featuring prepubescent or pubescent boys, including films, television programs, comic books, comic strips, and juvenile novels, appearing in the United States between 1950 and 2007.

Findings – The rapid decrease in the age is correlated with an increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adolescents, leading to the conclusion that it results from an attempt to privilege heterosexuality by making it appear a natural, inevitable outcome of biological maturation that is absent until puberty, whereas at the same time addressing homophobic insistence that no juvenile character be presented as gay by ensuring all characters, regardless of age, express heterosexual desire.

Research limitations/implications – The study is limited to a single causal factor, but it illustrates a complex cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way childhood is constructed, so there are doubtless other factors that should be explored. It is also necessary to explore why the change from presumed pubescent heterosexual awakening to presumed constitutional heterosexuality occurred at different rates depending on the race and social class of the character and the medium presented.

Given the less mature homeschooling ecosystem in China, together with the similarity of purpose, the current study examined the lived experiences of curricular choice making in the USA and China and categories of respective families (homeschools), as a way of understanding curricular flexibility. In addressing these features, based on an updated model of curricular flexibility as it applies to homeschooling, the authors examined the aspects of who, what, when, where and how to see if this context offers new light. The authors then consider ways in which the model can be further updated for greater analytical clarity and accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

A descriptive case study was conducted in the Xi'an city of China and the Seattle metropolitan area of the USA. A survey and two rounds of semi-structured interview data were collected from ten homeschooling families in both contexts.

The study found families’ adjusted curricula for different motives, as they navigated differing societal contexts, and curricular flexibility in homeschooling contexts was theorized as standardization and structuring strategies and social dimensions, and family preference patterns were identified. Chinese homeschooling families had comparatively less variety of available resources and freedom to homeschools compared to American counterparts, and they operated with the awareness of a standard national curriculum and its social implications.

This study elaborates on a little-discussed topic – the overall curriculum of each homeschool and motives influencing changing curricular choices during the process of homeschooling. And it is the first paper to use the model to explicitly define curricular flexibility in the homeschooling context, thus extending the existing theoretical discussion of curricular flexibility.