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This study was conducted to fill gaps in the literature based on institution type, career level, and gender identity.

Faculty often struggle with achieving work-life balance. This struggle is exacerbated for faculty parents. Most academic parent research has been conducted on early-career women and at research-intensive universities. Although these groups are important, it is also important to understand experiences of academic parents at different career levels and types of institutions. The authors conducted a qualitative thematic analysis from focus groups with faculty from a mid-sized master's level university about work-life balance expectations and experiences in their roles as academics and parents. These four groups included early-career mothers (n = 5), early-career fathers (n = 4), mid-career mothers (n = 4), and mid-career fathers (n = 7).

Faculty expressed having a high workload based on an intersection of high work expectations, unclear work expectations, and lack of equity. Consequences of the high workload included lower work-life balance, dissatisfaction at not doing more, the loss of flexibility as an advantage, and lower organizational commitment.

Although results are limited in generalizability, it is useful to examine one institution, with all participants sharing the same culture and policies, in-depth. The authors discuss recommendations for educational administrators for assisting academic parents and suggest institutions work to examine informal expectations and formal policies at their institutions. Working together, faculty and staff can help enhance alignment of expectations and perceptions of work-life balance, hopefully leading to happier, more satisfied employees.

In the 1990s, the New York City Police Department expanded its focus on reducing behaviors that detract from the overall quality of life (QOL) in the city. Many have credited this effort for the decline in the city's overall crime rate. They often cite the fixing broken windows argument, which maintains that reducing disorder sets off a chain of events leading to less crime. However, systematic research has not yet documented this chain of events. Looks at one of the first linkages, whether QOL policing sends a message to offenders not to engage in disorderly behaviors in public locales. The project interviewed 539 New York City arrestees in 1999. Almost all of them were aware that police were targeting various disorderly behaviors. Among those that engaged in disorderly behaviors, about half reported that they had stopped or cut back in the past six months. They reported a police presence was the most important factor behind their behavioral changes. These findings support the idea that QOL policing has a deterrent effect.

This chapter discusses salient factors pertaining to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), also called the Great Recession, which gave rise to contagion effects that continue to reverberate across the global financial landscape. The GFC is linked to three primary negative themes: build-up of credit in a global credit super cycle, New Financial Architecture (NFA) and financialization under neoliberalism, and a distorted relationship between laissez-faire economics/finance and normative political imperatives. The conclusion is that we need to rethink understandings of key principles in economics and finance and reform governance mechanisms of the financial system.

The essay examines an empirical phenomenon – the GFC – and discusses themes based upon the author’s insights gained from the vantage point of working in asset management during the Crisis. In addition, the author draws upon material from the academic literature and financial press. He problematizes finance through the lens of the GFC and suggests that the three causal factors being highlighted are enduring sources of instability in the financial system.

The conclusion is that financial crises such as the GFC are not caused by unpredictable exogenous variables but instead pertain to identifiable recurring factors and human failures. Structural, epistemological, and behavioral issues are aggravated by neoliberalism. Finance is integral to economic activity. But under neoliberalism, the global financial economy rapidly assumed a particular form of financialization founded on market fundamentalism and political and regulatory capture. Neo-liberal coöptation of finance, economics, and politics needs to be reversed to place financial and economic activity within more robust frameworks that take into account credit cycles, flaws, and instabilities inherent in the system while applying appropriate regulatory mechanisms to prevent crises.

Scholars and practitioners can draw upon claims made in this essay to propose more substantive reforms to the global financial system. These range from redesigning how finance and economics are understood and taught, to imposing circuit breakers to prevent credit cycles from becoming untenable bubbles.

Neoliberalism is a political project that has distorted understanding of empirical truths while also effecting a paralysis with regard to fixing problems. The market fundamentalism that neoliberalism prescribes and promulgates results, time and time again, in financial crises that have disastrous consequences including massive wealth destruction. It is crucial to reform the system and create more sustainable, less volatile paradigms of financial and economic life.

Arguments in this chapter are simple and straightforward but have significant implications for achieving more nuanced understandings of the financial system. Claims are presented as distillations of how the system actually works, especially the way in which it tends toward conditions of crisis and stress. Mainstream finance and economics are characterized as predicated upon certain erroneous propositions, particularly concerning efficient markets and rational agency, core tenets of the neo-liberal project.

This chapter examines how deregulatory fiscal policies undermined federal legislation intended to reduce racial and economic inequality through measures that included wider access to home loans among minority populations. We focus specifically on structural tensions that existed between fostering the goals of economic and racial equality within a political structure that also serves the needs of finance capitalism. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), typically considered a triggering point for the financial meltdown by conservative commentators, was passed to address racial and economic inequalities, yet financial deregulation and the growth of the subprime mortgage industry ended up completely subverting these goals. The unprecedented growth and evolution of the subprime mortgage industry that occurred largely outside of the law's reach helped minorities and other economically disadvantaged groups enter into the housing market. However, a crime-facilitative environment brought on by inadequate regulation resulted in a significant degree of fraud by lenders. While this expanded homeownership among minorities, it eventually pushed them into default and brought chaos to the entire U.S. economy. This chapter details how the collapse of the subprime industry disproportionately impacted minority populations, and exposes how deregulatory policies subverted the effectiveness and reach of the FHA and CRA. The history of the CRA provides a clear example of the contradictory tensions within the U.S. legal system that espouses equality yet ultimately fails those it was designed to help as a consequence of unfettered capitalism.