Search results

This chapter examines Pelagic Sargassum seaweed that has been washing up on shores from Mexico to Ghana in record amounts over the last decade. Increase in Sargassum has had a devastating impact on fisheries and tourism including the livelihoods of coastal communities and nearshore ecosystems. This increase has also caused significant health problems due to the exposure of rotting sargassum. Current science informing this increase points to climatic change and ocean eutrophication. Even as the scientific phenomena is studied, there have been numerous management strategies deployed to adapt to heavy seasonal washups, to build resilience in affected sectors and communities and even explore sustainable uses of the seaweed material turned to viable market products. Here, we focus on public management and administration of Sargassum to consider how the micro- and macroimpacts affect our societies including government and private sector responses to seaweed removal and legal, regulatory, and administrative approaches to such “pollution” that highlight process, jurisdictional, and political imperatives. We unpack via the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) lens to raise and uncover several interesting points regarding how we build resilience to environmental change, manage national systems in the face of unclear nature-based phenomena, and approach to equitable sustainable development.

Much of the discussion surrounding the antivaccine movement focuses on the decision of parents to not vaccinate their children and the resulting danger posed to others. However, the primary risk is borne by the child left unvaccinated. Although living in a developed country with high vaccination rates provides a certain amount of protection through population immunity, the unvaccinated child is still exposed to a considerably greater risk of preventable diseases than one who is vaccinated. I explore the tension between parental choice and the child’s right to be free of preventable diseases. The chapter’s goal is twofold: to advocate for moving from a dyadic framework – considering the interests of the parents against those of the state – to a triadic one, in which the interests of the child are given as much weight as those of the parent and the state; and to discuss which protections are available, and how they can be improved. Specific legal tools available to protect that child are examined, including tort liability of the parents to the child, whether and to what degree criminal law has a role, under what circumstances parental choice should be overridden, and the role of school immunization requirements in protecting the individual child.

Rapid stock market growth without real economic back-up has led to the 2015 Chinese Stock Market Crash with thousands of stocks hitting the down limit simultaneously multiple times. The authors provide a detailed analysis of structural breaks in heavy-tailedness and asymmetry properties of returns in Chinese A-share markets due to the crash using recently proposed robust approaches to tail index inference. The empirical analysis points out to heavy-tailedness properties often implying possibly infinite second moments and also focuses on gain/loss asymmetry in the tails of daily returns on individual stocks. The authors further present an analysis of the main determinants of heavy-tailedness in Chinese financial markets. It points out to liquidity and company size as being the most important factors affecting the returns’ heavy-tailedness properties. At the same time, the authors do not observe statistically significant differences in tail indices of the returns on A-shares and the coefficients on factors affecting them in the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods.

Research has shown that for young adults, marital attitudes (e.g., desire, importance, and expectation) are associated with relationship quality. However, how this association plays out for young adults of color is less known. Additionally, the influence of skin tone perception on the relationship between marital attitudes and relationship quality remains understudied. To explore these associations, the authors examined African American and Latinx young adults (N = 57, M_age = 20.71 years, SD = 1.28; 75.4% female) attending a Midwestern university. Exploratory results indicated that marital expectations were positively associated with relationship quality in that young adults who expected to marry one day, reported greater relationship satisfaction, commitment, and intimacy in their current relationships. Additionally, skin tone perception moderated the association between marital attitudes and relationship quality in two ways (i.e., between expectations and satisfaction and between importance and intimacy). Collectively, findings suggest that differing levels of marital attitudes and skin tone perception contributes to young adults’ perceptions of relationship quality. Considering these psychological factors of attitudes, skin tone perception, and relationship quality, together with systemic racial/ethnic discrimination, the authors discuss future research and practice considerations.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of an urban folktale on the purchasing intentions and buying behaviour of the consumer. Specifically, it examines a rumour involving fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, in which he purportedly made disparaging statements about African‐Americans. A survey of African‐American generation Xers revealed a relationship between the rumour and the decision to purchase Tommy Hilfiger clothing. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the relationship between business and education and thereby offer a research agenda for examining the influence of business on education. Educational research has given relatively limited attention to the impact of business on education.

This paper describes a theoretical framework drawn from organization theory that identifies five types of influence of business on education. The emerging literature on business‐school relations is accessed not to present a comprehensive review of research on the impact of business on education, but rather to identify issues regarding the impact of business on education that bear the scrutiny of researchers and educational and business leaders and policy makers.

The types of influence include business consuming the outputs of schools, supplying inputs to schools, competing with public schools for students and state funding, shaping educational policy at various levels, and distributing wealth in ways that indirectly affects education.

This paper identifies an issue that requires further research and policy attention and offers a conceptual framework and research agenda.