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In June 2017, The Human Data Commons Foundation released its first annual Quantified Self Report Card. This project consisted of a qualitative review of the privacy policy documentation of 55 private sector companies in the self-tracking and biometric data industry. Two researchers recorded their ratings on concrete criteria for each company’s website, as well as providing a blend of objective and subjective ratings on the overall ease of readability and navigability within each site’s documentation. This chapter explains the unique context of user privacy rights within the Quantified Self tracking industry, and summarises the overall results from the 2017 Quantified Self Report Card. The tension between user privacy and data sharing in commercial data-collection practices is explored and the authors provide insight into possibilities for resolving these tensions. The self-as-instrument in research is touched on in autoethnographic narrative confronting and interrogating the difficult process of immersive qualitative analytics in relation to such intensely complex and personal issues as privacy and ubiquitous dataveillance. Drawing upon excerpted reflections from the Report Card’s co-author, a few concluding thoughts are shared on freedom and choice. Finally, goals for next year’s Quantified Self Report Card are revealed, and a call extended for public participation.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the current understanding of human resource management (HRM) challenges facing franchise businesses.

A qualitative investigation, including eight in-depth interviews and 66 semi-structured interviews with various franchise stakeholders as well as 42 participant observations, was conducted in North America to answer the research questions.

Six major conclusions emerged from the conceptual and empirical work. The findings, for instance, reveal that human resources in franchise businesses lacks in motivation and skills, and franchisees’ distance from the ideal mix of autonomy and risk-aversion determines psychological and financial distress in the system.

The findings suggest that when firms choose the franchising path as a means of leapfrogging resource constraints, they will experience new and more challenging HRM complications for several reasons. Therefore, decision-makers at both franchisor and franchisee firms need to address these new HRM challenges proactively by recognizing their possibility and emergence and by engaging in cooperative learning with one another.

While HRM practices can “make or break” franchise systems, some important research questions still remain unanswered in this context. In an attempt to narrow this gap, and using a qualitative approach, this work identifies and classifies the key HRM challenges facing the franchise industry. Based on the finding, a conceptual model is proposed and discussed.

Research in the discipline of antitrust economics, which encompasses legal as well as economic aspects, reveals a young and expanding area that has established its own literature within the past twenty years. The citations in this bibliographic essay were selected for their particular relevance to the subject and represent a core collection of materials that would be most useful to the study of American antitrust economics.