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Customised executive education, designed for and delivered to individual client companies by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), differs in important ways from award-bearing courses. One area in which these differences are surprisingly extensive is in the use of technology. We explore the impact of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) on course design, delivery and evaluation of customised executive education. In doing so, we contrast this form of learning with MOOCs, which use TEL in a different way, for a different audience.

We begin with the ‘two-client’ problem. In customised executive programmes, course design is done collaboratively between the HEI and the corporate client, reflecting the particular learning needs of the selected participants as perceived by the commissioning client. We find that the level of TEL in any programme will reflect the learning needs, and also the level of TEL sophistication, of both client and academics.

We then consider the successful integration of TEL into customised executive education. TEL can enrich a course great, but will also mean a loss of academic control, as a significant amount of the learning will be peer-to-peer, and much of the information-gathering can take place outside the classroom.

We conclude with the outcomes and success measures of customised executive education. The institutional disruption of TEL to the HEI is considerable, as their traditional business model is based on rewarding academics for research and for classroom-hours. This needs to be rethought where the classroom element is reduced, but there is constant online interaction with participants.

The environment poses many ‘wicked problems’ that cannot be addressed from a single disciplinary perspective. In a research-oriented university, it is a challenge to overcome discipline boundaries to create different pathways for thinking and teaching about the environment. This vignette reflects on two strands, performance and academic culture, in what is necessarily a complex system involving the development and implementation of a new interdisciplinary subject. While we imagined what the learning process was for the students, what evolved was a mutual process of rethinking expectations about how to collaboratively learn as an academic team. This chapter examines three learning tasks prescribed for students as examples of how we came to understand the difficult nature of our engagement, and to reflect on what happened in the initial semester of the subject. Emergent from our reflections is the need for a culture of interdisciplinarity, and suggestions for how to more effectively support the kind of learning practices that will inform our understanding of complex systems as citizens and scholars.

In September 2015, VW had admitted to United States regulators that it had deliberately installed “defeat devices” in many of its diesel cars, which enabled the cars to cheat on federal and state emissions tests, making them able to pass the tests and hit ambitious mileage and performance targets while actually emitting up to 40 times more hazardous gases into the atmosphere than legally allowed. The discovery had prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to halt final certification of VW’s 2016 diesel models, and VW itself had halted sales of its 2015 models. As fallout from the defeat devices developed, VW posted its first quarterly loss in more than 15 years, and its stock plummeted. Top executives were replaced, and VW abandoned its goal of becoming the world’s largest automaker. Stakeholders around the world had been asking since the scandal broke: “How could this have happened at Volkswagen?”

Evidence from Australia and worldwide has highlighted the ongoing marginalisation, discrimination, abuse, violence and neglect of people with disability. One of the main areas of concern is that despite such evidence there remain fundamental barriers for people with disability to report violence and/or access supports. Significantly few studies have canvased the perspectives of people with intellectual disability (ID), family members or disability service providers. Accordingly as a first step, the purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of disability and violence-response professionals’ regarding the barriers and facilitators of effective support for people with ID reporting sexual violence and accessing mainstream supports.

A qualitative research design informed the basis of this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven participants who held roles within disability services and mainstream violence response. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. These transcripts were then analysed individually using a combination of thematic analysis and discourse analysis to bring to light the social and material structures within service systems in terms of how they disempower or empower supports for people with ID.

Participants from both services reported that professionals (particularly those outside the disability sector) lacked awareness of practical ways in which they could support people with ID to report and access services outside of disability-specific services. Participants also felt the capacity for people with ID to have a voice about what happens in the “aftermath” of reporting sexual violence was rarely acknowledged. Participants called for education and development of resources which could guide professional practice across disability and wider violence-response services. Participants saw investment in building interagency relationships across sectors as key to supporting the citizenship of people with ID.

This study suggests that there is a strong need for better community engagement and understanding of the multi-faceted issues surrounding responses to violence concerning people with ID. The findings of this study also outline implications for practice and policy which may be of interest to professionals both within disability and wider violence-response sectors in Australia and internationally.

A growing interdisciplinary literature explores how people can simultaneously hold strong convictions and remain open to the possibility of learning from others with whom they disagree. This tension impacts not only knowledge development but also public discourse within a diverse and disagreeing democracy. This volume of Political Power and Social Theory considers the specific question of how religious convictions inform how people engage in democratic life, particularly across deep political divides. In this introduction, I begin by discussing how a narrow vision of religious citizens as dogmatic believers has led observers to frame religion as a concerning source of democratic distortion – encouraging too much arrogance and not enough humility. Yet this dogmatic believer narrative captures only one aspect of American religion. Juxtaposing a snapshot of dogmatic believers alongside two other snapshots of religious groups engaging in political life raises complex questions about the relationship between religious conviction, humility, and democracy in a time of deep political polarization. I argue that answering these questions requires a sociological approach that is attuned to power, context, culture, institutions, and history. At the same time, I show how attention to the tension between conviction and humility has the potential to enrich the sociological study of religion and democracy, and particularly ethnographic research across the moral/political divide.