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This study aims to deepen our understanding of how inclusionary practices are used within organizations and how they satisfy specific inclusion needs.

We adopt a qualitative research design, reporting on data from semi-structured interviews conducted with 15 diversity and inclusion (D&I) directors/leads and using a thematic approach to analysis.

Our study expands understanding of inclusion practices, showing that they are not uniformly implemented and that practices may satisfy both needs to belong and differences valued, with interviewees prioritizing belonging. Well-being and career development are seen as important inclusion practices demonstrating support and appreciation of difference, thus as inputs, not outputs, of inclusion challenging existing assumptions. Inclusionary practices are malleable, and their impact depends critically on the leaders involved and their commitment to EDI.

Our study shows how practices satisfy inclusion needs and that the implementation of practices varies depending on the leaders involved.

Following an interpretivist approach, the authors draw on semi-structured interviews with parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Responding to limited academic advancement, particularly in the context of consumers experiencing vulnerability, the aim is to deepen marketing scholars’ understanding of value co-destruction (VCD) and its under-explored relationship with consumer ill-being.

Three forms of systemic VCD mechanisms emerged: obscuring, gaslighting and siloing. Ill-being comprised material, physical, psychological and social harms, which consumers experienced individually, relationally and collectively due to VCD. Family members’ experiences of ill-being and vulnerability were deepened by service systems’ inability to recognise the individuality of their needs and provide appropriate support.

In line with the interpretivist paradigm, the focus on families of children with ASD, while illuminating, delimits the generalisability of the findings. The authors call for further research on consumer ill-being, VCD and vulnerability in other service and marketing contexts.

The findings highlight the need for service system adaptability to recognise and address unstandardised needs.

Several systemic failures of (public) service systems which manifested as VCD mechanisms are identified.

The overall contribution is the development of a contextually driven characterisation of both VCD and ill-being and a deeper understanding of how these are interrelated. First, VCD revealed itself as a systemic failure to access, provide or integrate resources to meet actors’ needs as manifested by the three mechanisms. Second, the authors characterise ill-being as comprising material, physical, psychological and social harms due to VCD, which are experienced individually, relationally and collectively. Finally, the authors illuminate the nature of vulnerability and delineate the entanglements between vulnerability and ill-being in a collective (e.g. family) context.

Micro-businesses contribute to economic development by improving individual welfare. Women are the primary drivers and owners of such businesses in urban Ethiopia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the poverty status and determinants among women-owned micro-businesses.

The basic study units were women who owned micro-businesses. A sample of 384 women-owned micro-business was chosen using a stratified and systematic random sampling technique. Thirty-six participants were purposely chosen for in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Questionnaires, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. The poverty head count, poverty gap and poverty severity indices were computed to estimate poverty status. The major determinants of women’s poverty were investigated using a logistic regression model.

The overall poverty incidence, gap and severity were estimated to be 24.27%, 3.85%, and 1.11% respectively, among the women who owned micro-businesses. Eight of the 14 poverty determinants, including age, dependents, savings, remittance and the number of days and hours women work in their businesses, were found to have a significant effect on women’s poverty. The results suggest that local governments, technical and vocational training institutions should work together to reduce the impact of poverty-aggravating factors on women and increase the contribution of women-owned micro-businesses to poverty reduction.

This study addressed the poverty status of women who run micro-businesses, which is a crucial issue in Ethiopia’s urban context. It adds new knowledge to the issue of gendered economic participation, poverty reduction and poverty determinants in the Ethiopian context.

This chapter details a practice-based investigation of a 19th-century astronomical device known as ‘Janssen’s apparatus’. It questions traditional narratives of linear technological advancement and ‘sole inventor’ to reframe the historical artefact as a site which makes visible a network of technological knowledge interconnecting astronomy and visual culture. Approached from this perspective, the Janssen artefact is reframed as an ‘intersite of knowledge’, exploring how the various know-how contained within the device is located across disciplines rather than within a single field. Originally developed to calculate the Astronomical Unit during the 1874 Transit of Venus, Janssen’s apparatus failed in its endeavour as a measuring instrument, but its motion mechanism was successfully adapted into early cinema technologies. This chapter applies praxis through the development of a prototype artwork and the concept of ‘techne’ as speculative means of understanding how this mechanism was transferred from astronomy to the Western cultural realm. It proposes that the development of the apparatus was partially gleaned from moving image techniques already in use within 19th-century visual culture. The development of the prototype artwork is discussed in relation to the specific timing mechanism of the Janssen apparatus and how it establishes its own ‘intersite of knowledge’ relevant to its contemporary context. Finally, this chapter elaborates on how witnessing the Janssen mechanism in motion provided unique insight and how creating a dialogue between historical and contemporary apparatus facilitates a reconsideration of how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] and other host institutions that contain artefacts might share their hidden stories.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.