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This article explores leadership studies as a complementary and integrating discipline in undergraduate liberal education curricula. A significant historical purpose of liberal education was to liberate and prepare its graduates to be active and capable participants and leaders in social, economic, religious, and political realms. This historical purpose has become resurgent in recent critical examinations of liberal education. Some now argue that the undergraduate liberal education should return, in part, to preparing citizens for leadership responsibilities necessary to strengthen our communities, nation, and democratic institutions.

There appears to be a symbiotic relationship between liberal education and leadership studies. The knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary for effective leadership appear to be closely aligned with the desired learning outcomes of a liberal arts education, regardless of major. This article concludes that leadership studies may be an important and beneficial component of undergraduate liberal education curricula.

If your community is looking for more committed and competent leaders, what type of educational intervention will get the best results? U-Lead, the University of Minnesota Extension’s community leadership program, engages with organizations and communities to strengthen leadership. As the educational provider of U-Lead, Extension has a responsibility to provide quality programs as well as honor time and resource constraints. The primary question of this study is: what impact, if any, does the program duration have on participant outcomes? Key Observations include (a) the longest duration programs consistently had the most improvements in skills and knowledge, (b) after completing programs, more people are committing to leadership positions. This does not appear to correlate to program duration, (c) using evaluation data for modifying programs and starting additional programs leads to more significant participant change, and (d) community leadership theory and measurement can lead to better programs with greater results.

This study was conducted to explore the motives and experiences of founders of community based nonprofit organizations. The information collected in this study will be useful to extension leadership educators as they work with the leaders in developing and sustaining these organizations that address needs unmet by government or other organizations. The results show these founders have strong motivation influenced by early experiences. They were confident and were able to handle both obstacles and opportunities. They clearly perceived themselves as leaders. The findings of this study will be used to develop a more comprehensive profile of community leaders that start community based nonprofit organizations. Extension leadership educators have an opportunity and a challenge to work with these emerging leaders.

Leadership, organizational, and institutional theories provide competing explanations on the nature of leadership and role of leaders. Part of the problem is that each theory is often studied in isolation, leading to incomplete perspectives on the essence of leadership in value- driven contexts. A holistic paradigm that blends the three dominant models for understanding the work of the collective is warranted and necessary to optimize organizational outcomes. This article briefly highlights the contributions and limitations of each frame and provides an overview of complexity theory as a model for reconciling major differences. The paper provides specific perspectives, practices, and metaphors for navigating the collective to bring about desired outcomes.

In the fast pace of the 21^st century there is a demand for effective leaders capable of handling the internal and external changes occurring in our organizations. This paper seeks to inform the reader because change is natural; it is constant; it is inevitable. But, what constitutes effective leadership is the question? The main purpose of this paper is to offer 10 recommendations toward effective leadership that are outcomes of an eclectic leadership approach – Facilitative Social Change Leadership Theory (FSCL). The FSCL approach is a melding of Social Change Theory, Social Change Leadership Theory, and Transformational Leadership Theory as well as the work of Tichy and DeVanna.

The primary purpose of this paper is to call leadership educators to intentionally engage in a conversation regarding how we ensure participants of our programs are learning what we hope they learn. To achieve this principal aim, this paper will (a) briefly examine pressures compelling our discipline to engage in intentional conversations regarding assessment and (b) provide an overview of ways and means of assessment activities.

Change agents are individuals who can successfully transform aspects of how organisations operate. In education, teachers as change agents are increasingly seen as vital to the successful operation of schools and self-improving school systems. To date, however, there has been no systematic investigation of the nature and role of teacher change agents. To address this knowledge gap, we undertook a systematic review into five key areas regarding teachers as change agents. After reviewing 70 outputs we found that current literature predominantly positions teacher change agents as the deliverers of top-down change, with the possibility of bottom-up educational reform currently neglected.

Researchers have examined the influence of the factors on reducing return rates in retailing over the years. However, the returns experience is often an overlooked way to drive customer engagement and repeat sales in the now ubiquitous omnichannel setting. The focus on returns prevention in existing research overshadows management’s need to understand better the comprehensive mechanics linking the customer in-store return experience with their repurchase actions. Recognizing the need to bridge different stages of the returns management process, this research aims to explore the facilitators and barriers of in-store return activities.

Analysis of customer corporate data from 5,339 returns at the retail level provides insights from the customer return experience. Expanding our theoretical understanding, a deductive research approach then examines how those factors impact customer repurchase intentions both online and at brick-and-mortar stores. Stage two of the study employs a scenario-based role-playing experiment with consumer respondents to test hypotheses derived from signaling theory and justice theory.

Results find that returns policy and loyalty program capabilities are essential in creating a positive customer in-store experience. Moreover, a return experience enhanced by frontline employee service can retain existing shoppers and drive additional store traffic, further stimulating retailer sales.

These findings refine our understanding of returns management in evolving omnichannel retailing and offer practical insights for retailers to manage customer relationships through in-store returns.

The purpose of this study/paper Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017) is to show the author’s non-site intervention of authoritarian – undemocratic maneuvering of both women’s and earth’s “golden” wombs. The burning fossil fuels in myriads of flame colors, signal the power and distress of Earth’s wounded womb, memories of war, environmental destruction and human fatality, and descend to decline as extinguished Oil Drops (2017), creating a void. Global warming poses a problem for fossil fuel systems and those who profit from them.

The title of this paper has been inspired by Cara New Dagget’s book, The Birth of Energy (2019), posited in the nascent realm of energy “mortalities.” Now, confronting a world warmed by sweltering fossil fuels, the book provides us with a direction to thinking energy beyond the “Calvinist view” of everlasting work. Spellbound by Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017), the audience canter around the outer surface of the centrally positioned, circulating luminous “acrylic” oil drops highlighted by hundreds of mono-frequency lamps impregnated with desert biodiversity. A closer look takes spectators through a fiery desert, across the fossil fuel fields into the depths of its scorching oil wells, its womb, as they sense the “real-time” catastrophe that had occurred beyond the gallery wall.

These artists’ objective with their interventions is to “root it to the contour of the […] land, so that it’s permanently there and subject to the weathering,” so the audience is “sort of curious to see what will happen to this” (Schmidt, 1996, 225) through the course of time. The works resists the resistance of nature and social culture, as well as of body and intellect by emphasizing the intransience, however complex, of human beings with the ecosphere in which they survive (Novak 2002, 23). The surfacing of the under-surface of the land and ocean life triggers the idea of the private space, which involves role-play, gender norms and the control over women's lives in the capitalist and Gulf societies. Authoritarianism, fossil fuel capital, high-energy use and militarism make the climate politics critical to planetary security. This combustible convergence gave birth to Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017).

Ganz reminds us that devouring less energy appears to be almost unharmonious with the current politics of being “Modern.” Sacrificing energy resonances with abstinence at best, and widespread death and injustice at worst. But, consuming an overload of energy is incompatible with a multispecies existence on Earth. Scientists caution “a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway,” the consequence of which could be an uninhabitable, unsafe globe for beings (Steffen et al., 2018). Even though it sounds vivid, it is hard to overstate the crisis in the midst of what environmentalists and biologists term as a sixth extinction event (Kolbert, 2014), in line with a “biological annihilation” that paints “a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life” (Ceballos et al., 2017).

It is not only the land’s womb that we have hurt; we have miffed the hearts of the water network, and “Othered” and the wombs of many women and most surfaces of the Earth have been penetrated, unconsented! To sustain a biodiverse sphere, to pause the deaths of the planet’s flora and fauna and to thrive on Earth, we need to work on renewable sources of energy based on “new collectively shared values, principles, and frameworks” (Steffen et al., 2018). We need to stop Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017). Are we ready to accept the challenge? (Lau and Traulsen, 2016)

Petro-masculinity has multiple global dimensions and manifests in multiple and locally specific ways (Dagget, 2018). This encourages the geographically diverse artists discussed in this paper to embrace alternative visions, to make bold and explicit statements on gender and global diversity, equity and rights. Through history, women, in specific, embodied the entirety of the Ecocene and its life cycle and explored it in the context of their own relationships, health, sexuality, fertility, reproduction, childbirth, illness and inescapably death. The artists’ interventions’ visual physiognomies and intentions point toward a comprehensive agenda of action that leads to remedial courses toward reinstating the biome to a healthy condition.

Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017) enacts the historic all-consuming fires, penetrating the “shared environment,” burning the fossilized fuels exuding from Earth’s penetrated womb. The higher cone-shaped oil drops irradiate the intense dazzling images of oil wells in flames and the desert flora and fauna nestled within the scorching inner arena. This aligns with the private space provided to women. The wombs are smothered in the fuming fires of the Gulf war. The darker, narrower lower oil drops, iconic of the remnants of fossil fuel, are the residual sludge within which the land and water species are enmeshed and ensnared to death. The potency of the enactment of the drops “enables the viewer to see [him/]herself seeing, to become aware of how she perceives the world around [him/]her and in doing so participates in shaping it” (Eliasson, 2009, p. 25) as a form of engagement, which involves an “attention to time, movement and changeability” (pp. 18–21).