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To be an effective manager, knowledge of employment laws and how they pertain to terminations, especially mass terminations, is an important attribute. Those selected for termination in a workforce reduction often experience anger, fear, resentment and anxiety. A reduction in force which is carried out in a fair manner and treats the affected individuals with compassion and dignity will go a long way in preventing litigation. The manager must be familiar with how to plan for a reduction in force, the legal aspects involved, and how to go about the actual implementation of the downsizing effort. We have witnessed the workforce downsizing of many organizations within the past few years. The major contributors to this epidemic are plentiful. Economic pressures during the most recent recession and increased global competition have forced organizations to flatten out their organizational structures to enable them to quickly respond to changes in the marketplace. The recent tide of deregulation resulted in mergers and acquisitions creating duplicative positions within the organization. Additionally, the rapid pace of technology has led to databases which displace intermediate level employees whose responsibilities include compiling and analyzing. Unfortunately, corporate reductions may lead to employee lawsuits in the form of “wrongful discharge” cases. Wrongful discharge is a catch‐all phrase for a host of claims made by a former employee against his or her previous employer. The most popular wrongful discharge claims include breach of contract, bad faith, and discrimination of protected groups based on factors such as sex, age, race and many others. Certain employees are covered under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act which requires employers to give 60 days advanced notice in the case of mass terminations. While few of these cases ever make it to court, attorney fees, settlement fees and jury awards can be costly. In California, the average damage award exceeded $600,000. Therefore, a comprehensive evaluation of a reduction in force (“RIF”) plan must be performed and the myriad of legal issues must be considered. During this process, it is important to keep in mind that employees selected for downsizing will experience among other things, fear, anxiety and anger. How the actual implementation of the RIF is carried out will have an immense impact on whether an employee will bring forth a wrongful termination lawsuit.

In 1976, at Ruskin College, the Prime Minister made a rare and detailed excursion into the overgrown field of education, pin‐pointing a number of areas of concern and calling for a national debate. “Respond positively” was his plea. With apologies to Galileo and his Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences of 1632 between Simplicio, Sagredo, and Salviati, we envisage Politicio the politician, Pedagogio the scholar, and Paternio the parent responding to the speech.

This article advocates that privacy literacy research and praxis mobilize people toward changing the technological and social conditions that discipline subjects toward advancing institutional, rather than community, goals.

This article analyzes theory and prior work on datafication, privacy, data literacy, privacy literacy and critical literacy to provide a vision for future privacy literacy research and praxis.

This article (1) explains why privacy is a valuable rallying point around which people can resist datafication, (2) locates privacy literacy within data literacy, (3) identifies three ways that current research and praxis have conceptualized privacy literacy (i.e. as knowledge, as a process of critical thinking and as a practice of enacting information flows) and offers a shared purpose to animate privacy literacy research and praxis toward social change and (4) explains how critical literacy can help privacy literacy scholars and practitioners orient their research and praxis toward changing the conditions that create privacy concerns.

This article uniquely synthesizes existing scholarship on data literacy, privacy literacy and critical literacy to provide a vision for how privacy literacy research and praxis can go beyond improving individual understanding and toward enacting social change.

In his new book Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance, Felix Oberholzer-Gee offers business leaders and strategists guidance on a basic idea: unless an initiative creates value for customers, employees or suppliers, it is a waste of time and resources.

In this interview with S&L contributing editor Brian Leavy, Prof. Felix Oberholzer-Gee explains: “All you need to ask is, ‘Can my organization create differentiated value, can we raise customer willingness-to-pay (WTP) or lower employee and supplier willingness-to-sell (WTS)?’”.

Value-based strategy is “back-to-basics” in the sense that the approach insists on value creation as the foundation for every activity in the business.

A comprehensive understanding of employees’ work lives is likely to reveal many chances to create value.

The interview explains why and how firms should seek to exceed expectations where it counts, and sustain excellence by diverting resources from lower-ranked value drivers.

A number of leading retail companies gave detailed descriptions of how they had developed merchandising policies for the 80s at a two‐day conference organised by RMDP, and held in London towards the end of June.

This chapter explores the impact of context on the teaching of a multicultural teacher education course and illustrates what can be learned through partnering self-study methodology with discourse analysis. The study described in this chapter draws on data collected at two teacher education institutions with different student demographics in two different states in the United States. By drawing on methods of discourse analysis, we explore how the differences between two classes manifested in response to a set of class readings on race and racial stereotyping in schools. Specifically, we look closely at the discursive resources available in each location to talk about issues of race and racism. Through partnering discourse analysis and self-study methodologies, we uncovered deep-seated assumptions held by each of us that resulted in a reification of issues of race and class in ways that surprised and troubled us.

This paper describes the forms of knowledge used by players of fantasy sports, games where players create ideal sports teams and compete to accumulate points based on professional athletes’ statistical performances. Messages from a discussion forum associated with a popular fantasy basketball game were analyzed to understand how players described their decision‐making strategies to their peers. The focus of the research was to understand if players use mathematical concepts such as optimization and statistical analyses when assembling their team or if they base their decisions on personal preferences, beliefs, and biases. The analyses in this paper suggest the latter, that players rely on informal, domain‐specific heuristics that often lead to the creation of competitive teams. These heuristics and other forms of player discourse related to knowledge use are described. The paper also suggests ways that analyses of existing practices might provide a foundation for creating gaming environments that assist the acquisition of more formal reasoning skills.

To understand the phenomena of people revealing regrettable information on the Internet, we examine who people think they’re addressing, and what they say, in the process of interacting with those not physically or temporally co-present.

We conduct qualitative analyses of interviews with student bloggers and observations of five years’ worth of their blog posts, drawing on linguists’ concepts of indexical ground and deictics. Based on analyses of how bloggers reference their shared indexical ground and how they use deictics, we expose bloggers’ evolving awareness of their audiences, and the relationship between this awareness and their disclosures.

Over time, writers and their regular audience, or “chorus,” reciprocally reveal personal information. However, since not all audience members reveal themselves in this venue, writers’ disclosures are available to those observers they are not aware of. Thus, their overdisclosure is tied to what we call the “n-adic” organization of online interaction. Specifically, and as can be seen in their linguistic cues, n-adic utterances are directed toward a non-unified audience whose invisibility makes the discloser unable to find out the exact number of participants or the time they enter or exit the interaction.

Attention to linguistic cues, such as deictics, is a compelling way to identify the shifting reference groups of ethnographic subjects interacting with physically or temporally distant others.

We describe the social organization of interaction with undetectable others. n-adic interactions likely also happen in other on- and offline venues in which participants are obscured but can contribute anonymously.