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In this paper, the authors share answers to the following questions based on data collected from 183 global companies in the most recent round of Aon Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders^®: Does diversity and inclusion matter? What is diversity? What practices build more diverse workforces and more inclusive cultures?

Much of the research cited in this paper comes from the Aon-Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders^® data set. In the latest round of data collection, completed in late 2014, 183 companies participated from around the world. Each completed a detailed online questionnaire of leadership practices. From those submissions, finalists were identified and hundreds of interviews were conducted with senior line and executives of human resources. A panel of expert judges determined the global and regional winners based on their responses to the survey questionnaire and interviews, as well as financial and other publicly available information.

Whether it is a causal relationship or merely a correlated finding, companies that have diverse, inclusive talent strategies appear to out-perform their peers on both talent and financial outcomes.

This paper highlights the differences between top companies in managing diversity compared to other companies in the research data. It also highlights some best practice methods to build diversity.

This paper documents the evolution of the definitions of diversity and considers diversity as a means to business ends rather than an end in itself.

Leadership educators teach Transformational Leadership Theory in their classrooms, but could transformational theory be used as a pedagogical model to deepen students’ understanding of leadership? This article presents Erin Gruwell, a first-year teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach and subject of the 2006 movie The Freedom Writers, as a case study where an educator practiced the components of transformational leadership in the classroom to transform students’ lives. Gruwell used idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration to transform a classroom of gang members into a community of scholars and authors. Following the case examples, leadership educators are provided examples of how to incorporate the four components of transformational leadership in their instructional methods. The purpose is to not only demonstrate the theory in action, but to deepen students’ learning of leadership theory.

This paper seeks to shed light on the behaviors of a group of consumers referred to as “tween”, a sub‐group of Generation Y, described as pre‐adolescents, aged 9 to 15, who are be“tween” the children and juniors markets, by taking previously tested measures and applying them to “tween” girls. The work of Blackwell et al. indicates that individual tastes and preferences are expected to have an effect on to whom tweens look for purchasing cues.

The first section of the survey included demographic items consisting of tweens' age, grade level and race. Section two of the survey consisted of nine items used to determine the influence of two reference groups: parents and friends. Items adapted from the personal involvement index were used to measure the personal involvement of tweens in apparel purchases. Store patronage was measured by assessing the frequency with which participants patronized each of eight given retail settings.

Future research should replicate or adapt the study to a larger sample in order to determine the strength of the relationships, since the majority of the respondents were between the ages of 12 to 15, leaving younger tweens under‐represented.

The results reveal that tweens exhibit a high level of fashion interest and that fashion interest is the only variable in the study to have significant relationships with each of the other variables.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

THE NINETIENTH ANNIVERSARY of Sean O'Casey's birth and the recent acquisition by the New York Public Library of the papers of his literary estate afford an opportunity to view, once more, the remarkable achievements of a dramatist of universal distinction. A passionate believer in the cause of man's dignity and freedom, whose plays touched off riots and sparked off controversies, whose works wrung the beauty and passion and heartaches from the experiences of everyday life and ‘whose lips were royally touched’—to quote J. C. Trewin's recent colourful phrase—O'Casey was, with Shaw, one of the few incomparably great playwrights of the present century. Not without his detractors: one critic's jibe that O'Casey is ‘an extremely overrated writer with two or three competent Naturalist plays to his credit, followed by a lot of ideological bloat and embarrassing bombast’ is the kind of factitious reaction one expects from critically immature minds. Shaw's plays, at first, were slighted, but they survived, and today are flourishing; predictably, O'Casey's will enjoy a similar fate. O'Casey is a world dramatist in the widest sense, because he viewed the theatre in the same epic way as Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans.

The current study examines developing racial attitudes among a group of African American adolescents. Data for this study include 28 open-ended, qualitative interviews with African American adolescents (64% girls, 36% boys) in Detroit, Michigan, and were drawn from a larger study in which these adolescents and their mothers were interviewed about racial socialization. Data analysis shows adolescents' racial attitudes to be ambivalent and influenced by the dissonance between “color-blind” rhetoric – the idea that “race doesn't matter” – and their everyday experiences, in which race does matter in important ways. Adolescents' reports of racial attitudes and experiences with racism frequently include travel anecdotes, which reveal how place, travel, and negotiating the color line influence their developing ideas about race. The findings suggest that sources beyond parental socialization strongly affect adolescents' developing racial attitudes and identities and that young people's voices should be further utilized in studies examining these issues.