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Since its inception in 1876, Queensland’s premier agricultural and pastoral show and largest annual event, the Brisbane Exhibition, has provided a forum in which to observe and reflect on the achievements, values, development and scope of Queensland’s education system. The inaugural constitution of the Exhibition’s host body, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland, drafted by the first headmaster of Brisbane Grammar School, Thomas Harlin, listed among its objects: ‘To award prizes for the attainment of proficiency by the youth of the colony in specified subjects’. In its first twenty‐five years of annual shows, the Association met this objective at a modest level through its schoolwork category, with the notable exception of 1883, when it sponsored a highly successful Juvenile Industrial Exhibition. Examination of both the regular schoolwork category and the Juvenile Exhibition reveals the elements of the local curriculum that the Association deemed appropriate for inclusion in its annual shows, while comments from newspapers, educators and other individuals on the quality and nature of the schoolwork displays offer insights into the context of and aspirations for the colony’s education system.

Like many of his generation George George, the director of Auckland’s Seddon Memorial Technical College (1902‐22), considered marriage and motherhood as women’s true vocation and believed in separate but equal education for girls that included some domestic training. In this regard, New Zealand historians often cite him as an advocate for the cult of domesticity, a prescriptive ideology that came to be reflected in the government’s education policy during this period. But as Joanne Scott, Catherine Manathunga and Noeline Kyle have demonstrated with regard to technical education in Queensland, rhetoric does not always match institutional practice. Other factors, most notably student demand, but also more pragmatic concerns such as the availability of accommodation, staffing and specialist equipment, can shape the curriculum. Closer scrutiny of surviving institutional records such as prospectuses, enrolment data and the director’s reports to the Department of Education, allow us to explore more fully who was given access to particular kinds of knowledge and resources, how long a particular course might take, the choices students made, what was commonplace and what was unusual, and what students might expect once they completed their studies.

To investigate how parental divorce and gender might influence the likelihood of engaging in a friends with benefits relationship (FWBR), and the likelihood of binge drinking and unprotected sex practices.

Using self-report measures, 99 undergraduates shared their parental marital history, experiences with FWBRs, and health risk behaviors.

Men, as compared with women, reported significantly more FWBRs as did participants with divorced/separated parents, as compared with those with married parents. Participants who had engaged in an FWBR reported significantly more binge drinking than those with no prior FWBR experience; however, no differences were found for gender or parental marital status. No significant differences emerged regarding the prevalence of unprotected sex.

The current study employed the use of self-report surveys, which can be subject to social desirability. All participants were recruited from a single liberal arts college with a limited sample of men with divorced or separated parents.

Using mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to explore young adults’ predictors and outcomes of engaging in FWBRs provided unique insights into how gender and parental relationships influence both casual sex and health-related behaviors.

In 1981, W. Richard (Dick) Scott of Stanford's sociology department described a paradigmatic revolution in organizational sociology that had occurred in the preceding decade. In Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Scott, 1981), he depicted the first wave of organizational theory as based in rational models of human action that focused on the internal dynamics of the organization. He described the second wave, found in human relations theory and early institutional theory, as based in natural social system models of human action but still focused on the internal “closed system.” A sea change occurred in organizational theory in the 1970s as several camps began to explore environmental causes of organizational behavior. The open-systems approaches that Scott sketched in 1981 were still seedlings, but all would mature. What they shared was an emphasis on relations between the organization and the world outside of it. The roots of these new paradigms can be traced to innovations of the 1960s. Contingency theorists Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967) had argued that firms add new practices and programs largely in response to external social demands and not simply to internal functional needs. James Thompson (1967) argued that organizations come to reflect the wider environment and particularly the regulatory environment.

Most of my work focusing on educational systems – including universities, public elementary schools, private schools, and training programs in organizations – was supported by Stanford University centers and grants separate from the Training Program, for example, the Stanford Center for Research and Development in Teaching (1968–1977) and the Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance (1979–1986). Faculty collaborators in these studies included Elizabeth Cohen and Terrence Deal in the School of Education, and John W. Meyer, my colleague in Sociology. A number of NIMH trainees participated in these studies, including Andrew Creighton, Margaret Davis, and Brian Rowan. Other doctoral students involved in this research included Sally Cole, Joanne Intili, Suzanne E. Monahan, E. Anne Stackhouse, and Marc Ventresca.

I was a doctoral student in the Organizational Behavior (OB) Ph.D. program in the Graduate School of Business (GSB) from 1984 to 1989 and a faithful participant in the annual Stanford Organizations Conference at Asilomar, on the shores of the Pacific. I worked under the guidance of Professors Joanne Martin, Rod Kramer, Robert Sutton, and James March. I also benefited from the support and guidance of sociology professor Richard Scott in his capacity as director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute of Aging (NIA) Fellows Training Program in which I was a pre-doctoral fellow from 1985 to 1988. The reflections that follow are based primarily on my experience as a student during this vibrant period, although, as a current a faculty member within the School of Education at Stanford, I cannot resist drawing occasional comparisons between the organizations community then and now.

Post-event information (PEI) may distort eyewitness memory and lead to erroneous eyewitness testimonies. This paper aims to explore whether factors such as volitional engagement with PEI (e.g. choice to engage with a co-witness) and memory distrust influence misinformation acceptance and the perceived credibility of a co-witness.

Participants (n = 223) completed the Memory Distrust Scale and then watched a short mock crime video. Thereafter, two-thirds of the participants were asked whether they would prefer or not to listen to a co-witness’ account of the witnessed event (choice condition), and one-third of the participants did not have the choice (control condition). Every participant listened to the co-witness account (which contained items of misinformation); thus, those who preferred to listen to the testimony were in the choice-yes (i.e., volition) condition and those who preferred not to listen were in the choice-no (i.e., non-volition) condition. Finally, participants completed a cued recall task assessing their memory of the video and acceptance of misinformation. They also provided ratings to establish the perceived credibility of the co-witness.

The results indicated that neither volition nor memory distrust influenced misinformation acceptance. However, those who preferred to listen to the testimony (i.e., the choice-yes condition) perceived the co-witness as more credible than those in the choice-no or control conditions.

The findings suggest that witnesses are susceptible to misinformation regardless of their willingness to engage with or avoid PEI. Further implications and future research directions are discussed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the role of volition and memory distrust as a trait in eyewitnesses tendency to engage with or avoid post-event information. The research explores whether these mechanisms impact upon memory conformity and perceived co-witness credibility.

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Scott). In the school of education, Jim March was intriguing a new generation of students with his puzzles and wisdom. In addition to Mike Hannan's joint appointment, the Graduate School of Business featured such luminaries as Jeff Pfeffer, Joanne Martin, Jim Baron, Joel Podolny, and Bill Barnett. Slightly further afield, Ray Leavitt and Michael Fehling had begun to train engineers to think about organizational issues, as they developed computer simulations with nuanced attention to cognitive and decision-making processes. Steve Barley would join (what was then) the department of industrial engineering in 1994 and Mark Granovetter would join the department of sociology in 1995, adding fresh insights from the sociology of work and economic sociology, respectively, to what was already a firm foundation for organization studies. The umbrella organization that linked many of these efforts was the Stanford Consortium on Organizational Research (SCOR), which had been guided by Dick Scott's able leadership since 1988 and hosted an annual organizations conference at the beautiful Asilomar retreat in Monterey, California.

Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.