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This study aims to understand the asset and success factors that contributed to college completion of African American males who persisted through college. Only a dismal 22 per cent of African American males receive bachelor’s degrees compared to 41 per cent of White males (Kena et al., 2015).

The data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. The authors interviewed two first-generation African-American males from rural backgrounds to capture their experiences of their process to college completion.

Themes, based in cultural capital theory, that impacted their college persistence were identified within their pre-college experiences, college experiences and post-college perceptions. Recommendations for helping rural African-American males attend and persist through college are offered.

Only two participants from one predominately white institution in the southeastern USA were interviewed. Rural students from other geographical areas might have different backgrounds, challenges, assets and successes. Although the interview questions were based on relevant literature, they may not have covered all key aspects of the participants’ experiences. As in any qualitative study, biases of the researchers and research team may have influenced the results, although these were identified and shared before reading any of the transcripts and then discussed several times during the data analysis process.

Educators not only should try to address the cultural capital limitations of these men but also highlight and build on their cultural assets. These assets include familial and platonic individuals who see their potential for success and encourage them to attend college to become something better than what they see in their community, reverse role models who encourage youth to make different choices than they did, media-based examples of successful Black students, cultural messages of strength and determination (e.g. Million Man March) and the exhortation to be an example that other African-American boys could look up to.

This paper addresses the need for K-12 and higher education institutions to understand how to assist first-generation, rural African-American males in getting admitted to college, matriculating through college and graduating from college.

WHAT ARE ANY company's most valuable assets? There are some who would say they are its goodwill; but there are plenty of experts who go from firm to firm and from one country to another (and themselves gain an enviable living while doing so) stating without admitting any doubt that to any establishment worth anything at all a workforce is its most valuable asset.

This paper aims to investigate the way in which Sri Lankan business associations contribute to addressing such issues and the motivation behind their contributions.

Data, in this study, came from publicly available sources (online news articles, newspaper articles, reports, etc.) and a series of unstructured elite interviews with leaders of Sri Lanka’s most prominent peak business associations.

Sri Lankan associations contribute to addressing problems associated with human capital flight because doing so, ultimately, benefits their members and secretariat organisations. Peak bodies make their contributions by easing the push factors that catalyse the outflow of skilled migrants from the island nation and helping to replenish skills in the country by engaging in initiatives aimed at training and developing workers, young people and entrepreneurs.

The behaviours of Sri Lanka’s business interest associations and the logics that drive their actions are similar to those of their counterparts in other countries (as per academic literature in the area), where association membership is not state-mandated. Rational actions of business associations have the potential to produce socially beneficial positive externalities (as in the present case issues around the brain drain).

Findings from this research can assist government bodies, non-government organisations and other civil society organisations develop a better collaborative relationship with the private sector in developing nations to tackle problems associated with human capital flight.

While there has been a lively debate, among philosophers and scholars of public policy, on how governments should help address issues associated with this phenomenon, very little attention has been given to the real and potential contributions of non-governmental, non-charity-based civil society groups such as unions and business chambers. This paper seeks to address this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reflexive account of the co‐production of a qualitative research project with the aim of illuminating the relationships between research participants.

The paper draws upon personal experience of designing and conducting a research project into management learning, run jointly between an academic and a senior practitioner. The methodological issues involved and the reflexive dynamics of how the work of research collaboration is accomplished are considered.

Engaging with radical reflexivity helps to produce insights about the co‐production process.

This paper contributes to the field of reflexivity and is innovative in its context of academic‐practitioner research.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how preschoolers with different language backgrounds accomplish everyday interaction at a Swedish preschool, where the lingua franca (common language) is Swedish. More specifically, it aims to analyze how the target children, despite their limited language resources in Swedish, use their existing communicative resources to make friends and achieve intersubjectivity in front of two alphabet charts illustrating the Arabic and Latin alphabets, respectively.

The data are drawn from a single play episode between three boys and a girl, aged four years. Their interaction was video-recorded, and the analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing particularly on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

The analyses show that the children’s trajectory of achieving intersubjectivity was partly bothersome as their interpretation of the alphabet charts diverged, due to their different language knowledge and earlier experiences. Hence, to attain joint understanding and intersubjectivity, they used a range of communicative resources: besides speaking Swedish they used word mixing, attention-getters (“look” and “check it out”), and nonverbal moves such as pointing, gesturing, intone, and screaming. It is notable that, despite some problems in understanding, their desire to make friends and have fun together seemed to compensate for their joint failure to always understand each other.

Detailed analyses and observations of how children with diverse language backgrounds use their communicative resources to achieve intersubjectivity and make friends can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how they can further support the children’s socialization and capturing of the majority language – here Swedish.

The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how second-language learning is a complex trajectory edged with both setbacks and successes, especially when all the children interacting have diverse language backgrounds and experiences. However, the analysis highlights how, in their endeavor to make friends, the children find ways to solve problems in situ in their own way, and enjoy each other’s company despite the fragility of the play and their language shortcomings.

The purpose of this paper is to share the experiences and reflections of a Peer Support Worker over the course of a day working within mental health services.

A narrative approach has been taken to structure reflections based on the experience of attending a series of reviews on an acute mental health ward.

The experience of attending ward reviews creates reflections based on how this system affects and challenges both those who are served by it and those work within it.

This paper adds to the small number of accounts of the experiences of Peer Support Working in mental health services and as such is highly original.

In order to emphasize in-depth analyses of individual life stories, seven informants were selected. Since breadth of experience will contribute to a more detailed contextualization of the consumer's use of products in identity negotiation, diversity across informants was emphasized. Interviews generally followed the format as suggested by Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1989). A comfortable setting was chosen and pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity. Interviews were audio-taped and lasted anywhere from one to just over two hours. Grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988) focused on the meaning of the tattoo design, the experience of being tattooed, perceptions of the body, words the informants used to describe themselves, and other biographical information important for understanding the informant's personal myth. Every effort was made to present a natural front, keep the informant on track without being too directive, demonstrate active listening, and prompt the informant as a way of probing for details (Spradley, 1979). To ensure accuracy, an experienced and trained transcriptionist transcribed each of the seven interviews. The final text totaled 450 typed double-spaced pages.

IT IS TO BE hoped that by the time these words are being read the dispute over the Electricians' Union and the TUC will have been solved; and, we hope, with satisfaction to both parties.