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The study analyzes how equity-focused knowledge brokers, working at different levels of the US education system, understand and discuss capacity building in education systems, such as schools, districts, state and local education agencies, to answer this research question: How do equity-focused knowledge brokers support capacity building in education systems?

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five well-known equity-focused organizations that broker evidence-based knowledge and resources to educational systems, practitioners and policymakers. The research team members qualitatively analyzed 18 h of recordings, using their co-developed codebook based on the research questions and prior research on knowledge mobilization.

Four strategies to build capacity within the educational systems were identified. Pursuing sustainable educational change, brokering organizations built capacity with context-specific strategies: (1) engaging various roles within educational systems, (2) fostering communities and partnerships, (3) supporting educators and policymakers’ agency and efficacy and (4) creating a wider culture of external support beyond the systems themselves.

This study shows how knowledge brokers employed context-specific strategies targeting whole systems instead of individuals to ensure that the organization and individuals within had the mindsets, capability, and conditions to engage with and adapt the brokered knowledge and resources. Findings build on existing literature showing how knowledge brokers build capacity through well-known approaches, such as workshops/training, online tutorials and other online resources.

This chapter features a number of case studies that illustrate the variety of shades and formats of open education (OE). The unbundling and institutional detachment of the traditional formal education package provides the opportunity to develop services around the respective component parts of a larger curriculum, such as ‘Open Content’, ‘Open Degrees’, ‘Open Assessment’, ‘Open Learning’, ‘Open Tutoring’, ‘Open Technology’ and ‘Open Communities’. Each of such component parts potentially in turn allows for the development and provision of services that might be provided not only to the learner, but also to education providers, as depicted in Fig. 1.

While it is incontestable that eating in restaurants leads to a higher energy intake than eating at home, this paper explores the even more environmentally relevant connection between meat intake and the location of eating.

Based on secondary data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the authors apply a latent class model (LCM), combining latent profile analysis (LPA) and regression analysis. Different (latent) consumer classes are modeled based (1) on share of meat consumption and (2) share of eating out by means of LPA, while class-specific socio-demographic characteristics are estimated by means of ordered logistic regression.

Results of the LPA reveal four (latent) consumer classes with regard to the share of meat consumption and the share of eating out. One class consists mostly of male meat lovers with a high share of eating out, which, however, only represents 7% of the sample. A much larger class represents an affluent social group that consumes the majority of food outside of the home but does not consume significantly more meat than the large group of moderates who mostly eat at home. The fourth class mostly consists of children with a very low intake of meat.

By applying a LCM, the authors shed some light on the relation between meat consumption and eating out. The authors demonstrated that commonly assumed relations, such as men eating more meat than women, do not necessarily apply. Similar findings apply to factors potentially influencing meat consumption, such as education, marital status and income.

What role do people's attitudes toward social policies play for the politics of welfare state reform? This chapter contributes to a growing scholarship on policy responsiveness in welfare state research with a longitudinal comparative case study of the Bismarckian welfare states of France and Germany. Quantitative analyses of changes in mean attitudes as well as polarization and inequalities of attitudes based on the 1996, 2006, and 2016 waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Role of Government module are triangulated with a thick description of social policy changes. While recommodifying and defamilializing reforms in Germany transformed the welfare state fundamentally, there was more continuity in the French welfare state, in spite of a stronger focus on labor market activation policies. The quantitative results suggest that lower attitudinal stability toward the welfare state in Germany and lower polarization evoked a higher willingness for reform than in France, where more polarized attitudes and overall marginal changes in attitudes gave French governments less maneuverability in adopting reforms. In both countries, I find no evidence for an upper-class bias in policy responsiveness. In sum, my research supports the claim that change in public opinion toward the welfare state and diverging attitudes within societies play a role for the timing and direction of reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine housing speculation in Auckland, New Zealand, the second most unaffordable market in the world.

The study considers rental property purchases from 2002 to 2016 within the Auckland region. The authors apply a simple cash flow model that emulates the before-tax investment calculations used during purchasers’ due diligence. From this model, the authors determine whether purchases involved speculation on capital gains or not and the authors estimate the degree of speculation at the transaction level.

The authors find that housing speculation in Auckland is endemic and its housing market is a politically condoned, finance-fuelled casino with investors broadly betting on tax-free capital gains.

Although political leaders have decried that the “speculation-driven housing bubble in Auckland is a social and economic disaster”, the government’s main anti-speculation tool – the Income Tax Act’s intention test – sits idle and inoperable. By holstering this key policy tool, politicians foster housing speculation and use residential property investment to buttress New Zealand’s asset-based welfare system.

The authors develop novel methods to objectively distinguish speculators from genuine investors, measure the speculative pressure applied by individual rental property purchasers and outline an evidence-based approach to operationalise New Zealand’s currently impotent anti-speculation tool, the intention test.

A decade after Powell et al.’s (2011) seminal article on behavioral strategy, which called for models to solve real-world problems, the authors revisit the field to ask whether behavioral strategy is coming of age. The purpose of this paper is to explain how behavioral strategy can and has been used in real-world settings.

This study presents a conceptual review with case study examples of the impact of behavioral strategy on real-world problems.

This study illustrates several examples where behavioral strategy debiasing has been effective. Although no causal claims can be made, with the stark contrast between the negative impact of biased strategies and the positive results emerging from debiasing techniques, this study argues that there is evidence of the benefits of a behavioral strategy mindset, and that this should be the mindset of a responsible strategic leader.

This study presents a demonstration of analytical, debate and organizational debiasing techniques and how they are being used in real-world settings, specifically military intelligence, Mergers and acquisitions deal-making, resource allocation and capital projects.

Behavioral strategy has broad application in private and public sectors. It has proven practical value in various settings, for example, the application of reference class forecasting in large infrastructure projects.

A conceptual review of behavioral strategy in the wild.