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Children’s health and life chances are affected by many factors, with parents and schools holding influential roles. Yet relatively little is known about parental engagement in school-based health education and specifically, from the perspectives of health and education professionals. The purpose of this paper is to examine professionals’ perspectives on parental engagement in school-based health education.

An exploratory qualitative study was conducted with ten health, education and local authority professionals from a socio-economically deprived area in England. Semi-structured interviews explored the role of professionals within the school health curricula, roles that parents played in school health, and barriers and enablers to parental engagement in school health education.

Reported barriers to engagement related to assumptions about parents’ own health behaviours, impacts of funding and inspection regimes, and protected time for health within the school curriculum. Enablers included designated parental support workers based in the school, positive role modelling by other parents, consultation and engagement with parents and a whole school approach to embedding health within the wider curriculum.

Findings from this study suggest the importance of building meaningful partnerships with parents to complement school health education and improve child health outcomes.

This paper addresses an important gap in the research on parental engagement in school-based health education from the perspectives of health and education professionals. Effective partnerships with parents are crucial to the success of school health education.

In response to what are perceived as the negative consequences for children of family change over the past century, governments in the UK and the US have devoted substantial funds to programmes to strengthen families, but the focus of intervention in the two countries has moved in opposite directions. In the UK, financial support has shifted away from couple strengthening to parenting programmes, while in the US financial support has shifted substantially toward couple‐focused interventions. This review article summarises studies relevant to these policy choices. We present research evidence for a multidomain family risk‐child outcome model, and then describe the results of three studies using a randomised clinical trial design to examine the impact of intervention with couples on children's adaptation. The data support the hypothesis that interventions focusing on strengthening couple relationships may have a more positive impact on families and children than interventions that focus on increasing parenting skills.

This paper investigates the impact of social-media marketing elements, namely entertainment, customisation, interaction, electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) and trendiness, on consumer–brand engagement and brand knowledge.

Using an online survey, the study collects data in Hong Kong from 214 experienced social-media users, as indicated by their consumption of a durable technology product, a smartphone. We used partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM) to test the links between social-media marketing elements, consumer–brand engagement and brand knowledge.

The results reveal that interaction, electronic word-of-mouth and trendiness are the key elements directly influencing consumer brand engagement, then strengthening brand awareness and brand knowledge. This contrasts with the non-significant results found for the influence of entertainment and customisation on consumer–brand engagement.

Having cross-sectional nature, the study focuses on one single product, smartphones, at one location, Hong Kong. Future research may enhance the generalisability of the findings by replication in other countries with diverse cultures, such as countries in Latin America and Africa and examine other industries and other products, such as the service sector and convenience products with a low involvement level.

Marketers may strengthen consumer–brand engagement by using content that is trendy, along with encouraging interaction and positive EWOM on social-media platforms, in order to build strong and positive brand knowledge in consumers' minds.

This study contributes to the branding literature by providing an understanding of the role of social-media marketing elements in the brand-building process. Social media is a marketing channel recognised by its effectiveness in communicating brand-related information and its role as a means to stimulate consumers' brand engagement and brand knowledge. However, how effective these elements are for these purposes remains to be established. By empirically testing a theoretical model, this study confirms that specific social-media marketing elements, namely interaction, EWOM and trendiness, are critical drivers in the brand-building process in Hong Kong.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, systems of inter-related forces that promote and sustain regional entrepreneurship, are increasingly viewed as sources of innovation, economic development and community revitalization. Regions with emerging, underdeveloped or depressed economies are attempting to develop their nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems in the hopes of experiencing the positive benefits of entrepreneurial activity. For nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems to grow requires resources. However, how nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems manage their resource dependencies and the tensions that exist between creating and attracting resources are not clear. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theory of nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem resource dependence.

This conceptual paper analyzes entrepreneurial ecosystems as meta-organizations and builds on resource dependence theory to explain how nascent ecosystems respond to environmental dependencies and their resource needs through internal and external strategies.

Two specific strategies used by nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems to manage resource dependence – bridging and buffer – are explored. It is proposed that there is a positive relationship between the resource dependence of a nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem and its use of bridging and buffering activities. Two ecosystem characteristics that influence the pursuit of bridging and buffering – ecosystem size and the presence of collaborative values – are also identified. In addition, it is theorized that resource dependence strategies influence a key, system-level characteristic of entrepreneurial ecosystems: resilience, the ecosystem’s ability to respond and adapt to internal and external disruptions.

The theory presented generates insights into how nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems create and obtain resources when ecosystems are unmunificent, resource-constrained or underdeveloped. The theorizing addresses which resource dependence strategy – buffering or bridging – has a stronger link to resource dependence (and resilience) and under what conditions these linkages occur. The theoretical model generates insights for research on entrepreneurship in emerging and developed economies and produces practical implications for ecosystem participants, policymakers and economic development organizations.