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Provides a review and synthesis of the finance literature regarding foreign investment and the real estate literature dealing with foreign investment in US real estate. Addresses the motivations for investing in US real estate, including the potential for increased returns as well as the potential for risk reduction. Proposes an investment decision making model indicating factors that foreign investors need to consider when investing in US real estate.

Outlines the nature of the appraisal profession in the USA. Notes that the USA has moved towards industry self‐regulation via licensing and the establishment of minimum appraisal standards since 1990. Concludes that the role of the Appraisal Institute and the Appraisal Foundation have been paramount in these important developments.

Web-based courses are a practical way to engage in meaningful discussions with learners from a diverse set of communities. By gathering online to learn about a topic, learners can form communities that transcend geographic and political boundaries. This paper aims to investigate a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and Wisconsin Library Services, which brought open access online learning to thousands of lifelong learners around the state of Wisconsin. “Changing Weather and Climate in the Great Lakes Region”, a massive open online course the UW-Madison launched in 2015, paired a regional focus with face-to-face discussions at 21 public libraries to deepen learners’ personal connections to the subject matter. Through strategic partnership, targeted course development and marketing of events, intimate local discussion sessions and statewide events provided fora in which Wisconsin residents would explore changing weather and climate with university faculty, staff and students.

This paper uses a case study approach and firsthand interview feedback from librarians, library staff and university faculty and staff who were leading the effort.

This paper explores the lessons learned and practical implications from the project and offers insight into libraries and universities looking to engage specific communities in non-credit online learning projects into the future.

This effort was a first of its kind partnership for the University and the State of Wisconsin.

Decision comprehensiveness is an important process in determining the outcomes of strategic decision-making. While recent research began to explore its individual level antecedents, a fundamental aspect of organizational life, heterogeneous goals, have not been investigated for their effects on comprehensiveness. In this study, our purpose is to study the impact of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness and explore behavioral integration as a potential mediator in this relationship.

To test our hypotheses, we utilize a survey-based study with a sample of teams undertaking a business simulation. Our longitudinal data collection process captures team data across the initial-, mid-, and the ending-stages of the simulation.

Our findings show that goal heterogeneity negatively impacts behavioral integration and decision comprehensiveness. Moreover, the negative impact of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness is mediated through behavioral integration.

Given that many strategic decisions are undertaken by groups of individuals, it is imperative to understand the factors that impact team-level decision-making processes. Extending the literature, we empirically show the negative effects of goal heterogeneity on decision comprehensiveness. While doing so, we also show that behavioral integration – a team trait that can endure over time, as opposed to a one-time state – can be crucial in dampening this negative effect. Our findings suggest researchers, and managers, to be cautious in assuming decision comprehensiveness may easily be achieved in any given team context.

Research has found a subgroup of conservative white males have lower perceptions of risk across a variety of environmental and health hazards. Less research has looked at the views of these “low risk” individuals in group interactions. Through qualitative analysis of a technology deliberation, we note that white men expressing low risk views regarding technologies for energy and the environment also often express high social risks around potential loss of control. We argue these risk perceptions reflect identification with corporate concerns, usually framed in opposition to government and mirroring arguments made by conservative organizations. We situate these views within the broader cultural struggle over who has the power to name and address risks.

Climate change is a global threat to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. In an increasingly urbanized world, homeowners play an important role in climate adaptation and environmental sustainability through decisions to landscape and manage their residential properties.

In this chapter, we review the potential impacts of climate change on environmental sustainability in urban ecosystems and highlight the role of urban and suburban residents in conserving biodiversity. We focus extensively on the interactions of homeowners and residential landscapes in urban coastal and desert environments.

Understanding how human-environment interactions are linked with a changing climate is especially relevant for coastal and desert cities in the United States, which are already experiencing visible impacts of climate change. In fact, many homeowners are already making decisions in response to environmental change, and these decisions will ultimately shape the future structure, function and sustainability of these critically important ecosystems.

Considering the close relationship between biodiversity and the health and well-being of human societies, understanding how climate change and other social motivations affect the landscaping decisions of urban residents will be critical for predicting and enhancing sustainability in these social-ecological systems.

This study explores how top management teams make strategic decisions. The findings indicate that the top management team performs a variety of monitoring and control functions within most firms, but that a single team with stable composition does not make strategic choices in most organizations. Instead, different groups, with members from multiple organizational levels, form to make various strategic decisions. A stable subset of the top team forms the core of each of these multiple decision‐making bodies. The findings offer a possible explanation for inconsistent findings in the top management team literature, and suggest several new directions for future senior team research.

This study engages an understudied presupposition that values are relatively impervious to situational pressures. We do this within a key sociological context, incorporating social status as a meso-level structure, by measuring values before and after a competition situation with an experimentally controlled outcome to determine the situational robustness of values.

We incorporate measures of values into a standard competition experiment, looking at how winning or losing and the status of the perceived competition influence peoples’ values.

Drawing on the well-established expectation states literature, we demonstrate that perceptions of gaining or losing a competition influence core values. Overall, positive, related situational feedback seemed to heighten all of the values-measures, while receiving (manipulated) negative, specific feedback dampened the rating of all values.

This is an initial exploration of the received wisdom; future work should involve different manipulations, wider arrays of values-measurement, and more diverse samples.

We hope that our interpretations of these results suggest how perceived status influences core internal experiences. The processes described have implications for the experiences of groups that win or lose political competitions, and other social interactions whereby people feel more or less affirmed in terms of their core beliefs.

This suggests that individuals and groups who perceive themselves as winning competitions, elections, or challenges will feel affirmed in their core beliefs, and be more motivated to pursue those valued ends. People who perceive themselves as being situationally unsuccessful will feel a general dampening of these core beliefs.

This chapter is the first to link the internal study of values with the general expectation states tradition. It is exploratory, and results suggest this is a fertile area for future inquiry.

Biology and Politics (or Biopolitics) has been a part of the political science firmament since the 1960s. Over time, it has become less an odd outlier in the discipline and more a tolerated (and sometimes respected) part of the enterprise. After about 50 years of existence, this is a proper time to reflect on where biopolitics has been, where it is now, and where it might go as an academic endeavor. Indeed, some have said that the best step would for biopolitics to no longer be seen as a special, narrow part of political science – but a part of every field in the discipline, integrated into the larger world of the study of politics.