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Humanity faces many crises – climate change, food insecurity, persistent poverty – what Brown, Harris, and Russell (2010) call wicked problems. These problems implicate us all, with possible solutions transcending disciplinary, organizational, and national boundaries. Therefore educators need to nurture graduates able to engage as future practitioners – and citizens – in seeking solutions which recognize “the personal, the local and the strategic, as well as specialized contributions to knowledge” (Brown et al., 2010, p. 4).

A model of service-learning which draws on the principles of social pedagogy, cultural-based learning and co-production provides the foundations for a more reflexive pedagogy, supporting the “development of student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion and altruistic behavior” (Zajonc, 2013, p. 83). This approach advocates that community organizations play a pivotal role in co-designing knowledge. Drawing on an applied research module at University of Wolverhampton this chapter will argue that by engaging community groups as co-producers of knowledge, learning can be extended beyond students to the wider community (Murphy & Joseph, 2019). Not only will this enhance the potential of service learning to benefit the community and the students, but it has the potential to produce graduates more sensitive to the needs of communities themselves.

The Grundys are the alternative world of Ambridge. Invariably down on their luck, often portrayed as lazy if not feckless and usually incompetent. This chapter speaks up for the downtrodden of Borsetshire and in particular the Grundys. It looks at the development of the Grundy family in The Archers over almost 50 years now. It relates key elements in their lives, looking not just at the class struggle in the village but also the importance of gender in this. It draws on key players in the Grundy story from the 1970s including the late radio DJ John Peel who was for a time an enthusiast for The Archers and who played Eddie Grundy's records on his BBC Radio One show. It also looks at the views of key Archers figures such as Vanessa Whitburn and Keri Davies and how they have approached the Grundys. It uses the work of Marx and Engels to try to explain how it is that the Grundys moved from being small farmers to landless labourers. What the chapter doesn't do is to map out a strategy for the liberation of the Grundys from their oppression. It does however look forward to a world turned upside down when at 19.02 hours on a weekday evening on BBC Radio 4 we hear a programme called not The Archers, but The Grundys.

Upcycling was introduced in The Archers by Fallon Rogers, who created a business from selling furniture she had upcycled. The author cites other examples from Archers episodes: Bert Fry’s egg mobile was originally an old caravan. Eddie Grundy built Lynda Snell’s shepherd’s hut from farmyard scrap. Josh Archer expanded his online farm equipment sales to include old items refurbished and sold for profit. Definitions of upcycling imply that the original item has become worthless. The author, however, includes examples of nostalgic value placed on relics of a bygone age and suggests a dichotomy between the values of older versus younger Ambridge residents. Upcycling can also be viewed in a metaphorical sense: Lilian Bellamy, for example, regularly upcycled herself with cosmetic assistance. The most sinister example is that of Rob Titchener, who used coercive control to upcycle Helen (then) Titchener into the image he wanted. The author concludes that while motives may take several forms, it is Fallon Rogers who consistently uses both creativity and business sense in her upcycling endeavours.

Much has been theorized about what change strategies to employ given particular types of organizational change. Organizational theorists have linked participative strategies with culture change, strategies based on logic and reason with new technology implementations, and power strategies with the introduction of new laws and legislation. However, to what degree are these suggested recommendations carried out in organizations? In this paper, we explored the extent to which change recipients perceive the use of theorist recommended strategies when undergoing specific types of organizational changes. Using survey research (N = 88), we investigated the perceived relationship between two components of change: change content and change strategy. The results partially follow the ideals proposed by previous theorists, but they also highlight a significant relationship between power-coercive strategies and episodic change events that is contrary to those ideals. For practitioners, our findings draw attention to the connection between change content and change strategy in the hope of offering some guidance to those change agents who must determine how to lead a particular change initiative. Additionally, since our investigation is original and exploratory, we incite future research aimed at understanding the congruency between change content and change strategy formulation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of using a living case study method to teach graduate students in an organizational development (OD) course. A living case is defined as one where participants study a current, ongoing situation over the entire semester. Students worked with an authentic client to solve an authentic problem. After the course concluded interviews were conducted. Learners expressed a sense of feeling more connected and engaged with the course content because of the living case. Students also exhibited significant learning – new skills and mindsets developed during the course that are valued and used in their work, school, and personal lives.

This is an instrumental case study of a work-based instructional design used to improve student engagement and learning outcomes.

Students worked with an authentic client to solve an authentic problem. Learners expressed a sense of feeling more connected and engaged with the course content because of the living case. Students also exhibited significant learning – new skills and mindsets developed during the course that are valued and used in their work, school, and personal lives.

Higher education (HE) instructors are expected to teach students knowledge and skills that will be valuable at work and in life after graduation. Using a living case allows students to extract learning directly from the work experience. By using the concepts and the tools in an authentic, living case, students gain experience and concrete knowledge.

This study extends past research on connecting classroom learning and work experience. It looks at how a course designed using a living case study can be used to improve learner engagement and create longer term value for students.

The protective aspects of relationships for health have been extensively studied. Here, we assess whether different dimensions of partnership status at the time of a child’s birth are associated with better self-assessed health later in mid-life. Data are from three countries with different social welfare policies relating to union status and parenting: the US, the UK, and Norway. Results indicate that women who were partnered at first birth had better health at midlife in all three countries than women who were unpartnered. The analysis indicates no differences in the mid-life health of Norwegian women who were married or cohabiting at birth, whereas for US and UK women, being married at the birth of a first child is more beneficial for mid-life health than bearing the child in a cohabiting union. In the US, women who are least likely to marry do not demonstrate better mid-life health if they had wed relative to cohabiting. In the UK, in contrast, the women least likely to be married at the birth experience better returns if they marry. These findings highlight the importance of paying closer attention to heterogeneous treatment effects as they relate to childbearing, relationship status, and mid-life health.

Over the last two decades, there have been considerable changes in the business environment because of the use of information technology, modern communication means, and market globalization. Because of these changes, competition augmented and each organization started to search for the most efficient use of resources to dominate markets or at least to keep their market shares. To manage organizations in such complicated environments, managers need a lot of imperative precious information. Some arguments have been made regarding the ability of accounting systems to provide the new information requirements. This stimulated a stream of studies in an attempt to improve accounting systems and accounting information to serve the new management requirements. Some of these studies merged the accounting with the organizations’ strategic management in a new theme called “Strategic Accounting”. This paper concentrates on the concept of Strategic Accounting (SA) as a field and demonstrates how strategic management approaches affect the information developed by accounting systems. The paper illustrates definitions of SA, SA development stages, approaches that merge accounting with strategic management, and the effect of each of these approaches on the information that accounting systems provide to support organizations’ strategic management.

Families conduct their affairs through processes that are built upon those of previous generations and also social capacities such as culture, class, oppression and poverty. The media has played a part in stereotyping the lower classes through their portrayal on the television programmes such as Benefits Street and Jeremy Kyle and tabloid newspaper stories. This chapter is a case study of two families who are at the opposing ends of the social scale, the Horrobin/Carter and Aldridge families. The two families were chosen due to them being linked by marriage in the younger generation. Through the use of genograms, we explore how the families differ in their attitudes towards relationships within their individual families, and also how they relate to each other as separate family groups. Despite the many differences, there are also a number of key similarities, particularly regarding the key females in the families, in terms of family background and snobbery. We also show that there is little family loyalty in the more privileged family and a power differential between the two families (oppressors vs. oppressed) in terms of the crimes committed.