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This chapter explores how knowledge of landscape has been produced by different groups of interests in the Mark 3 partnership New Town of Warrington, UK, referring specifically to a neighbourhood called Birchwood. I introduce my on-going research project Days of the New Town and present findings as a point of encounter between knowledge of landscape as professional expertise and as socially lived experience. I place this encounter within the theoretical context of Lefebvre’s writings on social space. Specifically, I use his spatial triad, three overlapping concepts on how space is produced as lived, conceived and perceived (see The Production of Space 1973 translated into English in 1991). Having grown up in Birchwood, I carry with me a knowledge of this space in terms of lived experience. Whilst I do not call upon personal experience in this chapter, the aim of bringing about a greater awareness of the New Town as a space of lived experience has been a motivational factor in researching and writing about the ways we formulate our knowledge of New Towns: knowledge which can co-exist with the official archives of New Town Development Corporations.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

This paper aims to explore the pertinent issues, barriers and pitfalls of intergenerational communication in business families during their leadership succession period.

Building on relational leadership theory, the paper makes use of an action research approach using a qualitative single case study to investigate communication barriers and pitfalls in business transition.

Through action research, interventions were taken in the underlying case, which increased the consciousness, as well as the personal and social competencies of the business family. Thus, business families stuck in ambivalent entanglement understand their underlying motives and needs within the change process, get into closer contact with their emotional barriers and communication hindrances, which is a prerequisite for any change, and break the succession iceberg phenomenon.

Future research should undertake multiple case studies to validate and/or modify the qualitative methods used in this action research to increase the validity and generalizability of the findings.

Given the large number of business families in transition, our study shows the beneficial effects action research might have on business families’ communication behavior along a change process. The findings might help other business families to understand the value of action research for such underlying challenges and decrease communication barriers.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed intergenerational communication of business families using an action research approach.

An assessment identifying the leadership education needs of three groups of leadership program alumni was developed through focus group interviews. Respondents (386 of 1,063 or 36%) were most interested in training on: engaging others in a common vision, inspiring others, attracting the right people for the task, and influencing others. They preferred to participate in one or two workshops per year. Face-to-face delivery was the format most preferred by respondents with distance-delivery strategies identified as the preferred means by 34% or less, and respondents preferred to pursue regional collaborations in their state. The results will be the basis for advanced leadership development training for alumni of leadership development programs offered through Cooperative Extension. It was recommended that this study be replicated with community leaders that have not participated in formal leadership programs as the basis for developing initial and advanced training needs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how pregnant women with type 1 diabetes integrate new information technology (IT) into their health management activities, using activity theory as an analytical framework.

The research is a multiple case design, based on interviews with 15 women with type 1 diabetes who were pregnant, considering pregnancy, or had recently given birth. A thematic analysis, sensitised by activity theory, was used to analyse the data.

Health management in this setting involves negotiations and contradictions across boundaries of interacting activities. Participants play an active role in managing their health and using new IT tools in particular ways to support their health management. Using new technologies creates both opportunities and challenges. IT-enabled healthcare devices and other information systems open up new treatment possibilities, but also generate new contradictions between interacting activity systems.

The research was conducted with a small sample in a specific context of health management. Further research is needed to extend the findings to other contexts.

Healthcare providers need to accommodate a bottom-up approach to the adoption and use of new technologies in settings where empowered patients play an active role in managing their health.

The findings highlight opportunities to further develop activity theory to accommodate the central role that individuals play in resolving inherent contradictions and achieving alignment between multiple interacting activity systems when incorporating new IT tools into health management activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why the gender pay gap (GPG) – with its significant social costs generated through disadvantaging half of the population – persists in the USA despite decades-long efforts toward eradication.

A social provisioning approach, rooted in heterodox economics, is used to examine institutions that create and maintain the US GPG. The GPG is not a natural phenomenon, and, thus, must be examined within a specific social and historical context.

The analysis finds that the institutions of capitalism and patriarchy have created and perpetuated the GPG; however, mainstream economic theory does not consider these institutions and goes as far as explaining away the problem. Current US policies are formulated from this mainstream economic perspective, and, thus, are inherently flawed. The authors propose a reorientation toward a social provisioning theoretical perspective to analyze the GPG, which provides a more meaningful and practical foundation for policy formulation.

This paper provides a comprehensive examination of effective and ineffective theories and policies for addressing the GPG. Additionally, the authors provide concrete policy recommendations to eradicate the GPG.

This chapter focuses on how the repression of political ideologies can silence feminist voices. It examines how writings by women working with the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s have been overlooked even though they presaged important linchpins of U.S. second-wave feminist thought.

This study is based on historical and archival research.

Decades before the rise of second-wave feminism, women in the CPUSA had: (1) produced a political economy of domestic labor; (2) employed an intersectional analysis of the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, class, and nation; and (3) called for a global feminist analysis that linked these multiple oppressions to colonialism and imperialism.

This study illustrates the costs of political repression and how the canon of feminist thought can be enhanced by resuscitating subjugated knowledges.

Too little attention has focused on the silencing of women because of their political ideologies. This chapter addresses this lacuna in feminist studies and calls into question the oft-repeated notion that the periods between the waves of U.S. feminism were times of movement stagnation. It shows how theory construction can flourish even when feminist activism wanes.