In bondage when cold was king: the frigid terrain of slavery in antebellum Maryland

Cold weather remains one of the least explored environmental phenomena in the historiography of American slavery. By detailing the heightened vulnerabilities of the enslaved during the colder portions of the year and then describing the means by which enslaved people leveraged frigid weather against slaveholders, this paper highlights how slave and slaveholder differently mobilized the cold against one another in contests over power. It argues that in the lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Maryland, cold weather was both an afflicting as well as empowering force.     

Microstructures of economic action: talk,interaction and the bottom line

This paper contributes to an expanding body of research that has analysed the interactional foundations of economic activity, and price determination, by quantifying the financial implications of different micro‐interactional practices. Drawing on video recordings of naturalistic interaction the paper analyses a simple consumer choice, whether to pay one of two prices, the lower ‘standard’ price (£8.00) or the higher ‘gift aid’ (£8.80) price, to enter an arts institution. Utilizing resources from conversation analysis, the paper analyses different ways of posing this choice. It describes how, as interactional constraints tighten, standard prices become less socially desirable and customers increasingly ‘volunteer’ to pay the higher price. The paper contributes to sociological understandings of economic activity, demonstrating how simple one‐off choices, and prices, are accountably responsive to micro‐interactional structures.     

Brexit,Private Equity and Management

We analyse the expected impact of Brexit on private equity and its implications for management research. Specifically, we explore the implications for private equity funds and funding, and at the portfolio firm level with respect to employment and performance.     

Terrorism‐Centric Behaviors and Adversarial Threat Awareness*

This article estimates situational awareness in a diverse collection of police officers with respect to their individual ability to identify nine key behaviors that are indicative of terrorism activity. The selected group of police officers was drawn from state, county, and municipal law enforcement organizations. The terrorist‐centric behaviors were presented to the test group in multicomponent text‐based scenarios that emulate real‐world police events and respondents were instructed to rate each scenario component on an 11‐point Likert‐type suspicion scale. With the exception of terrorist fundraising, law enforcement personnel tended to view all of the terrorist‐centric activities and behaviors as at least “somewhat suspicious.” The activities that could also be associated with “conventional” criminality such as weapons acquisition received higher ratings than those activities more exclusively related to terrorism such as recruiting. We also noted statistically significant differences based on agency type, officers’ assignment (patrol or detective), experience, gender, agency size, and education. Race had no effect.     

Katabasis,adult betrayals and liminal identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life

In Child Soldier, China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier during Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse of children at home, and as child soldiers. I argue that Child Soldier is a text that lends itself to a katabatic analysis, and that Keitetsi is a katabasist who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier “within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return” . I argue that “hellish” elements in the memoir are more than just incidental: they point to a world where tenderness and love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. I also draw on Sigmund Freud and Homi Bhabha’s notions of the unhomely, to suggest that the memoir introduces interesting parallels between the unhomeliness in the home and that brought on by the civil war. Subconsciously, then, examining the memoir under the tropes of katabasis and the unhomely allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the abused and rejected young woman she becomes.     

Population growth in the 1990s: Patterns within the United States 1

Census 2000 counted 281.4 million people in the UnitedStates, up 13.2 percentfrom the 1990 Census population of 248.7 million and thehighest percent increasefor the nation since the 1960s. Population growth in the1990s was not only higherthan in recent decades, it was also more geographicallywidespread, with more states,counties, and cities experiencing population gains.This paper examines populationgrowth during the 1990s for a variety of geographiclevels, including regions, divisions,states, metropolitan areas, counties and large cities.It then compares growth rates forthe 1990s with earlier decades to provide a historicalcontext to present-day trends inpopulation growth and decline. Finally, it discusses howdifferential population growthin recent decades has resulted in a new form of populationdistribution in the US.     

Gay Male Academics in UK Business and Management Schools: Negotiating Heteronormativities in Everyday Work Life

This paper contributes to a neglected topic area about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people's employment experiences in UK business and management schools. Drawing on queer theory to problematize essentialist notions of sexuality, we explore how gay male academics negotiate and challenge discourses of heteronormativity within different work contexts. Using in‐depth interview data, the paper shows that gay male academics are continually constrained by heteronormativity in constructing viable subject positions as ‘normal’, often having to reproduce heteronormative values that squeeze opportunities for generating non‐heteronormative ‘queer’ sexualities, identities and selves. Constructing a presence as an openly gay academic can invoke another binary through which identities are (re)constructed: as either ‘gay’ (a cleaned up version of gay male sexuality that sustains a heteronormative moral order) or ‘queer’ (cast as radical, disruptive and sexually promiscuous). Data also reveal how gay men challenge organizational heteronormativities through teaching and research activities, producing reverse discourses and creating alternative knowledge/power regimes, despite institutional barriers and risks of perpetuating heteronormative binaries and constructs. Study findings call for pedagogical and research practices that ‘queer’ (rupture, destabilize, disrupt) management knowledge and the heterosexual/homosexual binary, enabling non‐heteronormative voices, perspectives, identities and ways of relating to emerge in queer(er) business and management schools.