John M. Amis – författare

The 2010 national midterm elections produced Republican majorities in Tennessee for the first time since Reconstruction. In the wake of that election, leaders of the Shelby County Schools (SCS) school district began legislative maneuvering to advance a long-cherished goal: granting their schools “special school district” status—a move that would permanently sever the relationship between the SCS and the other school district in the county, Memphis City Schools (MCS). Leaders of MCS realized this action would deprive it of funding from a significant part of the county’s tax base. So they made a stunning move of their own: they renounced the MCS charter. Ironically, under Tennessee law this action required SCS to take over the running of Memphis’s schools; SCS would actually be forced to merge with MCS. Thus began the largest school district consolidation in the history of the United States.Race, Economics, and the Politics of Educational Change progresses through nine chapters that examine the MCS/SCS merger from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Historical, sociological, political, legal, institutional, urban planning, media studies, and educational analyses of the consolidation render John M. Amis and Paul M. Wright’s volume a valuable tool for researchers, students, policy-makers and educators alike. The investigations in this work reveal deeply entrenched inequalities that have thwarted education, particularly for poor minority students, throughout the region’s history. This text presents insight into factors that have shaped not just the school system in Shelby County, but similar systems across the United States. A model for other urban areas that face similar challenges, this volume will serve as a significant resource for those seeking to understand the trajectory of large-scale educational transformations.

As organizational scholars, we are accustomed to using theoretical lenses to understand organizational practices and outcomes. That is, we conceptualize what people do, feel and think in their everyday organizational interactions through the use of theoretical language and models to uncover individual and/or social antecedents and outcomes. We tend to ignore, however, how our own day-to-day work as scholars - doing research - is subjected to the same pressures, affected by similar factors, and should be accounted for through similar modes of analyses. We treat our studies and theories as solid anchor points and as objective truths rather than as constructions embedded within individual, organizational, field and societal contexts. This volume is a must read for all researchers interested in understanding our own craft. Building on established traditions in the sociology of knowledge, we direct a reflective and critical gaze towards the structures, practices and meaning systems that ground and shape how we produce and consume managerial knowledge and organization theory. The volume includes both empirically-based papers and reflective essays that explore theoretical concepts and analytical reasoning to explain, critique and advance the ways in which we write about, produce, and consume theory.

Estimated to have an annual worth of US$24.8 billion dollars, the global sport sponsorship industry has become of vital importance to anybody interested in understanding the sport-commerce nexus. Global Sport Sponsorship is the first text to provide a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary analysis of this industry. Leading scholars from marketing, management, sociology, cultural studies, tourism, and gender studies address issues central to current debates in each of these disciplines. Topics covered include the strategic nature of global sport sponsorship; the role of celebrities in global advertising; controversies surrounding conventional norms of what constitutes 'acceptable' sponsorship; the utilization of sponsorship in the construction of global alliances; using sponsorship to negotiate local markets and the development of effective methods of evaluation. Global Sport Sponsorship is essential reading for anyone involved in the practice or academic study of one of the world's largest industries.