A Study of Espoused Corporate Cultural Factors and Their Relationship with Business Success

Reshoring of manufacturing companies is vital to the United States’ economy. Although one may assume that all of the business reshored will be large companies, statistics show that small businesses comprise the largest share of the U.S. economy. Small businesses make up 99.7% employer firms. Yet, 80% of entrepreneurs and small businesses who start will fail within the first 18 months. This study defines the key success variables of the espoused culture for selected Fortune 500 companies that could be used by entrepreneurs and small businesses to emulate their continued successes. The method to define the key success variables was to define the espoused culture of manufacturing companies with Standard Industrial Classification major group codes 29 (Petroleum Refining and Related Industries), 35 (Industrial and Commercial Machinery and Computer Equipment), and 37 (Transportation Equipment). Espoused culture is a company’s vision, mission, and values. Forty percent of the companies had a mission statement and 65% had a vision statement, 92.5% had values listed on their company’s website. Companies that have a published mission had an increase in revenue and profit by 5.5% and 11.8%, respectively. Companies that have published core values had an increase in revenue and profit by 37.9% and 48.8%, respectively. Companies that have a published vision had an increase in revenue and profit by 39.3 and 23.3%, respectively. The variables determine correlation of employee indicators and financial performance. The regression analysis showed variables that would be best at predicting profit and revenue. These five variables were Customer Focus; Benefits and People; External Focus and Shareholders; Value, Financial, and Profits; and lastly Innovations, Learning, and Technologies. From the espoused culture, culture types defined as Clan, Adhocracy, Market, or Hierarchy were identified. Any mix of culture can have success in revenue and profit. Yet, not all culture types lead to success in employee morale. From the culture analysis, companies that had a Market culture had the lowest leadership measurement and employee indicators. A Clan blend culture had the highest employee morale and leadership measurement. This research has discovered the impact of many variables and their correlation to company success

Models of classroom assessment for course-based research experiences

Course-based research pedagogy involves positioning students as contributors to authentic research projects as part of an engaging educational experience that promotes their learning and persistence in science. To develop a model for assessing and grading students engaged in this type of learning experience, the assessment aims and practices of a community of experienced course-based research instructors were collected and analyzed. This approach defines four aims of course-based research assessment—(1) Assessing Laboratory Work and Scientific Thinking; (2) Evaluating Mastery of Concepts, Quantitative Thinking and Skills; (3) Appraising Forms of Scientific Communication; and (4) Metacognition of Learning—along with a set of practices for each aim. These aims and practices of assessment were then integrated with previously developed models of course-based research instruction to reveal an assessment program in which instructors provide extensive feedback to support productive student engagement in research while grading those aspects of research that are necessary for the student to succeed. Assessment conducted in this way delicately balances the need to facilitate students’ ongoing research with the requirement of a final grade without undercutting the important aims of a CRE education

Racism, Health Status, and Birth Outcomes: Results of a Participatory Community-Based Intervention and Health Survey

Many community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships address social determinants of health as a central consideration. However, research studies that explicitly address racism are scarce in the CBPR literature, and there is a dearth of available community-generated data to empirically examine how racism influences health disparities at the local level. In this paper, we provide results of a cross-sectional, population-based health survey conducted in the urban areas of Genesee and Saginaw Counties in Michigan to assess how a sustained community intervention to reduce racism and infant mortality influenced knowledge, beliefs, and experiences of racism and to explore how perceived racism is associated with self-rated health and birth outcomes. We used ANOVA and regression models to compare the responses of intervention participants and non-participants as well as African Americans and European Americans (N = 629). We found that intervention participants reported greater acknowledgment of the enduring and differential impact of racism in comparison to the non-intervention participants. Moreover, survey analyses revealed that racism was associated with health in the following ways: (1) experiences of racial discrimination predicted self-rated physical health, mental health, and smoking status; (2) perceived racism against one’s racial group predicted lower self-rated physical health; and (3) emotional responses to racism-related experiences were marginally associated with lower birth-weight births in the study sample. Our study bolsters the published findings on perceived racism and health outcomes and highlights the usefulness of CBPR and community surveys to empirically investigate racism as a social determinant of health