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The impacts of employment in the coal industry remain controversial. Few studies have investigated these impacts over the decade of the great recession and in light of the nation's changing energy economy. We bring together two long-standing rural sociological traditions to address debates framed at the national level and for Appalachian communities facing the throes of transition from the coal industry. Building from rural sociology's “poverty and place” tradition and from natural resources sociology, we examine the relationship between coal employment and communities’ economic well-being as indicated by poverty, household income, and unemployment. The study spans U.S. and Appalachian counties from 1990 to 2010. U.S. counties with greater coal employment in 1990 had lower income and higher poverty in 2000. Overall, however, coal employment's effect is mixed in the 1990–2000 decade. By contrast, for the recent 2000–2010 decade, coal employment is positively associated with indicators of well-being. In Appalachia, fewer employment alternatives outside mining are related to higher well-being. Our findings extend the poverty and place literature and the natural resources literature and underscore why a just transition away from coal should focus on moving communities toward sectors offering better future livelihoods.

Poverty, Place, and Coal Employment across Appalachia and the United States in a New Economic Era

Clusters and cluster policy have become a dominant paradigm in the world of both economic development theory and practice. Cluster theory suggests that firms that are part of a geographically defined cluster benefit from being part of that cluster and that these benefits result in growth in economic activity and output for the region. From here it is only a short step to argue that economic development practitioners can devise policies that can facilitate cluster development through various forms of intervention. Yet despite the large amount of writing on clusters, there is substantial vagueness and ambiguity about the concept itself as well as how clusters work to bring about economic growth and whether policies put in place to build or strengthen clusters actually achieve the desired result. In this article, the authors conduct a review of literature related to clusters to try to set forth what we know and do not know about clusters, what remains uncertain, and what the implications are for economic dev...

Clusters and Cluster-Based Development Policy:

This paper investigates the role of geography in high-tech employment growth across U.S. counties. The geographic dimensions examined include industry cluster effects, urbanization effects, proximity to a research university, and proximity in the urban hierarchy. Growth is assessed for overall high-tech employment and for employment in various high-tech sub-sectors. Econometric analyses are conducted separately for samples of metropolitan and non metropolitan counties. Among our primary findings, we do not find evidence of positive localization or within-industry cluster growth effects, generally finding negative growth effects. We instead find evidence of positive urbanization effects and growth penalties for greater distances from larger urban areas. Universities also appear to play their primary role in creating human capital rather than knowledge spillovers for nearby firms. Quantile regression analysis confirms the absence of within-industry cluster effects and importance of human capital for counties with fast growth in high-tech industries.

Geography and High-Tech Employment Growth in U.S. Counties

This paper investigates the role of geography in high-tech employment growth across U.S. counties. The geographic dimensions examined include industry cluster effects, urbanization effects, proximity to a research university, and proximity in the urban hierarchy. Growth is assessed for overall high-tech employment and for employment in various high-tech sub-sectors. Econometric analyses are conducted separately for samples of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. Among our primary findings, we do not find evidence of positive localization or within-industry cluster growth effects, generally finding negative growth effects. We instead find evidence of positive urbanization effects and growth penalties for greater distances from larger urban areas. Universities also appear to play their primary role in creating human capital rather than knowledge spillovers for nearby firms. Quantile regression analysis confirms the absence of within-industry cluster effects and importance of human capital for counties with fast growth in high-tech industries.

/pdf/geography-and-high-tech-employment-growth-in-us-counties-5gcsf794jl.pdf

Geography and High-Tech Employment Growth in US Counties

Learning in cooperation and/or collaboration with others is embedded in many higher education settings. Research on learning communities of various types often focuses on academic performance and pedagogical and curriculum enhancements. Our intent was to explore the cultural aspects of peer-to-peer collaboration. We apply the analytic lens of ritual to understand how engineering majors manage this “betwixt and between” phase of their lives prior to graduation. Our ethnographic and survey data go beyond confirming the emergence of “communitas” (an egalitarian and collaborative community spirit) among these undergraduates, to examine its value, how it works, and why it is sustained. We argue that students learn and adopt various work strategies, many of which are collaborative efforts, in response to the engineering school's organizational culture. This research raises options for new collaborations to transform the organizational culture while enhancing student performance and the college experience.

Ritual as Work Strategy: A Window into Organizational Culture

The purpose of this paper is to apply a reflective theory of development for entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Muscle Shoals region of northern Alabama. The theory provides guidance for practitioners and policymakers interested in developing entrepreneurial ecosystems.,The theory offers five propositions, which are illustrated and applied in the case study. The propositions include the need for civic leaders recognizing local talent; support networks for entrepreneurs; a quality, connected place; activities designed to increase interactivity for entrepreneurs within the ecosystem; five distinct phases producing replicable, scalable and sustainable projects; and universities providing platforms upon which the ecosystems can develop.,Application of the proposed theory is transforming the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Muscle Shoals region. In just four years, the project has produced over 30 initiatives and events, precipitously increased student participation in entrepreneurial ventures and raised over $1m.,The theory and its application developed from a collaboration between the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue University and the Institute for Innovation and Economic Development at the University of North Alabama. This collaboration is replicable, scalable and sustainable, and is a model for university-led entrepreneurial ecosystem development and transformation.

Shoals Shift Project: an ecosystem transformation success story

Strategic Doing for Community Development

Liz Nilsen is a Senior Advisor to the Purdue Center for Regional Development. She was previously Senior Program Officer at VentureWell, where she provided leadership to the Epicenter Pathways to Innovation initiative, an effort to engage with a cohort of colleges and universities to fully embed innovation and entrepreneurship in undergraduate engineering education. She previously led several other STEM initiatives, including those associated with Penn State and Virginia Tech. She earned her BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Northeastern University.

/pdf/going-beyond-what-should-we-do-an-approach-to-implementation-27y161cbo5.pdf

Going Beyond "What Should We Do?": An Approach to Implementation of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Curriculum

This full paper in the research-to-practice category describes a departmental structure for change organized and executed as part of a REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The recent engineering education literature provides many conceptual frameworks for thinking about change in academic organizations, but comparatively few case studies of how departmental cultural change is operationalized both inside and beyond the classroom. Our approach to change was to organize “grassroots teams” of students, faculty, and staff to tackle problems and challenges of recognized importance to the department. This paper details a number of key features of these grassroots teams, including: membership, training, leadership, problem scoping, facilitation, goal setting, formative and summative evaluations, and the outcomes of the teams work. The grassroots teams were organized according to several operating principles: (1) optimal team size is 6-8 people, and optimal project duration is around one semester; (2) to the extent possible, each team should have students, faculty, and staff representation; (3) teams generally follow our change model to complete their work; (4) all teams should strive for equity of voice, meaning that student and staff voices are equal to faculty voices; (5) the changes to be made did not require permission (i.e., approval from a curriculum committee or other formal entity; or the team members implicitly already had permission for change as a result of their job role); and (6) the teams should focus on student outcomes we care about. Our results refined our understanding of how change happens (or in some cases, does not happen) in our organization, with fascinating implications for ongoing and future efforts. The existence of these teams, and their mission around progressive change in the department, operated in tension with the prevailing attitudes about change in the department (“we tried that before, and it didn’t work”). Not every change effort was successful. The feedback from participants was nearly unanimous. They appreciated the structured and well-scoped nature of the projects. They especially welcomed the process we developed to facilitate change, which was very different from the usual committee structures in which they were used to working. And they felt excited to see that change was possible. Our specific grassroots team implementation will undoubtedly not work in all academic environments. Local context matters and some changes to our approach will be appropriate in each different setting. However, we believe the approach outlined in this paper provides a flexible platform on which to build grassroots teams in other units of our university or at other institutions.

Grassroots teams for academic departments: a new way to understand culture and change

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