With Good Reason

Has the American dream evolved from 1950s suburbia to “vulgaria” today?  Urban Planning Professor Paul Knox (Virginia Tech) explores conspicuous consumption and communities of gigantic houses in contemporary upper-middle class suburbia.   His new book is Metroburbia, USA.  Also: While owning a home is still part of the great American dream, most of us are novices [...]

Batten Institute Director Mike Lenox (University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business) and internationally-renowned ethicist Ed Freeman (Batten Institute) engage in a lively discussion about the corporate world’s recent and increasing interest in sustainability. How, they ask, can businesses move beyond the “low-hanging fruit” of the green movement, taking major strides toward making service and [...]

On the 12th of August 1942, Lt. Col. Frank Goettge and 24 Marines under his command landed in the dark on the wrong beach on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and came under withering fire from Japanese soldiers, killing Goettge and 21 of his men.  Sixty-six years later, Cliff and Donna Boyd (Radford University) and [...]

Best-selling business writer Jim Collins (Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business) believes the special factors that lie at the heart of rare and truly great businesses are the same factors that make for the most successful organizations in the non-profit world—talented directors skilled at recruiting excellent staff who work for [...]

In Virginia, oysters have influenced our history, our industry, our culture and, of course, our eating habits.  When Captain John Smith sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, he said oysters were so plentiful “they lay thick as stones.” By the 1980s, overharvesting, disease and pollution had reduced the number of oysters to just one percent of [...]

Melanie Marks (Longwood University) has written a textbook “Chocolate Economics” to teach 2nd & 3rd graders about everyday finance. Also: Many of us struggle to balance our monthly budgets—car payments, rent or mortgage, new clothes, restaurants all can leave some of us desperately waiting for our next paycheck. But imagine you had just two dollars [...]

Film maker Sonali Gulati (Virginia Commonwealth University) used to spot telemarketers by the way they mispronounced her Indian name. But when they started to get the name right, she knew something was up. American companies have outsourced telemarketing and customer service jobs to India where workers compete for jobs at giant call centers. Gulati visited [...]

In the midst of America’s mortgage meltdown, black and hispanic homeowners are taking especially hard hits.  Business Professor Greg Fairchild (Batten Institute) says the lack of a down payment is the biggest obstacle for these communities, which historically have only a small fraction of the family wealth available to white households. Also featured: Peter Rodriguez (Batten Institute) is an [...]

Many companies are now hiring “actors” to strike up conversations with unsuspecting customers in order to convince people to buy their products according to Vince Magnini (Longwood University). This growing use of undercover sales agents along with ‘product placement’ in the movies and television raises ethical and legal questions. Also: We think of the Holidays as a [...]

Exactly 100 years ago, US markets went haywire, liquidity vanished, and investors panicked. Sean Carr and Robert Bruner (University of Virginia) share lessons from their new book, “The Panic of 1907.” Also Featured: We usually think of low voter turnout as a problem to be corrected: How can we live in a participatory democracy if [...]