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This study examined the feasibility of implementing an organizational intervention to improve worker safety, health, and well-being in a Chilean transportation company. The project brought workers, supervisors, and leaders together to identify concerns and develop sustainable solutions to improve working conditions. Rather than relying exclusively on outside consultants, the intervention provided guidance to the company as it developed the internal skills, teams, and processes needed to develop a sustained capacity to improve working conditions. Because this intervention was implemented during social and political unrest in Chile and the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers also noted how capacity-building approaches can help companies become more adaptable and responsive to worker and productivity concerns during periods of disruption.

This study examined how working conditions shaped the safety, health, and well-being of professional drivers in a Chilean transportation company. Researchers used interviews and focus groups with drivers, supervisors, union representatives, safety staff, and company leaders to understand how scheduling, communication, and work organization affected drivers’ health and safety. The study showed how structured input from workers and managers can reveal specific pathways linking working conditions to health and safety risks in a particular workplace. These insights informed the design of a targeted organizational intervention to improve worker safety, health, and well-being, guided by information from workers and managers about their working conditions.

The high cost of teacher turnover permeates the entire American K-12 public education system. As a result of a lack of support, lack of development opportunities and uncertain pathways for career advancement, too often teachers and school leaders leave the schools and school systems that need them the most. It is within this context that the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) developed at KIPP Philadelphia Schools (KPS) in 2010 as a way to strategically cultivate future leaders for a growing portfolio of schools. Originally conceived of as an internal leadership development opportunity for teacher leaders, the ELP is now approaching the end of its first pilot year as a leadership learning and development program for 12 future leaders from KPS and other charter, district, and independent religious-affiliated schools. Through a generous grant from the Philadelphia Growth Fund, I was able to develop an expanded version of the ELP as the focus of my Strategic Project. My role as Leadership Development Fellow at KIPP Philadelphia Schools (October 2012-April 2013) was to expand the ELP to include both KIPP and (for the first time) non-KIPP teacher leaders, reconsider the pedagogical approach and reconfigure the curricular design to meet the needs of this new partnership, and to make the changes I thought were necessary based on best practices in the field of Adult Development and Learning. As such, the central focus of the ELP shifted from the purely technical aspects of management and leadership, to an adaptive and developmental approach of leadership development, specifically with regards to teacher leadership as a stepping stone to school leadership. This approach, I believe, more purposefully prepares future leaders for the complex demands of leadership by tuning in to the specific ways individuals make meaning of their leadership experience. Concretely, this shift expanded the scope of leadership learning from a managerial and task-oriented approach to one more focused on the development of emerging leaders by understanding the connections they make between values, beliefs and action as they make meaning of their individual leadership journeys. Central to the new format of the ELP are key design changes, informed by best practices in leadership development programming, and through the lens of adult development. Also informed by the KIPP Leadership Competency Model, conceived of by the KIPP School Leadership Team based at the KIPP Foundation, the ELP provides the opportunity for teacher leaders to come together once a month for 22 hours of professional development across a school year. Each ELP participant develops a Leadership Learning Action Plan which informs an Action Research Project at each of the participants’ school sites. Here, participants are able to practice their leadership in action while simultaneously making an impact on their school community. Small groups work within the broader ELP cohort to provide necessary and supportive feedback as projects unfold, while also serving as critical friends to one another across a wide range of schools. Finally, Intersession Coaching provides the “connective tissue” for the ELP by creating a space for participants to apply their new skills to their individual school contexts. Taken together, these components have coalesced into the first of its kind leadership development experience led by a charter network and also open to ALL teacher leaders in Philadelphia. Due to its initial success, the program will likely expand to reach three times as many teacher leaders in the next school year, building upon key learnings from this pilot year and continually improving with each ELP cohort by incorporating feedback from all stakeholders as well as by following the leadership progression and impact of participants over time.

Governments around the world are developing digital sovereignty strategies to reduce their dependence on foreign technology providers and reassert control over their digital infrastructures. In the European Union, this has resulted in a number of regulations – including the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, the AI Act, and related initiatives – that aim to reduce Europe’s reliance on US cloud hyperscalers while developing domestic alternatives. This article asks how digital sovereignty rules shape states’ bargaining with tech giants and what these rules tell us about these firms’ infrastructural power. Theoretically, it proposes an updated version of the Obsolescing Bargaining Model (OBM) for digital infrastructures, which analyses whether there are analogies between the expansion of US oil companies in the 1970s and today’s bargaining between EU governments and US hyperscalers. Empirically, it traces the expansion of four hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud – across Europe between 2018-2026, combining firm-level data on data centre investments with text-as-data analysis on earning calls and annual filings to capture how firms adapt and respond to increased regulatory pressure. Findings show that digital sovereignty rules have so far had limited impact on hyperscalers’ expansion. This is due to factors such as enduring power asymmetries between governments and US hyperscalers, a lack of coordination among governments themselves, and the intrinsic limits of regulatory instruments that discipline firm behaviour but do not govern market access. The article contributes to existing debates on the structural power of big tech companies, the geoeconomics of digital infrastructures, and the interaction of regulation and industrial policy to shape firm-government relations.

Serving approximately 125,000 students, Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public School System, like many urban systems, has undergone frequent and relatively rapid leadership transitions, filling the system with partially implemented initiatives that are often misunderstood. After the County Executive appointed a new Board of Education Chair, Vice Chair, and Chief Executive Officer of Schools in 2014, the CEO began assembling a team to set the district on a path to improve practice and create better opportunities for everyone to learn in the system. During this transition, which opened space for creativity and opportunity, I worked in the county as a resident in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Doctor of Education Leadership Program. My task was to demonstrate that the system had the tools and resources it needed to drive a robust improvement and organizational learning strategy that could significantly impact the instructional and professional culture in Prince George’s County. While navigating the political dynamics arising as people entered and left the organization, I worked to implement a two-pronged theory of action to provide the system with a glimpse of what instructional improvement could be in Prince George’s County. After establishing a network of schools that used the Data Wise Improvement Process to drive learning in schools that were once deemed the lowest performing in the county, network leaders leveraged this proof point to highlight the impact that focused data use based on inquiry and collaboration had on the instructional core. As the school year progressed and the highest-ranking leaders in the district fleshed out the organizational structure, they searched for an approach to school improvement that could drive systemic learning: the Priority Schools Network’s use of Data Wise became a significant point of interest for district leadership. A couple key takeaways from this strategic project are informative for all school systems and have special implications for the largest ones. Paring back and equipping schools with a process to arrive at a single, school-wide, high leverage instructional focus, combined with an opportunity to share learning across schools, can rid schools and school leaders of the paralysis that results from the expectation that schools serve multiple uncoordinated aims.