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To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

This piece argues that television families’ shift away from the traditional nuclear family form is crucial to understand the relatively rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage in mainstream politics. Released in the early 2010s, The Americans focusses on a KGB-created family composed of two Soviet spies, total strangers who ultimately have two children to further their cover as an innocent American family running a DuPont Circle travel agency and living in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. Rather than being idealised or sought after, The Americans reveals that the nuclear family is legally, socially, and politically constructed, and, in the end, doomed to failure. Sex and love and even children are instrumentally manipulated on a regular basis to further political goals, transforming basic assumptions about how marriage and family life really work beyond the façade of suburban America. This opens space for consideration and acceptance of alternative family forms, including same-sex marriage.

This chapter explores the implications of patrimonial politics in the Dutch East India Company empire in the context of establishing a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. The Cape extended the reach of Company patrimonial networks with elite Company officials circulating throughout the Indian Ocean empire and consolidating their familial ties through marriage both within the colonies and in the United Provinces. These patrimonial networks extended to the Cape as elite Company officials created families locally or married Cape-born women. As the colony grew, the Company created a class of free-burghers some the wealthiest of whom were tied directly into elite Company patrimonial networks. But from the early eighteenth century onwards these elite Company networks came into conflict with the evolving free-burgher patrimonial networks with which they were in direct competition. This paper argues that local patrimonial networks can evolve in a settler colony that challenge the elite patrimonial networks of the imperial elite.

Based on a review of multiple literatures, a comprehensive content domain of essential intercultural competencies for effective global leaders is presented. This domain is then used to guide the development of the Global Competencies Inventory (GCI), a 160-item self-report measure that assesses the degree to which individuals possess the intercultural competencies that are associated with global leader effectiveness. Using sample sizes ranging from several hundred to nearly 9,000 subjects, evidence from several studies is presented showing the GCI to have convergent validity, predictive validity, and freedom from demographic and ethnic subgroup biases. Implications for theory and future research are also discussed.

Comparative organizational analysis once dominated American organizational sociology, grounded in rich case studies about organizational processes and outcomes. The Columbia school's approach to organizational research was exemplary in this regard. Following the publication of Robert K. Merton's (1940) essay, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” he attracted a group of talented doctoral students to his formal organizations seminar (Crothers, 1990), the core of whom would go on to write dissertations, books, and articles forming the substance of American organizational sociology in the decades to come. Among those students were Philip Selznick, Alvin Gouldner, Peter Blau, Seymour Martin Lipset, Rose Coser, and James Coleman. While their work varied greatly in substantive content, their studies shared a theoretical interest in explaining intra-organizational dynamics and the unexpected outcomes of bureaucratic administration. Organizations, they demonstrated, developed “lives of their own,” quite outside the intents of their founders (Haveman, 2009; refer, especially, Selznick, 1957). Organizations, in other words, were adaptive to the needs of their constituents, but adaptations did not always produce the intended results. One of the unintended consequences of organizational development was increasing variety in the kinds of organizations that emerged to meet particular societal goals or ends. Thus, an inherent focus of this early comparative research was the explanation of variety in organizational types, policies, and outcomes and an emphasis on the ways in which organizations diverged from ideal types.

Corporate governance has become a core topic in management research and business practice. Recent debates like – environmental responsibility, sustainability, ethics, corporate control, generation, protection and distribution of wealth, the role of the board and senior executives in setting standards for performance management, and stakeholder relationship management – have strong links to organisational trust. However, management literature has been relatively silent on how various corporate governance configurations and perspectives potentially shape trust relations within the organisation, especially in Africa. Thus, this chapter reviews corporate governance through the lens of the institutional logics perspective evident in western capitalism and develops a framework connecting various governance configurations to organisational trust. Doing so provides new directions for those seeking to develop further research in corporate governance, institutional logics and organisational trust.