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To analyze the August 2016 court decision in Sivolella v. AXA Equitable Life Ins. Co. and its implications for cases concerning mutual fund advisory fees under Section 36(b) of the of the Investment Company Act of 1940.

Discusses Section 36(b), the plaintiffs’ arguments and the judge’s decision in favor of the mutual fund adviser. Provides insights from the judge’s analysis of the advisory fees at issue, including the independence of the mutual fund board and quality of the annual advisory contract renewal process, whether the language of the advisory and subadvisory agreements fully reflects the nature and extent of services provided, the board’s reliance on outside experts and advisers when considering the advisers’ fees and services, and continuous improvements in the boards’ annual advisory contract renewal process.

AXA was a decisive victory for the adviser, and serves as a reminder to boards and advisers alike that a diligent focus on board process and independence can pay twofold after litigation is filed.

Boards and advisers should consider AXA’s implications, and whether the decision raises issues that should be reviewed by independent counsel with experience advising funds and advisers with respect to the Investment Company Act.

Practical guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

“Affairs of honor,” which were contests between gentlemen of the 18th and 19th centuries, often ended with physical violence in the form of dueling. Such was the case in the notable showdown between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1801. These affairs were products of the code di duello, an intricate series of social rules and expectations through which adversaries negotiated their dispute. In this article, we examine the similarities between such “affairs” and the modern issue of “cyberbullying.” We compare disputes conducted under the code di duello to those which regularly occur in modern adolescents’ on-line lives while also considering the relevance of studying this topic in social studies classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to address an important gap in the literature by investigating the relationship between organizational climate and performance in small businesses.

Data were collected from 100 retail pharmacies in Sydney, Australia where a manager and up to three staff members and three buying customers were interviewed in each pharmacy.

Supportive climates tend to be associated with higher organizational performance (i.e. financial performance, staff satisfaction, customer satisfaction) in small retail pharmacies, and may reduce staff turnover.

The results suggest that managers should consider creating warm and supportive organizational climates to enhance business performance, employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and increase employee tenure.

This paper is among the first to empirically establish a direct link between organizational climate and the performance of small businesses, in particular in retail pharmacies. Both financial and non‐financial measures of performance confirm reports based on larger firms that performance is enhanced in the presence of more supportive organizational climates. A further benefit of supportive climates, namely lower staff turnover in small businesses, was also evident.

Studies on entrepreneurship in public agencies suggest that managing for innovation may increase organizational performance. These studies, however, do not take into consideration the processes of opportunity identification. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to, first, situate the concept of opportunity identification within the broader research on public sector entrepreneurship, and second, to explore the relationship between managerial empowerment practices and employee alertness to new opportunities.

This paper uses aggregated data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey – an annual survey of the US Federal employees – to examine the relationship between managerial empowerment practices and employee alertness. The analysis employs a fixed-effects regression to model each panel of the US Federal agencies, from 2011 to 2017.

The results indicate that managerial empowerment practices have a clear correlation to employee alertness and are substantively different from empowerment practice’s relationship to “innovation” – an outcome of entrepreneurship. These findings suggest that scholarship should include opportunity identification as a moderating variable in future studies on public sector entrepreneurship.

The empirical analysis should be viewed as a novel approach to alertness in order to demonstrate the need to include opportunity identification processes in studies on managing for public sector entrepreneurship. Consequently, the results are not generalizable to all public agencies.

This paper highlights processes of entrepreneurial opportunity identification concerning management practices in the public sector, which scholarship has traditionally ignored.

Purpose – This chapter reflects upon my experiences as a PhD researcher examining the portrayal of multiculturalism in contemporary Welsh- and English-language fiction about Wales. It discusses my emotions regarding my identities as a second-language Welsh speaker and as an early career researcher, and how they affected my participation in this field.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on my PhD research, which examined how different cultural groups were portrayed in fiction as ‘others’ due to Wales’s complex linguistic and cultural position. This involved analysing contextual research about multiculturalism in Wales to explore discourses of belonging and alienation. This chapter reflects upon my emotional responses to the field as a Welsh speaker and new academic, and how this in turn affected my research.

Findings – Embracing my changing relationship with my Welsh-speaking identity, I reflect on how my research touched upon contradictory feelings I had about the Welsh language and Welshness. I discuss the effects my changing feelings over time about linguistic hybridity, and my growing confidence as a young academic, had on my engagement with different texts and writers. This is discussed in light of the relationships I was able to form with some creative authors and academics in Wales’s close-knit literary and scholarly society.

Originality/Value – This chapter argues that confronting their own emotional engagements with their research topics enables researchers to better understand why certain subjects are so contested. It can also prepare researchers to communicate their ideas effectively in the difficult debates that arise around such subjects.

While scholars discuss the theory of “Business Ethics,” students grapple with applying those theories to hypothetical case studies and business people struggle to live business ethics in practice. Many fail, casting large and ominous shadows. We are inundated with their stories. We need to hear more often stories of those who have succeeded and why their examples are important to the field of Business Ethics.

This chapter, after providing a brief overview of the differing uses of the term, Business Ethics, expands upon the metaphor of “ethical space” as the eye of a moral hurricane, provides diagrams illustrating the formation of ethical space in a business behavioral context, applies those diagrams to the examples of Andersen and Feuerstein as moral exemplars, discusses ways to mitigate the shadows that eclipsed their example, and suggests ways to enlarge corporate ethical space.

Ethics is a habit learned through mentoring and developed through practice. In a world of conflicting influences, we each carve out our own ethical space that can serve as an example to others as they face their own individual ethical challenges, but at the corporate level, a moral exemplar will inform the larger corporate ethical space only when the leadership of the corporation consciously adopts and constantly reinforces the example of its moral exemplar.

This chapter uses the visual metaphor of the eye of a hurricane to discuss the formation and importance of ethical space to moral exemplars in a world of conflicting influences and moral pressures.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a leading global company used action‐learning based leadership development to accelerate strategic culture change.

It describes the need for change, and the methodology and approach by which the initiative, Impact, generated significant benefits.

The initiative led to financial benefit, as well as measurable gains in customer centricity, collaboration, and innovation. It was also a powerful experience for participants in their journey as commercial leaders.

Impact was created using comprehensive customer feedback and its delivery involved key customers.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in management research is still nascent and has primarily focused on content analyses of text data. Some method scholars have begun to discuss the potential benefits of far broader applications; however, these discussions have not led yet to a wave of corresponding AI applications by management researchers. This chapter explores the feasibility and the potential value of using AI for a very specific methodological task: the reliable and efficient capturing of higher-level psychological constructs in management research. It introduces the capturing of basic emotions and emotional authenticity of entrepreneurs based on their macro- and microfacial expressions during pitch presentations as an illustrative example of related AI opportunities and challenges. Thus, this chapter provides both motivation and guidance to management scholars for future applications of AI to advance management research.

The world of management and technology has become accustomed to the notion of “2.0” advancements and transformative innovations. Is the field of Change Management/Organizational Development itself in this story? Not enough! We re-examine the field’s foundational beliefs, practices, focus, research directions, and value add. We conclude that there is strong evidence from the front line and from an IBM Case Study that the field must “reboot” – to rethink our methods and frameworks; the role and skills of change leadership for the future; change practitioner capabilities for the future; the metrics needed to evaluate progress; and the knowledge exchange between Academe and practitioners.