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The purpose is to offer a critique of the process of decision-making by top university administrators and to analyze how their decisions imposed their preferences and expanded administrative control.

In the fall of 2021, the top administrators at Boston-based Northeastern University required that all members of the university community return to fully on-campus face-to-face work. That decision involved a return to what was labeled “normal operations” and followed a year-and-a-half of adjustments to the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on that case example, the analysis then ranges backward and forward in time. Other decisions – by Northeastern University leaders as well as leaders at other schools – are considered as well.

Leaders impose labels on complex contingencies as a way of constructing meaning. No label is objectively true or indisputable. In the hands of individuals who possess hierarchical power and authority, the application of a label such as “new normal” represents an exercise of power. Through an exploration and analysis of the underlying, unspoken, assumptions behind the application of the “new normal” label, the article suggests how the interests of university leaders were being advanced.

Because of its reliance on labeling, the paper focuses mainly on the words of administrators – at Northeastern University and elsewhere – that are called upon to explain/justify decisions. The multiplicity of interests forwarded by the “new normal” label are explored. No attempt is made – nor would it be possible – to understand what was in the hearts and minds of these administrators.

The article makes a case that any and all pronouncements of leaders should be understood as assertions of power and statements of interests. The practical impact is to suggest a critical analysis to be applied to all such pronouncements.

The approach taken in this article is situated within post-modernist analysis that critiques dominant narratives, disputes epistemological certainty and ontological objectivity and takes cognizance of coded messages contained in language.

Everyone has been through a traumatic period of time with the pandemic. The author has focused on a specific community – university administrators and tenure/tenure track faculty – as a window to help explain how decision-makers shaped their response. The author wants to emphasize the labels imposed by leaders and the assumptions behind the application of those labels.

Managing global change is one of the key competencies demanded of global leaders and one of the main challenges they face, according to some scholars. However, leading change in the global context is one of the most under-researched areas of global leadership. This conceptual chapter first contrasts the organizational development and organization change fields and then proposes a hybrid approach termed global strategic change. Global strategies require new patterns of employee behavior and an enhanced appreciation of the dynamics of intercultural change in which two or more national cultures are involved. Understanding these demands on employee behavior will aid managers in pursuing their globalization efforts. Culture is conceived as a boundary condition, and cultural values that might impact each stage in the change process are identified. Two case studies illustrate successful global strategic change by expert global leaders who were not intimidated by cultural stereotypes. Thoughtful executives can create strategic performance improvements by avoiding being trapped or intimidated by a simplistic interpretation of cultural constraints.

Challenges the popular explanation for Enron's failure as being simply about financial reporting or criminal behavior and offers a more subtle and complex explanation.

With a framework developed from the literature on cults and cult behavior as well as secondary research, the authors develop the perspective that Enron's senior leaders created an organization that encouraged executives to act in ways that were criminal. Five characteristics of cults: persuasion, isolation, elitism, charismatic (and dogmatic) leadership and wealth not benefiting group members were found to apply.

The major differences between a high performance organization and a cult were transparency, accountability and dialogue.

It highlights the small difference between a high performance culture and a cult and raises “red flags” or warning signs for executives to be aware of. Executives looking for long‐term outstanding performance through high levels of social cohesion and strong behavioral norms need to be aware of the cult trap.

There are important management lessons from the Enron story that transcend accounting and financial reporting techniques and lessons beyond the illegal behaviors. It provides an understanding of how an organization's culture and systems can lead to cult‐like behavior and encourage employees to act in illegal ways.

The failure rate of TQM interventions exceeds 75 per cent. Contends that it is missteps in the implementation of TQM – and other associated change efforts such as process re‐engineering – that undermine the likelihood that the intervention will contribute in a significant and lasting way to the competitive effectiveness of the organization. Using three case examples of TQM efforts, suggests that the implementation process must succeed in unhooking the organization from its traditional hierarchical and functional moorings and reattach it to horizontal, cross‐functional processes. To do this, the intervention process must address six distinct but interconnected stages of unhooking and reattachment and do so in a logical, sequential way.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how popular culture in general and movies in particular both reflected and shaped public attitudes to newly emerging corporate giants in the 1950s; to demonstrate how that view was itself shaped by political context and prevailing American ideology.

The paper rests on a content analysis of 11 corporate films released in the USA between 1954 and 1960.

Studying corporate movies during the 1950s lends an appreciation of the salience of understanding the political/cultural context of business history. The movies also reflected Cold War realities: the constraints imposed by an anti‐communist blacklist, and the belief – hope, perhaps – that capitalist corporations would stand as a bulwark against the alien ideology of Communism.

The films studied are all US‐made. Studying films from later decades might also lend additional perspective.

The paper demonstrates the value of considering political context and ideology in understanding business history.

This paper seeks to add historical perspective to the contemporary debate concerning the efficacy of executive bonuses. That debate has become particularly significant in the USA as a result of the recent economic collapse and the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, turning the government – at least temporarily – into a shareholder of numerous companies.

The article is primarily an intellectual history of an idea: that executive bonuses are required to achieve top performance. The main primary source is two sets of articles from the Harvard Business Review from the 1930s and the 1950s. These are supplemented by other primarily and secondary material.

Arch Patton, a McKinsey Consultant and the most published author in the Harvard Business Review during the 1950s, constructed a defense of executive bonuses based on ideology rather than empirical evidence.

Constituents of the current debate on executive bonuses should be aware of the degree to which statements of support for efficacy are often presented as universally and exclusively correct which may result in distortion and concealment of real interests.

Despite the ubiquity of executive bonuses, no study has looked at the historical roots of the debate. Agency theory, which is presented as a rational and legitimate argument in favor of such bonuses, fails to address the historical context in which bonuses actually took root in corporate America.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the intra‐firm dynamics of business model enactment, paying particular attention to the social context in which that enactment occurs.

The article develops its hypotheses from qualitative case studies. In particular, the article presents two exploratory cases designed to generate questions and hypotheses.

The article generates two hypotheses: first, the social capital of a firm enhances its capacity to enact its intra‐firm business model; and second, when business model redesign alters the organizational location in which activities and transactions are performed, social capital will become especially salient.

Exploratory research is both suggestive and limited. Additional descriptive and explanatory research will more fully explore the phenomenon of the role of social capital in enacted business model design, as well as present data bearing on cause‐effect relationships.

For the manager, the implication of the research relates especially to building an enactment capacity for the firm's business model; attention to social relationships and investment in social capital will enhance a firm's enactment capacity.

The article is the first to consider the intra‐firm dynamics of business model design and to integrate the concept of social capital into an understanding of design enactment.

The purpose of this article is to present qualitative research of the past organizational crisis at Mississippi Chemical Corporation that the authors use to theorize a typology of organizational crisis from the leadership perspective.

The authors combined ANTi-microhistory approach and staff ride research design to re-enact the sensemaking of the company’s former crisis leaders and elicit their retrospective oral accounts. A long interview format was used to interview the crisis leaders.

The authors found that the former crisis leaders not only conceptualized organizational crisis conventionally as an event or as a process but also that they engaged in the denial of the crisis to guard the company’s reputation and competed with their claims against the stakeholder claims about the ways how the crisis was to be managed.

Based on the paper’s findings, the authors proposed an original typology of organizational crisis.

This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.