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This study aims to explore a range of institutional, environmental and policy conditions that influence the creation of “bossless” or “flat” companies, i.e. firms with little or no formal hierarchy.

The author builds on the theory and evidence presented by Foss and Klein (2022) in their study of the costs and benefits of organizing without hierarchy. The author also draws on a variety of related theoretical insights and empirical evidence. The paper is exploratory and anecdotal though and is intended to motivate further research rather than provide a definitive account of bossless organizing.

The paper develops nine propositions. It suggests that high levels of economic freedom create maximum scope for entrepreneurs to experiment with different organizational forms (1). Likewise, a lack of economic freedom increases the scope for the government to experiment (2). Markets characterized by technological innovation and uncertainty are likely to discourage bossless organizing (3 and 4), while stagnating industries with major capital requirements are likely to encourage it (5). Labor market interventions that increase the cost of employment contracts sometimes encourage firms to flatten (6), but more generally, these interventions encourage expanding management layers (7). In environments with strong intellectual property (IP) laws, companies with more modular and knowledge-based work are more likely to flatten (8). The creation of low-hierarchy firms such as cooperatives is encouraged by public subsidies, access to cheap credit and preferential tax treatment (9).

Studies of bossless or flat firms focus almost exclusively on describing their internal organization and evaluating their performance; little attention is paid to the conditions that encourage or discourage the emergence of these firms. This paper focuses on the latter, with a view to encouraging more scholarly interest in this field.

Firm-specific human capital (FSHC) has been an integral part of the vocabulary in the strategy field. Many scholars argue that FSHC inhibits employee mobility and drives employee retention at a discount, value appropriation, and firms' competitive advantage. FSHC also plays a central role in the resource-based view of the firm. In recent years, however, a significant debate has emerged on the validity and usefulness of the construct. The purpose of the chapter is to revisit this debate and discuss both challenges and opportunities related to FSHC. In a form of conversation, we take aim at FSHC from different angles and discuss its role as a mobility friction, in value appropriation of established firms, in the context of transitions between paid employment and entrepreneurship, and in the views of practitioners. While we agree that our understanding of the concept of FSHC must evolve, we continue to see its value in our theoretical toolbox.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Does a leadership team actually lead in any meaningful way? This is not a trick question – or at least, it is not meant be. Rather, it is an attempt to dig down into our understanding of leadership as it is commonly experienced in firms the world over. For the vast majority of managers, they are told they are part of the leadership team, and will no doubt attend well-meaning collaborative sessions on defining their company’s values or adopting shared ways of working. However, when it comes to actual leading, the focus will still be on the CEO, chair, and senior board members of the organization. They do the “real” leading – bosses make decisions, they delegate tasks, and ultimately they succeed or fail on what the business achieves with them at the top.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Editorial This special issue of Industrial Management & Data Systems is a huge departure from our usual journal/ monograph style. This is an additional issue to the year's volume — a bonus in fact.

This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to the forecaring in advance of the future and how does this relate to quantum storytelling? In a music ensemble, no one musician is the star: they are equal, all are the stars of the show, emerging as stars and then taking a supporting role in cyclic rotation. ELT is important to the world ecology because it is a together-we-are-all-leaders approach. Rather than restricting leadership to one or a few people, the ensemble of many networks of leadership is important. I will contrast ELT with more familiar models of leadership: dispersed, distributed, and relational that restrict leadership to a few. One primary difference is that ELT includes both community and ecology and it is rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) that extend from the ancient Southwest US and Mexico. My contribution here is to recognize that ELT is rooted in the rhizomatic fractal, whereas the other models of leadership discussed here (dispersed, distributed, and relational) have been linear-, cyclic-, or spiral-fractal waves. A fractal is defined as recurring self-sameness patterns across scalabilities. I will look to Deleuzian rhizomatic-fractals, which ELT purports to be and make an observation: ELT revived and reinvented in late modern capitalism, must be a correlate with the dominant hierarchic kinds of leadership of here and now, which is this world situation we are now in. Does not each revolution (steam, diesel/gas combustion, cyber-information, and liquid modernity) actually create anew the enslavement of human beings in hierarchic forms of leadership? At the end of this chapter, ensemble leadership will be related to whole-world ecological health.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of Personnel Review is split into 8 sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Career/Manpower Planning and Recruitment; Health and Safety; Industrial Relations and Participation; Pay, Incentives and Pensions; Performance, Productivity and Motivation; Redundancy and Dismissal; Work Patterns; and Training and Development.

In this section we look at the implementation of total quality control and its effect on employee participation; the lessons from Ford on employee involvement; privatization, regulation and industrial relations; and the soft management approach to handling a hostile industrial relations environment.

Purpose – This conceptual chapter clarifies concepts of marketplace community.

Methodology/Approach – Through a review of selected CCT studies, the chapter explores and reviews theories of subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes.

Findings – Subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes exhibit divergent qualities that are summarised in a typology of communities.

Research implications – The perspectives offered by tribal studies present powerful tools that compliment subcultural and brand community approaches to understanding the construction of marketplace cultures.

Practical implications – Theory that improves the understanding of different features of marketplace communities can help marketing practitioners to determine more appropriate communal marketing strategies.

Originality/Value of paper – This chapter recommends a consistent and commonly shared set of descriptive and theoretical terms for different kinds of marketplace community.

Despite the increasing importance of shared leadership, researches examining its relations with vertical leadership, a complementary source of power, has been scarce. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to extend the authors’ knowledge on this little-known topic by analysing vertical and shared leadership interactions in a change management project.

A qualitative content analysis based on nine semi-structured interviews with top and middle managers, and a dataset of documents including corporate reports, a Road Map book and presentations was carried out, analysing the reciprocal leadership relationships by using an extended framework, which includes directive, transformational, transactional and empowering behaviours.

Both in radical and incremental step, vertical as well as shared leadership interacted, showing their reciprocal need to deal with change. Leadership approaches and behaviours, conceptually and empirically distinct, even if highly related, are complementary sources that shape a constant compromise, according to the contextual demands of the project, to face change.

Further studies could strengthen the generalizability of the findings that suffer for the qualitative method. Moreover further studies could extend leadership interactions beyond leader-change management team relationships to the top-bottom levels of the organization. Contribution to theory is mainly twofold. First, findings highlight that for every specific change phase, both radical and incremental ones, different gradients of vertical and shared leadership are required. Second the authors found that leadership behaviours could be contrasting, requiring the ability to perform the multiple roles and behaviours in a well-balanced way in order to deal with the contextual demands of the change project.

The paper includes implication for developing and training leaders, as well as followers, to have effective and multiple leadership skills and be able to apply them in different contexts, both by switching from vertical to shared, and vice versa, and by having the capability to respond with appropriately behaviours to a wide range of situations, that could also be mixed and opposing more than linear.

The paper fills a gap in research about the interactions between vertical and shared leadership dynamics, through a qualitative study, during a change management project.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the Global Human Resources People and Strategy Conference.

The paper presents a conference report on the Global Human Resources People and Strategy Conference, which was held in New York, USA from May 6‐9, 2012.

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