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In reviewing proxy contests and tender offers of the past, the author concludes that the former has been inferior as a form of corporate conflict mechanism to the latter. However, he also underscores the important role that the proxy contest has played in the development of its competitor — the tender offer.

Purpose – Although extensive research shows that power affects negotiator performance, few efforts have been made to investigate how status conflict among negotiators affects negotiation. This chapter addresses this limitation and explores the question that when groups experience status conflict while simultaneously conducting negotiations, how this status conflict affects negotiator behavior and negotiation outcome.

Approach – We define three basic forms of status contest and develop 12 propositions about the impact of status conflict on between-group negotiator behavior and negotiation outcome.

Findings – We propose that when negotiating with an outgroup, negotiators who experience within-group status conflict will use the outgroup to increase their status within group by demonstrating their value to their own group. In the situation of wholly within-group status conflict and within-group negotiation, individual negotiators will use group concern to gain status. This group concern leads to more value-creating behaviors, but lessens the likelihood of reaching an agreement. When groups experience intergroup status conflict alongside intergroup negotiation, the likelihood of agreement, and the likelihood of integrative agreement, decreases and this is due to an increase in contentiousness.

Value – This chapter suggests that status conflict is an important, albeit neglected, aspect of negotiation and it can affect the outcome of the negotiation. Greater research attention toward status conflict in negotiation should help to improve negotiation effectiveness and the quality of agreements.

Existing literature has begun to identify the agonistic and contested aspects of the ongoing development of accountability systems. These “contests” are particularly important during periods of change when an accountability “deficit” has been identified, that is, when existing accountability systems are deemed inadequate and requiring revision. The purpose of this paper is to explore one such set of contests in the case of large technology and social media firms: the so-called “big tech”. The authors focus specifically on “big tech” because of increasing societal concerns about the harms associated with their products, services and business practices.

The authors analysed four US Congressional hearings, in which the CEO of Facebook was held to account for the company's alleged breaches and harms. The authors conducted a discourse analysis of the dialogue between the account giver (Mark Zuckerberg) and account holders (Members of Congress) in the oral testimony at the four hearings.

Two areas of contestation in the dialogue between the account giver and account holders are identified. “Epistemic contests” involved contestation about the “facts” concerning the harms the company had allegedly caused. “Responsibility contests” involved contestation about who (or what) should be held responsible for these harms and according to what standards or criteria.

The study advances critical dialogical accountability literature by identifying two areas of contestation during periods of change in accountability systems. In so doing, they advanced the theory by conceptualising the process of change as underpinned by discursive contests in which multiple actors construct and contest the “problem” with existing accountability systems. The outcomes of these contests are significant, the authors suggest, because they inform the development of reforms to the accountability system governing big tech firms and other industries undergoing similar periods of contestation and change.

Competition is a prominent topic of discussion among academics and practitioners; yet the relevant literatures in management and psychology lack a consistent definition to describe this phenomenon. Consequently, much of the mixed results concerning competition's impact on attitudes and performance might be due to conceptual differences about the construct. A survey administered in a laboratory setting demonstrated individuals perceive different types of competition, and these different types had different impacts on attitudes and behavior. One type of competition identified here, the opportunity for informal competition, draws from a vast literature in social psychology—using social comparisons to evaluate performance. These results support broadening the definition of competition and expanding future research investigation efforts. Informal social competition can potentially benefit efforts to effectively direct and enhance motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some pressing but under-researched aspects of public leadership. Ten propositions about public leadership are set out and these are intended to be thought-provoking and even controversial in order to stimulate researchers to design research which addresses key theoretical and practical questions about leadership in the public sphere. They will also help practitioners navigate an increasingly complex leadership context.

This invited essay uses ten propositions about public leadership, selected from three sources: the leadership literature, the author’s own research and from collaborative research discussions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The first proposition argues for distinguishing public leadership from public service leadership given that the former is about leadership of the public sphere. Other propositions concern context; purpose; conflict and contest at the heart of public leadership; leadership with political astuteness; dual leadership; leadership projections; fostering resilience; leadership, authority and legitimacy; and the challenge to researchers to use research designs which reflect the complexity and dynamism of public leadership.

While this essay is primarily addressed to researchers, there are many ideas and concepts which practising leaders will find insightful and useful in their work.

This essay draws on deep experience in undertaking high-quality academic research about public leadership which draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises organisational psychology, public management and political science to create synergies in order to enhance the understanding of public leadership.

By so doing the current research manuscript will offer a series of new insights into the problems and prospects of war, peace and conflicts. In order to shed new lights on the pressing issues related to peace, we will approach the problem and prospects of war and peace from new angles and thereby evade the dominant tradition, methodology and models within which the existing work had proceeded so far. Let us have a look at the central issues that our work will examine in great detail.

Violent conflicts and peace are the flip sides of the same coin of our societies. In many societies, sometimes conflicts of violent nature paralyse our collective senses, which result in an appalling destruction of economic and social assets and abysmal loss of human lives. In similar societies, a peaceful resolution of serious conflicts takes place. Even many societies seem to traverse from conflicts to peace and to costly conflicts again. The goal of this chapter is to examine the foundation of cyclical fluctuations in the level of conflicts. One can ponder that a low level of conflict is a peaceful composure, while a high-level conflict represents a lack of peace. However, admittedly, it is impossible to pin down a level of conflict as a threshold between peace and violent conflicts. There is no science that we are to apply to define this threshold, or boundary, and we will rather depend on the common sense. Our simple definition of peace is somewhat tautological: peace is an absence of an unacceptable level of violent conflicts. What is an acceptable level of conflict in a society? It is important to note that it is virtually impossible to banish violence and conflicts from a society – especially at its current stage. We will thus externally impose a cut-off point for conflicts below which a society is taken as peaceful and beyond which the society descends into a conflictual crisis. Our intention is to explore whether the system has its own internal dynamics to fluctuate between peace and violent conflicts.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the establishment and development of a leadership centre in a South African University. The paper is concerned with reviewing concepts of identity, ideology and struggle from a systems‐wide perspective and their impact on working with transformational change in a society in transition.

A conversational framework was used by the authors to create deeper understandings of the complexity of human and social relations in the context of the case. The paper uses methodologies for reflective investigation informed by the work of Boje and Flyvbjerg to review a ten year longitudinal case study.

The paper supports the view that “idealised” forms of organizational intervention and narratives about it often ignore the real world of competing rationalities, such as issues related to multiple and competing identities, contested ideologies and conflict and therefore “edit out” what is involved in the struggle to lead alternative forms of organization in periods of transition.

As with all research based on a case study approach it is difficult to make claims about a major contribution to generative knowledge. However, an in‐depth review of situated knowledge can offer insights which may be useful in exploring the dynamics of transformational change in other societies in transition.

The paper offers an in‐depth review of factors impacting on change and develops an interpretative framework that could be applied in other contexts. Given the current systemic changes taking place within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the paper could offer insight into working with transformational change in societies in transition.

This chapter argues that despite the proverbial claim that populism is ill-defined and has too broad a conceptual net, the literature on the subject tends to converge toward four core elements of populism that provides a conceptual and analytical unity. Furthermore, the conceptual core of populism explains why the concept has been able to encompass a wide range of populist manifestations without becoming an empty analytical shell. Also, the conceptual cores have helped provide the empirical basis that has given rise to a diverse and innovative literature that seeks to measure and compare cross-nationally populism.