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In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

John Antonakis (PhD, Walden University) is professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research is centered on individual-difference antecedents of effective leadership, the measurement of leadership, and the links between context and leadership as applied to neocharismatic and transformational leadership models, and the development of leadership.

As CEOs now communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders, it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that the intended meaning of their messages is received. Boas Shamir focuses on how leaders engage in the management of meanings in order to (1) justify their actions and the changes they introduce to the organization; (2) recruit followers and motivate members of the organization to support their actions; and (3) create shared perceptions and interpretations so that members’ actions are guided by a common definition of the situation. Heike Bruch, Boas Shamir, and Galit Eilam-Shamir show how the leader of a large Swiss-based company actively managed the views, interpretations and energy of more than 100,000 employees through weekly e-mail letters when the company faced grave financial difficulties. Gretchen Spreitzer, Mary Sue Coleman, and Daniel Gruber show how an incoming university president dealt with an ongoing lawsuit regarding the university's use of affirmative action in its admissions processes and worked with various stakeholders to firmly establish the university's identity.

Using a Constrained Choice Theory framework, this paper will identify variation in choosing the constraint-reflective priorities of budget, taste, or health by sociodemographic group, familial status, and weight category. Identifying which groups experience unique constraints will allow for customized healthy eating programs to address barriers specific to each group.

Data are derived from a paper survey of families with children in Lexington, KY and analyzed using logistic regression.

The results of this study confirm that some sociodemographic groups are more likely to choose priorities that reflect contextual constraints in their lives than others. In particular, having a higher income reduces likelihood of prioritizing budget and increases chances of prioritizing taste. Being married or cohabitating is correlated with choosing health, but having more children reduces the likelihood of prioritizing health. Being obese correlates with increased likelihood of prioritizing budget. Membership in each of these categories reflects constraints on which foods are purchased for the home.

Families are encouraged to improve their diets by eating at home, but families face many constraints when choosing healthy foods at the grocery store. Understanding the constraints experienced by various groups when shopping for food will lead to health policy that more fully addresses barriers to healthy eating for groups with disproportionately high incidence of diet-related disease.

This paper extends Constrained Choice Theory by applying it to a new aspect of health, purchasing groceries, and also by examining a wider variety of sociodemographic groups than previous research.

An important issue for medium-sized enterprises (MEs) in strategic management research is the ability to be resilient, recover and bounce back, after a disturbing and extenuating external event, such as the recent financial and economic crisis. Researchers have made efforts to understand the antecedents to resilience. Some studies propose capabilities and resources that strengthen experimentation while other researchers emphasize factors that support reliability. This study seeks to reconcile these views relying on upper echelons theory as the top management of MEs’ shape organizational attitudes and behaviors. The authors propose two antecedents in MEs related to management capabilities, ambidexterity and consistency, and the characteristics of family ownership that allow building of experimentation and reliability. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of 3,006 MEs and show how manager ambidexterity and family ownership play important roles in ME resilience.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to relate to the reader how overlapping advancements in technology and the diffusion of popular music into the habitus of listeners have provided the framework for an instrumental rationalization of litigious approaches to copyright protection by their owners. Namely, the personalization of music, which has evolved with the aid of technological advancements, has privatized music consumption, thus establishing socio-legal parameters that limit consumption to an individual action.

Design/methodology/approach – We discuss the concepts of habitus and taste, communality in music ownership, communicative action, and technology-driven consumption as they relate to the instrumental rationalization of industry-led governance structures defining music ownership rights. These arguments are supported in part by a consideration of historic examples of tension and responding legal actions.

Findings – The primary outcome from this chapter is to illustrate the extent to which the recording industry has traditionally held a role in guiding copyright policy. The chapter concludes by illustrating the current legitimation crises encountered by the recording industry and policy makers as consumers abandon traditional ownership paradigms en masse.

Originality/value of chapter – The technologies associated with the Internet and music consumption continue to evolve. This chapter highlights the differing interests in controlling music interests, and casts light on how agency has influenced structural developments central to copyright.