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Action from activists is at the origin of many initiatives that end up injecting moral concerns into the way companies operate. In such instances, activists function as moral entrepreneurs that lastingly change the definition of what constitutes morally acceptable corporate behavior. Yet, in order to have such a lasting effect on companies, activist efforts need to pass through multiple stages that deal with both the effective mobilization of their own constituents and the triggering of corporate responses that can induce broader change in the economy. In the present chapter, the authors study how local shareholder activists initiated and helped sustain the process that led to the establishment of active ownership in Switzerland between 1997 and 2011. Active ownership refers to the active engagement of shareholders with firms to push them toward considering environmental, social, and corporate governance criteria in their decision-making. The case illustrates the processual nature of moralizing dynamics initiated by activists and emphasizes the long-term and cumulative nature of many moralization projects.

Successful visionary educational leaders promote a shared vision with great commitment and manage to connect other organizational members to it. In spite of this, the source of their personal commitment to the organizational vision has not yet been the subject of extended study. The purpose of this paper is to correct this by investigating leaders' personal ethos; the personal experiences and values which form their motives and personality. This paper furthermore considers the influence of personal ethos on the content of the vision promoted in educational organizations. Finally, it explores the link between leaders' personal vision and the organizational vision they promote.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with visionary educational leaders. These interviews were narrative in nature and aimed to explore the development process and the interrelation of personal and organizational vision in an educational framework.

Data indicate that visionary educational leaders do not separate their personal vision from their organizational vision. Furthermore, the educational leaders interviewed told of formative experiences which affected their worldview and shaped their personal ethos. Personal ethos proved to be a key element in formulating the leaders' personal and organization vision. Four prominent factors emerged as central to the personal ethos of educational leaders: identity, culture and values, professional experience, and family.

The findings suggest that educational leaders should engage in a process of self‐reflection in order to form a significant personal vision to which they can fully commit. Furthermore, the insights of leaders about what is important to them can enable an open dialogue with other organizational members and the development of a shared vision.

The paper aims to describe recent moves to establish a UK electronic thesis service. The existing arrangements for access to UK doctoral theses are not seen as ideal or sustainable. A range of stakeholders have come together in recent years to invest in an alternative. The resulting service model is one that is relevant to higher education across the UK and beyond.

The EThOS service model is a partnership between the British Library as the service provider and UK universities, and includes technical, legal, business and operational aspects. It has been achieved by a series of development projects undertaken since 2002, culminating now in the impending transition from prototype to live service.

The EThOS service model includes a range of partnership options to suit the varied requirements of UK higher education institutions. The main ambition of the model is to make electronic theses available open access via a financially viable and sustainable model. The core of the model is a “central hub”, offering discovery, digitisation and preservation functions, working with institutions, in part via their institutional repositories.

It is hoped that most UK higher education institutions will sign up for EThOS and benefit from this shift to both electronic theses and open access. Many have already indicated that they will do so.

The value of the EThOS service is likely to be considerable. Where theses are available open access, their use escalates. EThOS will enable UK theses to be more widely accessed, read, used and cited worldwide. Authors, institutions and the UK all benefit from this.

This paper aims to describe the transition of EThOS, the British Library’s E-Theses Online service, from its original role as a transactional document supply service to the service seen today where it forms part of the UK’s network of institutional repositories, open access and still-developing research funder mandates.

The constituent parts of the EThOS service are described, and an analysis is given of the development of open access repositories, electronic theses and the way that PhD theses have become an important resource for cutting-edge research content for researchers worldwide.

The value of doctoral theses for researchers continues to grow and be recognised. Many UK institutions have moved to mandatory open deposit of electronic theses, and many are digitising their older print thesis collections. Public funders are starting to track open deposit of the theses they fund; and research organisations are analysing the full UK metadata collection to understand trends in PhD research areas.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough assessment of the current statistical sources in Spain, as well as new indicators that extend and improve the European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS) to better address every housing exclusion situation.

The main categories of the ETHOS typology are reviewed: definition, subcategories and the availability of data and statistical sources in Spain. The assessment of the information available is carried out by considering objective and subjective indicators. Additionally, the inclusion of new subcategories is proposed.

The strengths and weaknesses of the ETHOS model when applied in the study of housing exclusion are highlighted, and the need to have an appropriate set of indicators for measuring housing exclusion is stressed. The ETHOS typology may be the reference conceptual framework to elaborate a system of housing exclusion indicators. However, it would be necessary to extent this model in order to cover some situations of exclusion risk owing to insecure housing for economic reasons and environmental degradation, and including the subjective assessment of the people affected by these processes.

This study implements the ETHOS methodology checking the statistical information available distinguishing between objective and subjective indicators. Further, this paper shows an integrated overview of the four main ETHOS categories (rooflessness, houselessness, insecure and inadequate housing) with the four types of housing restrictions (accessibility, stability, adequacy and habitability).

Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

Ethical conduct by politicians involves more than respect for the law and adherence to rules governing conflicts of interest. It displays fidelity to a democratic ethos. In this chapter, I provide a characterization of the democratic ethos and sketch its connection to recent work in democratic theory. Second, I describe the sort of fidelity to the democratic ethos that is a condition of ethical conduct by politicians. Third, I suggest a mechanism through which greater adherence to a suitable version of the democratic ethos might be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of manipulation as a legitimation strategy. Focusing on the role of verbal communication, are integrated insights from rhetorical theory with strategic and institutional approaches to legitimacy in a study of three documents published by the “most admired” companies in the USA in 2007; General Electric (GE), Toyota, and Starbucks.

The research is based on a qualitative analysis of three documents that describe the environmental focus and policies of GE, Toyota, and Starbucks. The approach involves analyzing and synthesizing a large number of environmental claims made by these companies.

The analysis of the texts reveals a constructed organizational ethos that is combined with strong environmental focus to appear trustworthy in environmental matters in the eyes of consumers and stakeholders. Relying on four categories of environmental statements, the companies practice a form of “green” legitimation.

The research is limited by the small number of publications used as data sources, which makes generalizations problematic. It does not investigate the effects of the verbal claims.

The paper adds to the literature on organizational legitimation, providing valuable insights into manipulative legitimation. It demonstrates the need to combine insights from strategic and institutional approaches to legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how political leaders can rhetorically use social media to construct their leadership, with a special focus on character – rhetorical ethos.

The authors used a qualitative case study which consisted of two political leaders’ activities on Twitter. The leaders were chosen on the basis of similarity – both foreign ministers in Scandinavian countries and early adapters to ICT. All tweets, including photos, for selected period were analyzed qualitatively with the classical rhetorical concept of ethos.

Social media is the virtual square for political leadership. The two political leaders studied use social media similarly for rhetorical means and aims, with ethos as rhetorical strategy. The rhetorical ethos they constructed differs radically though: busy diplomat vs a super-social Iron man. There is no single constructed ethos that political leaders aim for.

Even though this is just one qualitative case study, it shows a variety of rhetorical means and constructs of ethos in political leadership.

The study shows a possibility for political leaders to construct their own image and character through social media, for a potentially large audience of voters, without being filtered by political parties or media.

This study contributes to the evolving area of rhetoric in leadership/management and it adds to knowledge about how political leaders use social media.

The moral ethos profiles (MEPs) of six Hong Kong companies were investigated via questionnaires and in‐depth qualitative interviews and analyzed according to the Kohlberg stages model. In five of the companies, the MEPs obtained via interviews were consistent with those obtained from the questionnaires. Interviews and questionnaires were also used to investigate how managers in these companies tackled ethical dilemmas (both real work‐based ones of their own and hypothetical ones). In the company with the consistently least virtuous MEP, managers used more lower‐stage ethical reasoning to tackle ethical dilemmas. There was, however, no difference between managers in companies with the most virtuous and moderately virtuous MEPs in terms of the stage‐level of ethical reasoning they used to tackle ethical dilemmas. The study helped to refine a moral ethos questionnaire.