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No genre of news reporting generates the same pressures as covering trauma. Multiple casualty incidents, such as the school shootings that are the subject of this volume, challenge reporters to find words for the results of actions that might more naturally be described as unspeakable. To paraphrase MacDuff's reactions to the murder at the court of MacBeth in Shakespeare's play, what take place in the familiar, supposedly safe and mundane settings of school classrooms and corridors are horrors that neither ‘heart nor tongue can conceive of’. For journalists such incidents raise acute ethical and practical dilemmas about how to approach and interview victims and survivors in ways that are less likely to add unnecessarily to their distress. Then there are the news choices which have to be made: how does one produce narratives that are informative and compelling but that avoid playing into the agendas of the perpetrators or inspiring copycat behaviour? And on top of that – what responsibilities do news editors owe the public in assisting them to digest information which may tear through their assumptions that the world is, for the most part, a stable and orderly place?

This book contributes to the current academic discussion on school shootings by analysing this contemporary phenomenon in a broader context of media saturation in contemporary social and cultural life. We argue that in order to understand school shootings as a cultural and sociological phenomenon, we need to analyse this type of public violence from a variety of academic perspectives. By drawing on a range of empirical analyses of different school shooting incidents in the United States, Germany, Finland, and Canada, the authors in this volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which the media and school shootings are connected in contemporary society. Numerous frameworks are applied in these original analyses, including media violence, journalism, visual culture, and social networking. Our shared goal is to understand the complex interplay between media, society and school shootings, and certainly how this interaction is carried out in a range of cultural and societal contexts and settings.

Klas Backholm is post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Developmental Psychology at Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland.

In this chapter, we focus on expatriate CEOs who are assigned by the parent company to work in a subsidiary and compare them to those who themselves have initiated to work abroad as CEOs. Since we do not know much about these individuals, we direct our attention to: (1) who they are (demographics), (2) what they are like (personality), and (3) how they perform (job performance).

Data was sought from 93 assigned expatriate CEOs and 94 self-initiated expatriate CEOs in China.

Our findings demonstrate that in terms of demography, self-initiated CEOs were more experienced than assigned CEOs. With regard to personality, we found difference in self-control and dispositional anger: Assigned expatriate CEOs had more self-control and less angry temperament than their self-initiated counterparts. Finally, we found assigned expatriate CEOs to rate their job performance higher than self-initiated CEOs.

Although there may not always be immediate benefits, career consideration often plays a role when individuals choose whether to become an expatriate. For many years, organizations have used expatriation to develop talented managers for high-level positions in the home country. Recently, however, a new trend has emerged. Talented top managers are no longer expatriated only from within parent companies to subsidiaries. Self-initiated expatriates with no prior affiliation in the parent company are increasingly used to fill top management positions in subsidiaries.