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The purpose is to argue that market-generated and brand-related phenomena such as fandoms work as a social and institutional force beyond the market and to showcase their influence on the society as a whole.

The influence of fandoms on many societal institutions is explored through the literature on fandom studies and consumer research.

The research indicates that market-generated resources and their related sociocultural dynamics play a significant role in shaping the evolution of many institutions of current societies.

The research is exclusively focused on fandoms despite the varied facets of market-related sociocultural dynamics, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here shifting the focus from fandoms to brand systems.

Researchers, especially in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may use the perspective shift from market to society to enlarge the scope to new fields of study, out of the market.

The research provides new lenses to understand emerging phenomena in fields such as religion and/or politics difficult to understand with traditional frameworks.

This paper provides exploratory research identifying market-related social and institutional processes and emphasizing how they influence other societal institutions, such as family, religion, corporations, professions, and politics; rather than bringing social and institutional processes into the marketplace.

The chapter explores the role of law in society and its relation to ethical conflicts as reflected through the prism of the film The Third Man. By focusing on the complexities of life in post-war Vienna, the film exposes dilemmas that prevail in ordinary times and in functioning democracies as well. Our analysis suggests that one way to manage these dilemmas and balance the conflicting loyalties and interests they raise is to sustain open channels between the law and other narrative-generating practices from which normative stances are evaluated. The law-and-cinema discourse is one such channel and The Third Man presents, in our eyes, the vitality of that channel, due to its rich aesthetical language and its unique representation of the ethical tensions (and their consequences) in the modern era.

Although special education was built upon the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the discrimination that many racialized students receiving special education services experience cannot be denied. Many culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students receiving special education services encounter labels that perpetuate racism and ableism and lead to inequitable access to services and resources necessary for more positive postsecondary outcomes. By honoring intersectionality and dismantling the singular identity, educators can become change agents and shift the historic oppressive narrative to create a system of empowerment as these individuals transition from transitional kindergarten to age 21 special education programs (TK-21) schools into adulthood.

This chapter forms the introduction to the book and offers an overview on the main aspects of leadership development that require explanation and further consideration. The current poor state of much development is considered and evidence provided of the deficiency in our understanding of organisations and how they function in actuality.

The misunderstandings about how people behave and how they really manage or lead are explored. One of the most important of these is the assumption of transferability, not just between national and regional cultures but within societal cultures, sectors, industries and organisations. This assumption applies equally to learning interventions which can have contradictory forms by being based on criteria external to the company and the individual leaders within it. The dominance of university business schools is also questioned.

The introduction concludes with an overview of the two-part format of the book and provides a pen picture of each chapter.

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.

In this study we examine how resource-constrained organizations can maneuver for competitive advantage in highly institutionalized fields. Unlike studies of institutional entrepreneurship, we investigate competitive maneuvering by an organization that is unable to alter either the regulative or normative institutions that characterize its field. Using the “Moneyball” phenomenon and recent changes in Major League Baseball as the basis for an intensive case study of entrepreneurial actions taken by the Oakland A’s, we found that the A’s were able to maneuver for advantage by using bricolage and refusing to enact baseball’s cognitive institutions, and that they continued succeeding despite ongoing resource constraints and rapid copying of their actions by other teams. These results contribute to our understanding of competitive maneuvering and change in institutionalized fields. Our findings expand the positioning of bricolage beyond its prior characterization as a tool used primarily by peripheral organizations in less institutionalized fields; our study suggests that bricolage may aid resource constrained participants (including the majority of entrepreneurial firms) to survive in a wider range of circumstances than previously believed.

The chapter describes an approach to teaching people how to understand organisations by focussing on observing what is going on in the group itself and the experiences of the members individually and collectively. This mode of learning does not use descriptions or theories about organisations but sees each group as unique in its particularities not as generalisable behaviour. The approach is called subjective theory and provides a basis for a general theory of organisations which has eluded most writers but is epitomised in the work of Carl Rogers and Encounter Groups.

The method fits well with the concept of the reflective practitioner and has a long tradition dating from the 1930s and the work of the Tavistock Institute and Elliot Jaques, and the Glacier Papers. The approach has been poplar in the UK, Canada, the USA, Western Europe, South Africa and Australia. Subjective theory provides a way of counterbalancing the currently dominant objective approaches used in artificial intelligence which often becomes reductionist and simplistic.