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The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activity (CPA) are two important components of firms’ nonmarket strategies, oriented toward shaping the firm’s political and social conditions. Although this is acknowledged in the literature, there are contradictory arguments and evidence, concerning, first, whether and under which conditions firms align their CPA and CSR activities, and second, what the impacts might be if they do align these activities. In light of this, this chapter draws from earlier reviews of nonmarket strategies, to explore the factors at multiple levels, macro and micro, that may drive a firm’s alignment of CPA and CSR. In doing so, we draw from management research to identify the macro- and micro-level factors that shape CPA and CSR alignment as CSR and CPA alignment research mostly focuses on outcomes rather than identifying the drivers of alignment. We develop a general model that integrates the macro- and micro-level discussions to make suggestions about where future research needs to go to increase understanding of when corporations will combine their CPA and CSR efforts and the merits of these efforts.

The recent development of the European debt sovereign crisis showed that sovereign debt is not “risk free.” The traditional index bond management used during the last two decades such as the market-capitalization weighting scheme has been severely called into question. In order to overcome these drawbacks, alternative weighting schemes have recently prompted attention, both from academic researchers and from market practitioners. One of the key developments was the introduction of passive funds using economic fundamental indicators.

In this chapter, the authors introduced models with economic drivers with an aim of investigating whether the fundamental approaches outperformed the other models on risk-adjusted returns and on other terms.

The authors did this by constructing five portfolios composed of the Eurozone sovereigns bonds. The models are the Market-Capitalization RP, GDP model RP, Ratings RP model, Fundamental-Ranking RP, and Fundamental-Weighted RP models. These models were created exclusively for this chapter. Both Fundamental models are using a range of 10 country fundamentals. A variation from other studies is that this dissertation applied the risk parity concept which is an allocation technique that aims to equalize risk across different assets. This concept has been applied by assuming the credit default swap as proxy for sovereign credit risk. The models were run using the Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG) method as the optimization model, together with the Lagrange Multipliers as techniques and the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. This led to the comparison of all the models mentioned above in terms of performance, risk-adjusted returns, concentration, and weighted average ratings.

By analyzing the whole period between 2006 and 2014, it was found that both the fundamental models gave very appealing results in terms of risk-adjusted returns. The best results were returned by the Fundamental-Ranking RP model followed by the Fundamental-Weighting RP model. However, better results for the mixed performance and risk-adjusted returns were achieved on a yearly basis and when sub-dividing the whole period in three equal periods. Moreover, the authors concluded that over the long term, the fundamental bond indexing triumphed over the other approaches by offering superior return and risk characteristics. Thus, one can use the fundamental indexation as an alternative to other traditional models.

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

The post-Soviet space, consisting of the countries of the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact, is a good testing ground for the dynamics of growth. Motivated by the mixed evidence on economic convergence in the region, this paper explores why countries have performed differently, focusing on institutional strength and its determinants. It proposes the hypothesis that, in the region, Russian influence plays a negative role in institutional development, both through opaque business practices that come with it, and through the isolation from European Union influence it entails. The paper uses recent panel data to test this hypothesis, concluding that there is some evidence supporting a negative effect of Russian influence on post-Soviet states’ institutions, but that more rigorous analysis is needed to confirm this link.

In the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) contemporary business environment intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) play a central role. Their objective is to align member countries for collective global problem solving activities under the guidance of the organization. They aim at providing global stability and security through the creation of supranational institutions. While political sciences have studied IGOs from a global political perspective, little is known about the influence of these IGOs and their supranational institutions on country institutional environments and business environments. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to understand how IGOs influence these national institutional environments, especially considering the countries’ development levels. By using regime and institutional theory we are able to conceptualize the relation of supranational and national institutions within the differently developed countries. We identify two interconnected factors that impact this analysis, the strength of the national institutional environment of member countries and their power in the IGO. Using these factors, we identify a clash and misalignment of national and supranational institutions in emerging countries, which is leading to enhanced VUCA business environments. We provide an exemplary case that discusses institutional schisms created by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) influence in Argentina. Moreover, the impact of IGOs is significant in least developed countries and has little to no impact in highly developed countries.

This chapter explores the question of the relationship between bureaucracy and politics in Latin America. The objective is exploring the role that politics plays in guaranteeing a professional and autonomous bureaucracy structure.

The chapter first examines an institutional explanation for bureaucratic performance. I will scrutinize the institutional arrangements that might preclude the existence of a professional bureaucracy. The chapter then “brings the state back in,” under the assumption that the explanation for performance of bureaucracy might have been related to long-lasting conditions of “Stateness.” The bureaucracy is analyzed in a more historical perspective and relates the former with specific societal and partisan coalitions at the time of state consolidation. These historical decisions seem to have determined a pattern of clientelistic utilization of the State apparatus in some countries but not in others. The partial evidence presented in this section suggests the importance of “state strength” to understand bureaucratic performance.

The separation of powers constitutes a vital feature of western democracies, enshrined in myriad federal and state constitutions. Yet, as a broad principle, theorists struggle to pin down its precise nature, and many contend that the tripartite separation of state powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches proves simplistic and infeasible. I argue we should understand the separation of powers as a strategy used to structure relations between the separated institutions. This process of structuring empowers the creation of novel inter-relations among institutions (relations of balancing, checking, dividing, coordinating and so on), with the goal of improving their institutional integrity. In short, we separate only to reconnect.

Institutions underpin the operation of national economies. These differ significantly between countries reflecting varying historical paths, policy choices and national cultures. Moreover, they need to be understood systemically as an ensemble of relations between their component parts: financial systems, corporate governance, industrial relations, patterns of state intervention, etc., have evolved together so that their operation and effects tend to reinforce each other. Different countries faced by common exogenous changes will tend to evolve along different lines rather than converge. National institutions matter: they significantly affect economic performance and distribution.

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.