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Narratives are central to consumers’ understanding of brands especially during change. The financial crisis that began in 2008 offered a changing marketplace from which to develop two managerially useful frameworks of consumer narratives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Consumer focus groups, interviews with bankers and qualitative consumer surveys were used to gather consumers’ narratives about retail banking. The narratives were examined through frameworks from both the humanities and psychology (narrative identity).

The individual consumer narratives were used to create first a possible cultural narrative or bird’s eye view and later archetypal narratives of groups of consumers for a ground-level view of the changing marketplace.

Like all early research, the findings must be examined in other contexts to improve generalizability.

The narrative results revealed the impact of change on consumers’ identities, views of other entities and retail banking activity to yield managerially actionable information for segmentation, target marketing, branding and communication.

Frameworks are developed for consumer narratives which are shown to be useful tools in examining consumers’ reactions to changing markets and in formulating marketing responses.

To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I deconstruct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements – logic, setting, obligations, and resources – in order to show how state grants of land to individuals and corporations (notably railroad companies) constituted patrimonial practices embedded within modern structures. “Modern state patrimonialism” had its origins in royal patrimonialism. Monopolization of resources – by a state rather than an absolutist ruler – continued to offer the basis for patrimonial practice, but state patrimonial resource distribution became less personalistic and more connected to public goals (financing the state, rewarding state service, settlement of territory, development of a national economy, and construction of a transportation system). Recipients of patrimonial distributions often gained considerable control over disposition of resources that they received. In these patrimonialist practices, economic action was constructed in logics of action that occurred outside of “market” transactions. Future research should analyze patrimonial dynamics during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by identifying state monopolizations of scarce and desirable resources (mineral rights; city water systems; electrical systems; telephone systems; radio, television, and other airwave bandwidth; the internet), and analyzing how the distribution of those resources are entailed, controlled, licensed, or otherwise managed. A research program in the study of modern patrimonialism helps build out an institutionalist sociology of the economy.

Debates in US politics over abortion, homosexuality and other socio‐moral issues are increasingly explained by sociologists, politicians, policy advocates and the media as the result of a “culture war” in American society. Contained in this explanation is a theory that explains the moral value attitudes driving these debates as the product of conflicting worldviews. Since the worldviews that ultimately drive these debates cannot be compromised, the debates are said to be insoluble using normal democratic processes. The widespread dissemination of the hopeless aspect of this theory generates concern of self‐fulfilling prophesies. In this paper I outline the “culture war” and traditional “status group” theories and offer a critique. I conclude with an explanation of how the traditional “status group” explanations of these conflicts offers a more accurate — and more hopeful — vision of US society that avoids potentially self‐fulfilling prophesies of war.

The Library Association Conference has once more been held, and in spite of the smaller attendance and the omission of most of the usual social and local functions, there was a spirit of camaraderie and interest displayed that has made the meeting a decided success. It met at a time of such national strain that we may surely hope will never recur during the experience of the present generation, a time when all professions, occupations and business enterprises seem of small interest in comparison to the great national effort being made to defend the positions of ourselves and our Allies, against the overbearing aggression of a military despotism, so organised and trained, so powerful and unscrupulous as to call for the highest self‐devotion and sacrifice of all and every member of our immense Empire. It is therefore not a matter of surprise that although the number of members present was somewhat smaller than usual the tone of the Conference was kept at a high level, and attention was mainly focussed upon business matters.

In the early twenty‐first century organization scholars and managers face an economic outlook full of daunting challenges. With investors, workers, and other stakeholders distressed and hostile toward corporate executives and boards due to recent corporate scandals, the future for many industries and firms appears grim. In what ways can business history help corporate managers and new venture entrepreneurs overcome these leadership challenges? This paper seeks to uncover practices throughout the Boeing Company's management history that offer today's executives and board members numerous examples of industry vision and leadership.

Visionary leadership theory is used to help understand Boeing's actions. A theory of visionary entrepreneurial leadership is proposed based on Boeing's history. Four specific cases of aircraft design and development decisions and actions are presented as examples of executive and board directors' vision and leadership.

Boeing has served as the aircraft industry's innovator and leader for over nine decades by designing and building path‐breaking airplanes when no other aircraft manufacturer would venture similar risks to their reputation and capital. Furthermore, Boeing executives and board directors have repeatedly made risky decisions that – if the prototype literately crashed and burned – would probably bankrupt the company. Management's vision was always on the next great airplane, never on individual image or personal wealth.

Future research directions are presented suggesting a focus on firm executives and boards of directors' decisions and how these decisions influence industry wide innovation and development.

The paper analyses the leadership attributes of Boeing executives over the last nine decades.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: (i) identification of the shared premises of the structuration and morphogenesis theories which have remained indifferent to or openly at odds with each other, while highlighting at the same time the specific elements of these two models which are better elaborated in one than the other; and (ii) demonstration of the benefits of social theory testing on the eventful historical analysis.

I first comparatively examine the main premises and guiding concepts of the two models in question, point out their basic affinities, and note different emphases. Next, different components and phases of the (re)constitution over time of societal structure(s) and human agency posited by the structuration/morphogenesis model are illustrated and “tested” through the historical account of the initiation and spread of migration of Polish peasants to America at the turn of the twentieth century and the subsequent impact of this movement on the sender and receiver societies.

First, the demonstration of a close theoretical affinity of the structuration and morphogenesis models which provides the grounds for an intellectual exchange between their proponents. Second, derived from the historical analysis of Poles’ migration process, the identification of specific concepts informing the structuration/morphogenesis model which need further refinement. The third, most general finding-qua-contribution is a demonstration of the benefit for social theorizing from the historical, that is, time- and place-sensitive conceptualization and analysis of the examined phenomena.

In Weberian scholarship, conventional wisdom views the corruption of the modern rational-legal bureaucratic state by local patrimonialisms as an endemic feature in non-Western postcolonial state formation. The resultant neopatrimonial state is often blamed for the social, political, and economic ills plaguing these societies. This essay challenges conventional wisdom and argues that neopatrimonialism is a process of hybrid state formation that has its origins in the cultural politics of colonial state building. This is achieved by drawing on a comparative study of British Malaya and the American Philippines, which offers contrastive trajectories of colonialism and state formation in Southeast Asia.

Because of the precariousness of state power due to local resistance and class conflicts, colonial state building involved the deepening of patron–client relations for political control and of rational-legal bureaucracy for social development. In the process, local political relations were marked and displaced as traditional patrimonialisms distinguished from the new modern center. Through native elite collaborators and paternal-populist discourses, new patron–client relations were institutionalized to connect the colonial state to the native periphery. However, colonial officials with different political beliefs and ethnographic world views in the center competed over native policy and generated cyclical crises between patron-clientelist excess and bureaucratic entrepreneurship.

Instead of the prevailing view that postcolonial states are condemned to their colonial design, and that authoritarian rule favors economic development, my study shows that non-Western state formation is non-linear and follows a cyclical pattern between predation and developmentalism, the excesses of which could be moderated.

For decades, managers around the globe assumed that “crisis management” referred to the sudden appearance of a television reporter enquiring about an impropriety at company headquarters. The decade now ending has witnessed a broader definition of crisis management, as public expectations of corporate behaviour on each continent has given rise to the need for proactive crisis management planning, an attribute some companies have sought too late and others too hurriedly. “Rules” of crisis management have little scholarly value, but some suggestions are offered.