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This essay charts an intellectual journey. Geoffrey M. Hodgson became an institutional economist in the 1980s. He explains how he discovered institutional economics and what strains of institutional thought were attractive for him. Another issue raised in this essay is how institutional researchers organize and move forward. Hodgson argues for an interdisciplinary approach, but this is not without its problems.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

Women's bodies are abject and ‘out of place’ in organisations where (self and other) disciplining of women's bodies serve to regulate and silence women. Yet we know little about how expectations of body and appearance play out in the career decisions and everyday practices of women academic leaders. In this chapter reflexive accounts are used to explore if dress and appearance expectations have implications for women's career development and advancement, specifically in the context of business schools. The literature review and two reflexive autoethnographic accounts provided, illuminate how, through dress and appearance, the pervasiveness of hegemonic masculinity is both sustained and challenged and the potential impacts of this upon women's careers in academia.

This study is a comment on Geoffrey Hodgson’s “Discovering Institutionalism: One Person’s Journey.” In this self-description of the evolution of his thought, Hodgson distinctly acknowledges Thorstein Veblen’s influence on his own institutional perspective. This is the issue that I explore in this study. My argument is that Hodgson can be understood as a Veblenian, but he does not fit in the Veblenian notion that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that Hodgson’s notion of habits is the strongest Veblen’s influence on him, and his reconstitutive downward and upward causations are in line with Veblen’s institutionalism, albeit without the mid-twentieth century Veblenian writings. I also address the approach to the content of habits as a break between Hodgson’s and Veblen’s institutionalism. By offering an unprecedented Veblenianism, I argue that Hodgson’s institutional economics can be understood as a new institutionalist segmentation.

Purpose: Twenty-first-century leaders operate in an unpredictable and complex business environment. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) nature of the business milieu and proved to be a real-life test for organisations and their leaders. It brought challenges and losses at personal, organisational, societal, national, and global levels. Nevertheless, some leaders and organisations thrived during and after the pandemic. This research assimilates leadership lessons from extant literature and real-life cases of leadership successes and failures. The authors aim to consolidate leadership strategies valuable in unpredictable, demanding, and complex times like COVID-19.

Methodology: The research relies on an extant literature review and opinions of four c-suite leaders captured through semi-structured interviews. The study uses content analysis to analyse the primary data collected.

Findings: The present research presents its results as a VUCA Leader Toolkit. It consolidates learnings from real-life case studies, extant literature, business reports, and experts’ opinions. It addresses the gap in existing research on VUCA-suited leadership strategies. The outcome of the present study is a clear, adequate, explicit, and well-defined list of VUCA-necessitated leadership strategies.

Originality/value: The research proves its utility in providing the VUCA Leader Toolkit. The outcomes carry usefulness for both present and future business leaders. The business environment today is ever-changing, complex, and uncertain. This unpredictability, uncertainty, complexity, and fuzziness would proliferate in the coming times. Hence, it is imperative to have a list of leadership strategies that may serve as a ready reckoner for leaders.

Impactful pedagogies in Higher Education are required to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. This chapter outlines an inclusive, flexible, and work-based learning curriculum design framework to respond to these needs. Two cases from Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) are used to illustrate this framework in a transnational educational context in Sub-Saharan Africa. Case one explores the impact of a Railway Operations Management program in South Africa, where the views of two cohorts of 137 recent graduates were gathered through an online questionnaire. Case two examines the views of Optometry/Orthoptics students who undertook an intensive two-week clinical work experience on the train-based clinic (Phelophepa train) in South Africa; data was gathered through an online questionnaire from 58 participating students since 2014. Both examples highlight transformative personal experiences and impacts of their education beyond just their studies – to a clearer sense of personal and professional pride, to becoming role models for their families and to developing meta-cognitive skills to support lifelong learning. In the Railway Operations Management example, additional benefits were seen to their organization – through improved interpersonal skills, decision-making, and problem-solving and creating knowledge-sharing – whereas in the Optometry/Orthoptics case life-changing impacts to patients were delivered through this work experience.

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

This chapter explores the multifaceted present-day social and cultural constructions of adolescence in a Nordic Atlantic society, the Faroe Islands. Based on young people’s perspectives and narratives, this chapter delves into the transition from youthhood to adulthood in the context of a small-scale, family-oriented society in shift. Drawing on sociological theoretical writing about “waiting” and “waithood” in relation to the (often temporally extended or delayed) transition from adolescence to full adulthood in a globalizing world, as well as social anthropological studies of future-making, my aim is to outline the new futural orientations of contemporary adolescence with focus on aspirations for work and family life. Young people, the chapter argues, are waiting and navigating in a society with multiple parallel temporalities: When to marry? When to get children? When to earn your own money and have your own home? These and many other questions define waithood in contemporary society, which is characterized by an increasingly precarious avenue toward promising futures resonating the socially accepted ways of performing adulthood. In the Faroe Islands, an island society with roughly 54,000 inhabitants, young people’s waiting is very often also a question of staying or leaving, that is, mobility and migration strategies. The waiting entails pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021). Adolescent islanders aim to “hit the right pace” in their future imaginaries. This chapter contributes to sociological discussions on the social construction of adolescence with focus on the meaning of time and temporalities. It relies on empirical material from extensive qualitative studies in the Faroe Islands.