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Warner Winslow Gardner's notes on The Institutional Theory of John R. Commons (1933) are published here for the first time, as far as the present editors can determine. The typewritten manuscript was found among the Robert Lee Hale papers at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.² Gardner (1909–2003) was born in Richmond, Indiana. He went to Westtown School, a Quaker preparatory school in Pennsylvania for five years, and then to Swarthmore College, graduating in 1930. To escape unemployment, as he stated in his recorded reminiscences, Gardner took graduate work on a fellowship at Rutgers University, receiving a Master of Arts Degree in economics in 1931.³ From there he went to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1934. Quite significantly, Gardner attributed his decision of shifting from economics to law to his reading of Commons’ Legal Foundation of Capitalism:It would be 1930–31 and, in the course of that year, I read and was much impressed by a book by John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin in which he tried to weave together economics and law. I thought, “aha,” here is a field that had real attraction and real potentiality. I ended up with an MA at the end of that year. Instead of going for a Ph.D. in economics, I thought I’d go to law school, study law and try to weave the two disciplines together into a meaningful structure. (Gardner, 1972, p. 16).

This chapter critically reviews the literature on authentic leadership (AL) that emerged in response to scandals in private- and public-sector organisations, drawing on theories, concepts and methods from other disciplines. The author finds that AL lacks a consensus definition, and that quantitative research has largely been at the level of employees rather than executives or board members. The review reveals 12 categories of criticisms. Schaefler advocates inductive qualitative research on the major concerns of executive leaders and means of addressing them via group dynamics, maintaining that exploring processes of AL in real-world settings would complement existing quantitative research and contribute to the development and extension of AL theory.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

For many of the current leadership theories, models, and approaches, the answer to the question posed in the title, “Is leadership more than ‘I like my boss’?,” is “no,” as there appears to be a hierarchy of leadership concepts with Liking of the leader as the primary dimension or general factor foundation. There are then secondary dimensions or specific sub-factors of liking of Relationship Leadership and Task Leadership; and subsequently, tertiary dimensions or actual sub-sub-factors that comprise the numerous leadership views as well as their operationalizations (e.g., via surveys). There are, however, some leadership views that go beyond simply liking of the leader and liking of relationship leadership and task leadership. For these, which involve explicit levels of analysis formulations, often beyond the leader, or are multi-level in nature, the answer to the title question is “yes.” We clarify and discuss these various “no” and “yes” leadership views and implications of our work for future research and personnel and human resources management practice.

This chapter explores conflict in digital transformation as a leadership challenge. The authors maintain that conflicts cannot be left to HR managers; rather, they must be anticipated, handled adeptly and made a leadership priority. Although conflict resolution is a well-researched area, this is not the case for authentic leadership in digital transformation. Thus, the field is ripe for empirical research. Pitman and Reilly call for research on conflict in digital transformation, the role of leadership in averting and resolving conflicts and whether these roles change understanding of authentic leadership. The impact of AI warranting a revision of orthodox authentic leadership theory represents a further domain of potential research.

Three decades of academic and professional discourse on HR technologies (HRTs) have produced continued disagreement over construct definitions and research streams that are highly fragmented. These realities suggest that greater consistency in meanings is sorely needed if we are to integrate and upgrade knowledge in this area. This chapter draws on the findings of a systematic research review to properly define the content domains of human resource information systems (HRIS), virtual human resources (virtual HR), electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and business-to-employee (B2E) systems. An integrative synthesis was performed on 242 system-level writings that appeared in the literature from 1983 to 2017. The weight of the evidence strongly supports treating HRIS, virtual HR, e-HRM, and B2E systems as independent, complimentary constructs. While the first three comprise a firm’s HRT system, the fourth construct is more appropriately positioned in the business-collaborative system. The sample was further evaluated with an analytic framework to detect patterns of practice in research designs. This revealed that much more attention has been focused on system actions and outcomes than on attitudes and system characteristics. Different units of analysis were well represented aside from trans-organizational studies. Finally, a case is made for better contextualizing HRT research by recognizing differences in assimilation stage, functional penetration, and collective proficiency. These factors are rarely mentioned, let alone studied, raising additional concerns about measurement error. Detailed suggestions are offered on ways to incorporate them. Together, these materials should promote more sophisticated and generalizable assessments of technology, improving our ability to understand its impacts.

This essay comments on what three eminent UW-Madison economists taught during the first half of the 20th century: John R. Commons (1862–1945), Selig Perlman (1886–1959), and Martin Bronfenbrenner (1914–1997). What we know about what and how they taught varies. Interestingly, little or no effort has been made to preserve records that might inform us about what college and university economists taught their students and when and how new ideas and issues found their way into the teaching of economics. This thought first came to me in the years immediately following my joining the UW-Madison faculty in January 1965. I realized that many of us who gained experience in the policy arena while on leave in Washington DC during the 1960s incorporated that experience into our teaching at all course levels. This meant our students benefited from being on the cutting edge of emerging policy issues, such as poverty, negative income tax, human capital, military draft, and the all-volunteer army, the Kennedy round trade negotiations, tax policy, and cost–benefit analysis. We regularly incorporated these issues into our teaching, usually a half-dozen years before they made their way into the next edition of the textbooks and thus reached a wider student audience. Once incorporated into textbooks, these issues became much less interesting to teach because they had been boiled down to pedestrian textbook-style prose.

The contemporary human resource management (HRM) sector is faced with continual leadership development challenges. Unethical behavior in leaders is not the norm, but it is also not the exception. Human resource training and development focus significantly on better leadership but have largely failed to create more effective leaders. The result? Employee and follower wellbeing have not seen their best days. In this chapter, authentic relationships comprising authentic leaders and authentic followers are posited as a solution. The call is for more rigor in the theory underpinning leadership development programs, assurance of such programs, and embedding ethics into the core of what leadership developers do.