Search results

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.

Donald Trump entered the presidency in 2017 with an electoral mandate to reduce US military involvement around the world and to abandon the trade and investment treaties that empowered global corporations. Yet he mostly continued the foreign policies adopted by previous administrations. In recent decades, those policies have increasingly served particularistic elite interests at the expense of the US ruling class as a whole, and they have also been unsuccessful in stemming the decline of US imperial power. This chapter explores the factors that explain this continuity of policy. In analyzing the reasons for policy stasis, it offers an analytical basis to evaluate what might change under President Biden. It also assesses what strategies might be most effective for those who hope to resist US militarism and to undermine the US capacity to enforce a hegemony based on rapacious capitalism.

Trumpism seeks to maintain white domination. President Trump's policies aimed to restore white power at a time when it seemed to be in jeopardy. This chapter examines Trump's policy record and its impact on the US Black population, focusing on voting rights, policing, and criminal justice. I also discuss the far right's attack on history curricula and public education, specifically its demonization of Critical Race Theory. These efforts to protect and extend white power are not new. They are based on the principles articulated by the Founding Fathers, who asserted the right of white settlers to control the nation. More recent precedents for Trump's racism include the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, ascended politically by mobilizing white racism. While many have labeled Trumpism a fascist movement, I argue that it is better understood as a precursor to fascism. It represents a continuation of the racist origins and traditions of the United States, where the national oppression of African Americans is core to the operation of capitalism. In closing, I offer a strategic proposal for stopping this reactionary movement and preventing it from developing into a full-fledged fascist movement.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop a model of union reform that may help to revitalize the labor movement. Our model presents a path using democracy and militancy to overcome union oligarchy to build stronger unions and a stronger broader movement. We develop a new model of union revitalization by expanding the Voss and Sherman (2000) model from our own experiences and a review of past union revitalization efforts. Democratic and militant strategies are a key to successful reform efforts. Entrenched union leaders tend to oppose such efforts. Reformers must adequately overcome entrenched leader responses to succeed in reforming their unions. We have developed a new conceptual model of union revitalization. Our model should be tested further through in-depth case studies and analysis of reform efforts which have failed or succeeded. Our model presents strategies and tactics for labor activists to revitalize their unions and the labor movement. We present a new model of union revitalization that looks at both internal and external union revitalization. This chapter accumulates evidence across reform efforts throughout the modern history of unions. This comparative and contrasting analysis of the evidence from these efforts is a unique contribution to the field. Further, the resulting model from this review presents a unique focus on the strategies and tactics of reform efforts as well as the interaction between union reform efforts and entrenched leaders. This model provides a path for both future research and practical revitalization efforts.

Buying secondhand clothing is not only interesting for consumers wanting to save money but also for sustainable clothing enthusiasts. It is now among a number of consumption practices which slow down fast fashion production while saving 10 to 20 times the energy (Fletcher, 2008, p. 100). While most of the recent scholarly work focuses on secondhand consumers (Bianchi & Birtwistle, 2010; Franklin, 2011; Norum, 2015), this paper aims to examine business activities. This perspective from economic anthropology enhances understandings of secondhand clothing, as research to-date has tended to neglect the semiotic function of clothing while underlining exchanges. To gain insight into the dynamics of the sector in Germany today, two businesses from Hamburg have been ethnographically examined by the author since 2014. This study outlines their work practices and explains the development of this high-end segment of the market from the 1970s until the digital age. For businesses, the digitalization of the trade has had massive effects on their business practice because it seems to solve inherent problems connected to the selling of pre-owned clothing. I argue that the digitalization did not only promote acceptance of buying secondhand clothing in Germany but also the emergence of new businesses models.

The origins of the SCS can be traced to the civil service established by the English East India Company (EIC) in 1786, when the EIC began its operations in Malaya with the acquisition of Penang as a settlement from the Sultan of Kedah (Tilman, 1964, p. 40; Jones, 1953, p. 7). The EIC used the term “civil service” to distinguish its civilian employees from those working in the military, maritime, and ecclesiastical organizations. There were three types of civil servants then: those who were covenanted, i.e., occupying senior positions requiring a bond of 500 British pounds as security to ensure the performance of their duties; those who were uncovenanted; and extra-covenanted officers who were granted covenants locally because of their exceptional administrative capabilities (Blunt, 1937, pp. 1–2).

This chapter addresses a five-year phase of protest activity set in motion by fathers’ rights and shared parenting groups’ resistance to the Federal Child Support Guidelines, which were incorporated into Canada’s Divorce Act in 1997. Drawing upon Department of Justice discourses, parliamentary hearings and debates, and advocacy websites it examines the dynamics and outcomes of the protest cycle. It argues that the government’s legislative response signals a failure of fathers’ rights activism in Canada. This failure is a consequence of the collective identity that advocates and their supporters enact and celebrate in various public arenas, the effectiveness of feminist counteraction, and the contingencies of governance in Canada’s left-of-centre advanced liberal democracy.