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Cosmopolitanism represents a complex, multilevel, multilayer phenomenon manifested in a variety of social spheres, including moral, political, social, and cultural. Yet, despite its prominence in other disciplines, cosmopolitanism has received relatively scant attention in international management research. Furthermore, the understanding of cosmopolitanism as an ever-present social condition in which individuals are embedded lags significantly behind.

In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for cosmopolitanism as an individual-level phenomenon situated at the intersection of the moral, political, and sociocultural perspectives. The framework explicates the interrelations between macrolevel dynamics and individual experiences in a globalized world. We conceptualize cosmopolitanism as an individual disposition manifested and enacted through identities, attitudes, and practices. We also highlight the diversity of individuals who can be considered cosmopolitans, including those who may not possess the classic cosmopolitan CV. Finally, the chapter explores the implications of cosmopolitanism for global organizations and global leadership.

We aim to explore whether demographic groups of varying status positions differ in terms of their perception of work group members’ openness to deep-level and surface-level diversity. We also explore the effect that task group conflict and relational group conflict have on perceptions of openness to diversity.

Quantitative analysis of responses from 489 academics in multicultural university departments is applied. A comparison is made of different demographic groups based on age, nationality, and seniority with regard to perceptions of work group members’ openness to diversity. Specifically, we focused on perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarity (deep-level) and openness to visible dissimilarity (surface-level).

We found that there are indeed differences between demographic groups with regard to perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarities. No significant differences could be found in relation to openness to visual dissimilarities for any of the demographic sub-samples. We also found that there were differential effects of contextual adverse circumstances in the form of relational group conflict and task group conflict on the perceptions of the two types of work group openness to diversity.

The knowledge that different demographical groups perceive their peers’ openness to diversity differently is an important insight when decisions regarding diversity issues have to be taken.

Few studies have focused on perceptions of diversity. This is an important omission because individuals often act upon their perceptions, rather than on objective reality.

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.

We conceptualize new ways to qualify what themes should dominate the future international business and management (IB/IM) research agenda by examining three questions: Whom should we ask? What should we ask, and which selection criteria should we apply? What are the contextual forces? Our main findings are the following: (1) wider perspectives from academia and practice would benefit both rigor and relevance; (2) four key forces are climate change, globalization, inequality, and sustainability; and (3) we propose scientific mindfulness as the way forward for generating themes in IB/IM research. Scientific mindfulness is a holistic, cross-disciplinary, and contextual approach, whereby researchers need to make sense of multiple perspectives with the betterment of society as the ultimate criterion.