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Leaders in health care today are faced with a wide array of complex issues. This chapter describes an innovative physician leadership development program at the Cleveland Clinic intended to enhance the leadership capacities of individuals and the organization. Propositions regarding the program's impact on organizational innovation, organizational commitment, social capital, and the human element of physician practice are offered for future examination.

This chapter discusses the project to investigate, recommend, and create user-focused solutions for opening and operating Severn Library, a high-density storage facility, at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD.

This chapter takes the case study approach, discussing the practical application of project management techniques to various stages of a large-scale project to plan for a high-density storage facility.

Although the Severn Library project began with a large project team, lack of formal project management expertise and the massive nature of the project led to its breakdown into smaller constituent projects, with the two authors filling the roles of “accidental project managers” to complete the work on time. Although this approach was ultimately successful, the overall success of the project could have been improved through more formal application of project management techniques.

This chapter discusses the experience of the authors at one large, public state university. The experience of other libraries and library managers may vary based on institutional context.

This chapter will be valuable to library managers interested in project management techniques in libraries, and/or in planning for high-density library storage facilities.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the only writing on the application of project management techniques to construction and operation of a high-density library storage facility.

The ‘Transition Town’ (TT) movement pioneered by Rob Hopkins initially in Kinsale (Ireland) and Totnes (United Kingdom) has become the fastest growing environmental movement in the global north (Hopkins, 2008). With over 30 official TT initiatives in the United Kingdom, the concept is now spreading into New Zealand, Canada, and many more countries.¹ The movement starts from two premises: (i) the reality and implications of rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change; (ii) the reality of ‘peak oil’ – an imminent, permanent short fall in oil supply, increasing year on year with massive geo-political, economic and social consequences.² Whilst supporting national and multilateral efforts to reduce emissions and to develop new energy technologies and infrastructures, TT leaves climate change protest to environmental campaigning groups, NGOs and activists oriented towards a global civil society. Acknowledging the need for ‘government and business responses [to climate change and peak oil] at all levels’, the role of TT is to ‘create [a] sense of anticipation, elation and a collective call to adventure’ and that this grass-roots bottom-up, local activism could potentially prepare the way for more directly political action at the level of national government (Hopkins, 2008, p. 15).

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.

David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning.

Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

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.